Loom Kusama Crowdloan Retrospective
Overview
On July 20th, 2021, Bifrost secured the final Kusama parachain slot in the 5th Kusama auction, by locking in 136,817 KSM. Basilisk put up a good fight for a while, ultimately raising 116,808 KSM — not quite enough to secure the winning bid. As for the other 11 bidders, only two managed to raise over 20k KSM through their Crowdloans.
The 5th Kusama auction was the last in the current series of auctions, all up over 1.1 million KSM has been locked up for the next 48 weeks (which is the duration of the lease for the on-boarded parachains). Here’s the full list of winners and the amounts they’ve raised through their Crowdloans:
- Karura — 501,137 KSM
- Moonriver — 205,935 KSM
- Shiden — 138,457 KSM
- Khala — 132,280 KSM
- Bifrost — 136,817 KSM
Most of the parachain launches went smoothly, though Moonriver triggered a bug in the Kusama relay chain that caused their parachain to stall for a little while, fortunately they found a workaround and got their parachain running again fairly quickly.
Retrospective
Going into these Kusama auctions we assumed that the amount of KSM that would be needed to win would drop significantly with each successive auction. Thus, we reasoned that the last auction could be easily won with a modest 50k KSM or thereabouts. Unfortunately our assumption turned out to be incorrect… while there was a significant drop off in the amount of KSM locked in by the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd auctions, the trend didn’t continue in the 4th, and 5th auctions, where the winning bidders raised well over 100k KSM each, which is a hefty chunk of change (even with the current market conditions).
Our marketing of the Crowdloan also wasn’t great, it should’ve been rolled out a few weeks before the first auction started. Instead, we waited for our engineering team to get everything fully tested and ready to ensure there would be no technical blockers for launching our parachain in the event that we managed to secure a parachain slot.
Kusama Parachain Outlook
Since we didn’t secure a Kusama parachain slot the Loom parachain won’t go live for the time being. However, we’ll keep track of the latest updates to the Kusama relay chain to ensure that our parachain remains ready to go live if we secure a parachain slot in the next series of Kusama auctions.
Up to 100 parachains could be on-boarded on Kusama, so more auctions are expected to be held in the not too distant future, but no dates have been announced as yet. In the meantime we’ll watch the current crop of winners, and learn from them as they battle test the Kusama relay chain with their newly on-boarded parachains. Now that third-party parachains are live on Kusama we’re also hoping that ParityTech puts a little more effort into keeping the developer docs in sync with the rapid development of their SDKs.
What’s next?
With Polkadot integration taking a back seat for the moment, our primary objectives are to on-board Basechain validators, and to entice more developers to deploy dapps on Basechain.
Validators
In the last few months we’ve on-boarded three new Basechain validators, and a few other parties have reached out to us about running a validator node. We’d like to on-board even more validators in the coming months, so we’ve been working on reducing the resource requirements for Basechain nodes.
To date we’ve reduced the size of jump start archives (containing a snapshot of chain data necessary for a node to sync with the rest of the network) by a significant amount, and expect to reduce it by a further 20+GB in the near future.
On the front-end, we continue to make incremental improvements to the Basechain Staking Dashboard, streamlining validator management, exposing overviews of relevant metrics, and providing more insights about delegations.
Developers
While our mainnet Basechain supports EVM-based smart-contracts just like Ethereum and BSC, it is not a fork of Ethereum. In practice, this means that there are a few differences that cause some friction when on-boarding developers that are already familiar with the Ethereum ecosystem.
In the past the promise of gas-free transactions provided sufficient motivation for developers to overlook these differences. Unfortunately, gas-free transactions are not sustainable in the long term, so we’re actively working on improving the Basechain JSON-RPC API in order to provide almost 100% compatibility with today’s most popular Ethereum tools and libraries.
Conclusion
We’re disappointed that we didn’t secure a parachain slot for our Kusama parachain in this series of auctions, but the parachain is just one piece of the ecosystem we’re building, and we’re happy to wait a little bit longer until the next series of Kusama auctions. On the bright side, the five recently on-boarded parachains will help ParityTech verify the stability of the Kusama relay chain, and flush out any major bugs before we launch our own parachain, saving us a few headaches in the process :)
In the meantime, we’ll make sure our parachain is ready to launch during the next series of auctions, and review our Crowdloan rewards to see if we can provide better incentives to early contributors in our next Crowdloan.
Loom Network is building an ecosystem of blockchains for the next generation of DeFi protocols, NFTs, and high-performance multi-chain dapps. At the core of this ecosystem is our Basechain network — already live in production, audited, and battle-tested.
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