Kusama, Polkadot’s canary network, has broken new ground for decentralized finance during June and July. June saw the maiden launch of a parachain. Karura was the first parachain team to successfully win a slot auction. This candle auction winner occupies a parachain supported by Kusama for the lease period. To date, we have seen five successful auctions take place. This week, July 20th, marked the end of bidding for the fifth auction. Now, the first batch of five are all wrapped-up. Kusama will pause their schedule to allow for network optimizations and improvements.
With this schedule pause, let’s take a closer look back at the five successful projects connected to parachains:
- Karura
- Moonriver
- Shiden
- Khala
Parachain Winner #1: Karura
Founded by the Acala Foundation, Karura is a scalable, EVM-compatible network optimized for DeFi. The platform offers a suite of financial applications including: a trustless staking derivative (liquid KSM), a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets (kUSD), and an AMM DEX – all with micro gas fees that can be paid in any token. Its sister network Acala aims to be the DeFi hub for Polkadot and the two projects will eventually be interoperable.
Check out Blockdaemon’s previous Karura blog post for a closer look!
Parachain Winner #2: Moonriver
Moonriver is a companion network to Moonbeam and provides a permanently incentivized canary network to the main Moonbeam chain. Like Moonbeam, Moonriver is a full Ethereum-like environment and works with industry-standard Ethereum tools, DApps, and protocols.
By mirroring Ethereum’s Web3 RPC, accounts, keys, subscriptions, logs, and more, Moonriver minimizes the changes required to run existing Solidity smart contracts on the network. Ethereum projects can simply replicate their DApp and deploy it to Moonbeam using Hardhat, Truffle, Remix, and other popular deployment tools.
Parachain Winner #3: Shiden
Shiden Network is a multi-chain decentralized application layer on Kusama Network. The platform supports various applications across DeFi, NFTs and more. As Kusama’s Relay chain doesn’t support smart contract functionality, Shiden aims to act as the smart contract layer of the blockchain.
Parachain Winner #4: Khala
Khala Network is the Phala pre-mainnet on Kusama. Phala will implement its mainnet on Polkadot, as the parachain to serve enterprise-scale blockchains and DeFi service. Khala implemented its mainnet on Kusama, as a parachain to serve creative and growth blockchains and DeFi service. Khala Network’s native token is K-PHA. K-PHA can be swapped with ERC20-PHA (and with Phala’s PHA on future mainnet) at a 1:1 rate.
Parachain Winner #5: BiFrost
BiFrost is a parachain network developed based on Substrate to provide liquidity for staking tokens. Users who participated in the slot auction by locking up Kusama (KSM) tokens received the equivalent in vsKSM. This is a guaranteed airdrop which delivers liquidity to supporters of the project. These tokens were released when BiFrost won. The utility of these tokens will be fully realized when apps are launched on top of BiFrost’s parachain.
