crow with knife: EXPECT CHAOS

EXPECT CHAOS – Understanding Kusama, Polkadot’s Canary Network

A common problem when mining (the old-fashioned kind – think coal, not Bitcoin) is poisonous gas. Miners came up with an ingenious solution: bring down a singing bird – usually a canary. Birds have very delicate lungs compared to humans, so if the bird died (and stopped singing), they knew they should head back up to the surface!

This is the idea behind Kusama – to act as a “canary network” to verify that code changes don’t cause any issues with the network, before deploying to Polkadot mainnet. This may sound like a testnet, but Polkadot has several actual testnets/devnets, such as Westend and the community-run Paseo. What makes Kusama different is that KSM tokens have actual economic value.

This means that not only is there an incentive for malicious actors to attack Kusama, it can also suss out problems with various other economic attacks before this code is deployed to Polkadot. It’s a real live network with projects being built on it, both parachains/rollups who also first deploy their code to Kusama before their mainnet on Polkadot, as well as projects which want to take advantage of always being at the cutting edge of Polkadot development. After all, the evolution of Polkadot – including such past upgrades as OpenGov, agile coretime, asynchronous backing, etc. – all come to Kusama first.

The slogans of Kusama are “no promises” and “expect chaos”. Now it’s clear to you why!

crow with knife