Polkadot announces Kusama is “finally ready to launch parachains”

Kusama, the sister chain of the Polkadot platform, is ready to launch parachains on the network.

Polkadot and Kusama creator Gavin Wood said in a blog post today that Polkadot is entering the fourth and final phase of its mainnet launch, which involves deploying parachains in the Kusama network. According to Wood, Parity Technologies, the development arm behind Polkadot, has released an upgrade for Kusama - Polkadot version 0.9, "and is now finally ready to launch parachains."

Wood said the parachain launch will come after a comprehensive external audit of the new version of Polkadot and Kusama performs "at least one successful auction including a crowdfunded loan and hosts at least one functional parachain" in the wild. He did not provide a specific timeline, but added that he expects the audit to be completed in the "near future" and the first of five auctions to be announced on the Kusama website a week in advance.

“After the successful completion of the first auction on Kusama, one can expect auctions on Polkadot to arrive soon,” Wood said.

Promotion of the Polkadot protocol has been underway since August, when the project launched the Rococo testnet to evaluate its planned parachain-based sharding implementation. Some expected the parachain launch to take place in the first quarter of 2021, but the Rococo testnet was said to have stability issues — for example, one of its parachains was apparently stuck for more than a day.