See All Polkadot Parachain Slot Auctions In One Place

Polkadot is the third-generation permissionless blockchain launched by the core developer of Ethereum, Dr. Gavin Wood. The core concept of this design is instant scalability and extensibility. It aims to connect the current independent blockchains to achieve communication and data transfer across different blockchains.

Towards this goal, Polkadot’s design allows for two different types of blockchains; a main network, called the relay chain, where transactions are settled, and user-created networks, called parachains, that can be customized for any number of uses and communicate with each other via the relay chain.

Polkadot and Kusama are very closely related due to being built on nearly identical codebases. Kusama is branded as a “canary network” for the Polkadot blockchain, meaning that new code and features are always battle-tested on Kusama first before they can be launched on Polkadot.

Because its primary use case is to facilitate testing, Kusama attempts to give developers more flexibility while they finalize the design of their Polkadot projects. In turn, Kusama offers looser rules than Polkadot, including less stringent governance parameters.

A potential advantage of starting a project on Kusama is that it allows Polkadot projects to build a user base and gain traction in the community before the official launch. Many projects that wish to launch on Polkadot will launch a similar iteration on Kusama beforehand.

Parachains are individual blockchains running in parallel within the Polkadot ecosystem (the Polkadot and Kusama networks).

Polkadot architecture consists of up to 100 parachains connected to and secured by a central relay chain. Parachains can interact and exchange data and assets with each other within the system, and can also connect to external networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum using bridges. This flexibility addresses the problems of scalability, security and interoperability that have hampered blockchain development so far.

For Polkadot and Kusama, a crowdloan is a way for new projects to bootstrap its parachain auction.

So crowdloan allows people to contribute by agreeing to lock up their own ksm (dot) until the end of the lease. Teams can reward their contributors however they see fit, and can structure their crowdloan in various ways, hosting it either natively on Kusama (Polkadot) or on a 3rd-party platform.

If a team does not win an auction, the funds are returned to their owner and unlocked. The team will need to initiate a new campaign if they wish to continue participating in auctions.

You can get the latest progress through the CMC Polkadot auction page, and even view completed auction data.

Contribute directly on-chain using Polkadot’s GUI (on their website)