The Kusama community stands at an inflection level. 5 years after its launch as Polkadot’s “chaotic canary,” and the proving floor for radical innovation and early stage Polkadot deployments, the neighborhood are actually voting to redefine its functions by way of Referendum 498, a Web3 Basis proposal aiming to allocate 10 million DOT from the W3F treasury to cement Kusama as Web3’s premier hub for superior know-how, together with zero-knowledge (zk) innovation, artwork, and proof-of-personhood experiments.
This fulfills a pre-launch dedication to commit 1% of the unique DOT provide (10M DOT) for growing the worth proposition of Kusama. Now that Polkadot-Kusama bridge has been activated, cross-chain transfers are attainable and Web3 Basis is happy to announce that it’s in search of to satisfy that dedication, with the precise particulars to be authorised by the Kusama neighborhood.
The referendum, now dwell below the “Want-for-Change” observe, outlines a three-pillar imaginative and prescient: help for bleeding-edge growth, eventual transition from canary community to look community, and community-driven funding over a minimum of the following 24 months. Initiatives would possibly vary from grants for ZK rollups and DAOs, sponsored parachain coretime, to prizes for hackathons.
Kusama was conceived as a high-risk, high-reward surroundings to check Polkadot’s bleeding-edge know-how. With Polkadot’s maturity, this referendum suggests Kusama now pivots to a brand new identification, an experiment-central community.
Why This Issues
Kusama’s unique mandate as a testbed for Polkadot has turn out to be much less obligatory as each networks matured.
But its ethos stays unmatched.
Latest milestones, like dealing with 143,000 transactions per second in the course of the “Spammening” stress take a look at, show Kusama’s capability to behave as a testbed for all form of fascinating new experiments. Its transfer in direction of being a peer community indicators a shift: Kusama can evolve to be greater than only a canary community for Polkadot, free to prioritize autonomous experimentation.
Voting begins 21 February 2025.
For extra particulars and to vote along with your KSM, you’ll be able to go to the W3F referendum on-chain.
Word: This proposal displays a imaginative and prescient, not a inflexible roadmap, choosing community-driven flexibility. Particular allocations will adapt to neighborhood wants, preserving Kusama’s legacy as an open, boundary-pushing ecosystem.
