Editor's Note: This article comes fromTalk about Xia Kanshi (ID: huaxiakiss), Author: Hua Xia, published by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Talk about Xia Kanshi (ID: huaxiakiss
Talk about Xia Kanshi (ID: huaxiakiss
), Author: Hua Xia, published by Odaily with authorization.
The market is used to describing Kusama as "Polkadot's test network". However, this obviously does not correspond to its current market popularity and market value.
The reason why Kusama is called "Polca's testnet" for granted is mainly due to people's habitual thinking. In the history of the blockchain, the testnet is not a new thing. Even in the era of the information Internet, the testnet has become very common. testing work."
Once, before the Ethereum mainnet went live, there was also a test network called "Olympic", which hoped that all kinds of potential roles would participate in the network to stress test the network and try to find undiscovered code problems .
Today, it is still a common practice for blockchain industry projects to release testnets before the mainnet goes live. However, an obvious problem is that there is no continuous and long-term incentive test network action, and it cannot make developers, users, nodes, etc. have enough motivation to discover various problems for the network.
The existence of most testnets is ultimately reduced to a process of "testing for testing". When the mainnet goes online, various problems really emerge. At this time, the fate of waiting for the mainnet is either to roll back the data, or to fork the mainnet. No matter which one is, it is obviously overwhelming for a nascent network hit.
Gavin, the founder of Polkadot, is obviously aware of this common problem, so he creatively proposed the concept of "advanced network" for the Polkadot network, that is, Kusama.
The Kusama network has its own economic model, its own issued token chain assets (KSM), and corresponding validator nodes, and gradually has its own community. In other words, Kusama is first and foremost a real, functioning blockchain network.
At the same time, the official description given to Kusama is: Kusama will continue to exist for a long time, not only for testing Polkadot, but also to provide a real environment for testing and drills for various ecological projects that try to access the Polkadot network in the future. In other words, as long as the Polkadot ecosystem is developing, it is necessary for the Kusama network to exist.
All code updates of the Polkadot network and its ecological projects will be deployed on the Kusama network first, and tested for a period of time, and will not be deployed on the Polkadot network until it is stable. This allows the Kusama network to have a more aggressive pace and more efficient governance mechanism than the Polkadot network.
Of course, everything has advantages and disadvantages. A more radical attitude and a mission born for innovation and testing determine that Kusama is not as secure and stable as the Polkadot network. However, this is a relative comparison, because even the code that was first deployed to the Kusama network was first audited by a security audit company.\KSM。
Polkadot currently plans to have 100 parallel chains, but this is obviously not enough for a network that is positioned to compete with Ethereum. Polkadot's big killer is a scalable multi-chain network, using the structure of "relay chain + parachain" to expand and connect the network infinitely, and finally form a complex and self-evolving ecology.
Therefore, the key node known as the "Holy Grail of Polkadot" is: the parachain itself becomes the relay chain in its own ecological network, we can call it the "parallel relay chain", and the "parallel relay chain" connects 100 more Even more parachains, and so on.
Therefore, regarding the positioning of the Kusama network, officials are also constantly exploring and updating their views. A foreseeable result is that Kusama will access the Polkadot network as a "parallel chain" when the time is ripe in the future, and the Kusama network is originally a "relay chain + parachain" network structure similar to the Polkadot network; therefore , once the Kusama network is connected to the Polkadot main network, it means that the Polkadot network has officially opened the road to exponential expansion of performance and ecology. This is the "Holy Grail of Polkadot".
Before the opening of the "Polkadot Holy Grail", the most important event of the Polkadot network is undoubtedly the opening of the parachain, which is a key step for the Polkadot network to officially enter practical applications. The access of the parachain needs to bid for limited "parachain slots", and the bidding form of the auction is the corresponding ecological token, that is, DOT
The update of the parachain-related code is a major iterative update.
According to Gavin’s latest speech, the Polkadot parachain is roughly divided into seven online sequences, which are: launch Rococo v1 and wait for its stable operation; launch Kusama’s system (public interest) parachain; open the slot on Kusama Auction; launch parachains that successfully bid on Kusama; launch Polkadot’s public interest parachains; open slot auctions on Polkadot; launch parachains that successfully bid on Polkadot.
Kusama will be the first to open the auction for the slot in the future, which is worth watching.
Gavin’s launch of Kusama’s “first network” is indeed a genius idea, and this idea comes from the in-depth thinking of “how to build a stable, safe, and fork-free” blockchain network. At the same time, the launch of Kusama has also brought a new direction for the industry on the issue of "how to build a stable and secure network?" For example, the recently well-known privacy computing network project PlatON has launched its own "advanced network" Alaya, which PlatON itself calls "meta-network".
