Shiden Wins Third Kusama Parachain Slot Auction

Key highlights:

• After Karura and Moonriver, Shiden is the third project to win a parachain slot auction on Kusama
• In total, the project's bid was supported with 137,020 bonded KSM ($32.3 million)
• Shiden is a smart contracts platform for decentralized applications

Shiden becomes third project to win parachain slot on Kusama

Shiden is the third project to win a parachain slot on the Kusama blockchain. In total, 137,020 KSM ($32.3 million) was bonded to support the project’s bid. Users who backed Shiden by bonding KSM in support of the project will receive rewards in the form of SDN tokens. Users were able to back Shiden’s bid either directly on-chain or through the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, which has been very active in supporting the emerging Kusama ecosystem. 

Kusama supports parachains, which are blockchains specialized for certain use cases that connect to the Kusama Relay Chain. Parachains connected to the Kusama Relay Chain leverage the relay chain’s security, and also benefit from improved interoperability with the other parachains that constitute the network. 

Shiden is a blockchain platform for smart contracts that’s designed to bring decentralized applications to Kusama. Shiden supports both the Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly, providing flexibility for developers. In addition, Shiden plans to support interoperability with other blockchains like Ethereum and Cosmos. 

SDN tokens will be used on Shiden to incentivize node operators, and will be used for transaction fees and DApp rewards.

Polkadot and Kusama are known as sister blockchains and are very similar from a technical perspective – the biggest differences between the two are related to governance. Many teams are planning launches on both platforms. For example, Shiden is the Kusama-based counterpart of the Polkadot-based project Astar. Kusama is meant to be a more experimental version of Polkadot, and many projects are taking a similar approach with the protocols they develop for Polkadot and Kusama. 

Shiden is likely to receive new upgrades before Astar, potentially opening up some unique opportunities for users – the Astar team describes Shiden as a canary network that will enable research & development for Astar. 

DeFi platform Karura and smart contracts platform Moonriver were the first two projects to win Kusama parachain slot auctions.