Right now, parachains are causing quite a stir in the world of blockchain.
If the term 'parachains' hasn't reached your ears yet, let me explain... next-gen blockchains These are designed to overcome the limits of traditional blockchain systems and dismantle the centralized web's hurdles. They seamlessly integrate within the Kusama (KSM) and Polkadot networks, connecting to create what's known as the 'Kusama ecosystem'.
At present, Kusama boasts six active parachains. Out of these, five were acquired through auction between June 15th and July 20th.
Here's a straightforward summary of the role each parachain plays and their current progress on their respective roadmaps:
- Statemine serves as a general-purpose parachain focusing on digital assets. It holds the distinction of being Kusama’s inaugural live parachain. Recently, the Kusama Council decided passed a motion to approve the significant upgrade of Statemine, which will allow it to operate without restrictions. Post-upgrade, users can freely create assets and NFTs on Statemine by depositing 1 KSM per asset class.
- Karura functions as a specialized DeFi hub, facilitating users to swap, borrow, lend, and generate earnings. The project has wrapped up Phase One (Crowdloan & Action), and Phase Two (Govern via PoA), in its launch process roadmap. It now steps into Phase Three, focusing on implementing Govern through the Council.
- Moonriver resembles Ethereum's EVM compatible blockchain. Recently, the project undertook a crucial phase completed Phase One of its five-stage launch process aimed at decentralization, involving the addition of third-party collators to its active set, steering it into Phase Two, which will enable governance within the blockchain.
- Shiden offers a platform for smart contracts, compatible with both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and WebAssembly. Currently, it is advancing through Phase Two of its launch process development stage. This phase will allow projects to benefit from staking rewards, smart contracts, and dApps functionalities, alongside an increase in collators.
- Khala is designed for executing confidential smart contracts. The platform addresses trust issues within cloud services by furnishing computational resources to other blockchain applications while securing the data layer. On July 26, Khala revealed it had completed the Phala blockchain and Khala parachain. Phala wallet Khala also declared that the
- Bifrost was officially up and running, with 24,961,006 K-PHA equivalent to nearly $20 million USD distributed, claimable via wallets. outlined its plan is a DeFi protocol developed to handle the liquidity staking from diverse PoS chains. It recently triumphed in the fifth Kusama parachain auction on July 20. Later, on July 24, Bifrost publicly announced initiated initiatives to boost the derivative applications and its ecological growth. Most notably, by July 29, it
announced that the Bifrost parachain mainnet is operational, and the collator upgraded to version 0.9.8. Polkadot whitepaper Ultimately, the inclusion of parachains is envisioned to allow Polkadot to actualize its scalable multi-chain framework. Outlined in the
parachains constitute the final major feature to be implemented for the platform. Currently, Polkadot and Kusama are anticipated to support a maximum of 100 parachain slots on their networks.
