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The blockchain industry is ever-growing, with new and better developments being launched on a daily basis. This naturally results in a need for innovations that improve the performance of existing blockchain projects. It’s necessary to evaluate these innovations regularly in order to tackle potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities that may undermine the efficiency of a project. This is the main goal that Kusama sets out to achieve: to ensure that all project improvements made are fit for the mainnet.
Kusama is built with substrates and codes similar to those of Polkadot. Often referred to as “the canary network of Polkadot,” Kusama is an evolutionary and multi-channel network designed to facilitate an audit system for Polkadot. How does the audit system work? Well, Kusama welcomes new features and experiments with them before said features are rolled out to Polkadot.
Most blockchain ecosystems only use a test network to develop their decentralized applications (DApps) and projects. Kusama, however, provides a functional market and test network conditions that other chains don’t provide. Kusama also benefits from modified governance parameters that allow it to operate up to four times faster than the Polkadot ecosystem.
Kusama uses two types of blockchains to process transactions and manage network activity. The main network, on which the validators are located, is called the relay chain. The relay chain has minimal functionality and is responsible for coordinating the system as a whole. Parachains, on the other hand, are unique and allow users to run separate Layer 1 blockchains with the Kusama network. Being able to run these single layers linked to the relay chain ensures the security of the parachains and significantly increases the scalability and interoperability of the Kusama network. There are also user-generated networks called parachains that may each have different architectures, features and use cases, depending on the project using each one. We’ll explain these in detail later on in this guide.