The Kusama network stands at an inflection point. Five years after its launch as Polkadot’s “chaotic canary,” and the proving ground for radical innovation and early stage Polkadot deployments, the community are now voting to redefine its purposes through Referendum 498, a Web3 Foundation proposal aiming to allocate 10 million DOT from the W3F treasury to cement Kusama as Web3’s premier hub for advanced technology, including zero-knowledge (zk) innovation, art, and proof-of-personhood experiments.
This fulfills a pre-launch commitment to devote 1% of the original DOT supply (10M DOT) for increasing the value proposition of Kusama. Now that Polkadot-Kusama bridge has been activated, cross-chain transfers are possible and Web3 Foundation is pleased to announce that it is seeking to fulfill that commitment, with the specific details to be approved by the Kusama community.
The referendum, now live under the “Wish-for-Change” track, outlines a three-pillar vision: support for bleeding-edge development, eventual transition from canary network to peer network, and community-driven funding over at least the next 24 months. Initiatives might range from grants for ZK rollups and DAOs, subsidized parachain coretime, to prizes for hackathons.
Kusama was conceived as a high-risk, high-reward environment to test Polkadot’s bleeding-edge technology. With Polkadot’s maturity, this referendum suggests Kusama now pivots to a new identity, an experiment-central network.
Why This Matters
Kusama’s original mandate as a testbed for Polkadot has become less necessary as both networks matured.
Yet its ethos remains unmatched.
Recent milestones, like handling 143,000 transactions per second during the “Spammening” stress test, prove Kusama’s capacity to act as a testbed for all kind of interesting new experiments. Its move towards being a peer network signals a shift: Kusama can evolve to be more than just a canary network for Polkadot, free to prioritize autonomous experimentation.
Voting begins 21 February 2025.
For more details and to vote with your KSM, you can visit the W3F referendum on-chain.
Note: This proposal reflects a vision, not a rigid roadmap, opting for community-driven flexibility. Specific allocations will adapt to community needs, preserving Kusama’s legacy as an open, boundary-pushing ecosystem.
#Chapter #Kusama #Web3 #Foundation #Proposes #10M #DOT #Initiative #Fuel #Innovation #Network #Sovereignty #Web3 #Foundation #Team #Web3 #Foundation #Feb
