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Kusama (KSM)

Last updated: Jul 10, 2023

Kusama is an early, experimental version of Polkadot that exists as an independent network.

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Overview

Project industry	Blockchain Infrastructure
Product type	Ecosystem
Founded	United Kingdom
Whitepaper	Open

What is Kusama

Kusama was built by the same team that created Polkadot, a company known as Parity Technologies. Its founder is Dr. Gavin Wood, a world-renowned computer scientist and programmer, who also co-founded Ethereum. Parity Technologies has an extensive team comprised of some of the world's most successful blockchain engineers, and has over 100 employees in total spread throughout the world.

In addition, Kusama is funded by grants from the Web3 Foundation, which was launched to help "nurture and steward technologies and applications in the fields of decentralised web software protocols." The Web3 foundation also supports Kusama with research and community development thanks to its growth team.

Kusama is unusual among blockchain platforms since it is predominantly built for developers that want to launch bold, ambitious projects, with a fast-evolving pace of development. It is built on a multichain, heterogeneously-sharded design that uses a nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) consensus system — an alternative consensus mechanism to the energy intensive proof-of-work (POW) scheme employed by several other blockchains.

This system enables it to perform rapid on-chain upgrades without a fork, and support cross-chain message passing (XCMP) to enable communication with other parachains on the Kusama network.