Polkadot Launches New “Canary” Network Called Kusama With Scaling and Governance Features

The blockchain development project Polkadot announced the soft-launch of its experimental “canary network” that is called Kusama. The goal is to offer improved and enhanced scalability and governance features. The information was released by the organization in a blog post on August 23.

Polkadot Launches “Canary” Network
According to the recently released blog post, this experimental “canary” network is an early and experimental pre-production trial network that aims at helping understand how new technologies are able to perform under “real” economic conditions.

The Kusama network is an unaudited and unrefined released of Polkadot that would allow different developers to build new systems or try the different functionalities provided by Polkadot.

This newly released network started as a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) in which validators nodes are run by the Web3 Foundation. Although the goal is to try some of the new features developed by Polkadot, many of the functionalities have been disabled. At the moment, we could only test staking, sessions and claims modules.

As per the blog post, the period will last long enough for at least 50 and 100 validators to be bonded and ready. Nonetheless, there will be more than one additional runtime upgrades during these weeks to merge in additional features to the chain.

After all this testing the Web3 Foundation will be issuing a centralized runtime upgrade that would remove the Sudo module and the authority that the Foundation has over the chain. In this way, they will be enabling the NPoS staking system that would transform Kusama from a centralised PoA network to a Proof-of-Stake network.

The Genesis Governance will include different steps, such as proposing legislation on the network, fast-tracking, treasury and a post-genesis Governance treatment with an oracle committee and spontaneous subject committees.

Developers and Polkadot need to understand which are the problems related to this network, the features that it has incorporated and how to improve it in the long term. Kusama will exist as long as there is community demand and as the project expands, the intention is to release new high-risk functionalities.

Polkadot is a multi-chain framework platform that aims at facilitating interoperability and scalability of a wide range of blockchain networks in the crypto market. In order to be powered, Polkadot bases its project on the PoS consensus algorithm and it is expected to be improving its services with the official soft-launch of Kusama.