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By Bill Laboon, Director of Education and Community at Web3 Foundation Parachains are the diverse layer-1 blockchains that run in parallel on the Polkadot and Kusama networks. Parachains connect to Polkadot or Kusama by leasing a parachain slot on the Relay Chain. Apart from the slots for common good parachains, which are reserved for functionality that benefits the ecosystem as a whole, projects wishing to obtain a parachain slot need to participate in one or more parachain slot auctions. The

The first batch of 5 parachain slot auctions on Kusama were completed successfully over the course of June and July. Here are our recommendations for rolling out the next batch of Parachain Auctions after the interim period of monitoring for liveness and stability.

This post provides important background information on the candle auctions and crowdloan mechanisms for these slots and recaps what happened during the first five auctions.

We’ve monitored the Kusama network for stability after the first 5 parachain auctions. We’ve sampled metrics from opt-in validators to gather the information in Prometheus and Grafana for this report.

The Kusama community has just voted to upgrade the Statemine parachain to allow anyone to create assets and NFTs on a permissonless basis.

A look at why candle auctions are the most suitable form for blockchain auctions, as seen in recent research done at the Web3 Foundation.

Nominating and validator selection are crucial parts of user interaction with Polkadot. This post presents background information on nominating and things to consider when selecting validators.

With the increase in the number of accounts nominating on Polkadot and Kusama, we have seen some limitations of the current staking parameters. In order to prevent issues from occurring when these limits are reached, some restrictions are being added to the staking system on both networks.

The first Kusama parachain slot auction has ended and the first parachains have successfully connected to the Kusama Relay Chain, delivering the last piece of core functionality outlined in the Polkadot whitepaper: purpose-built, interoperable parachains.

The first real-world functional parachain Statemine, began processing permissionless transactions after an on-chain upgrade last week. After some smooth running over the weekend, the time is coming to move to the next stage: slot auctions.

On 24 May 2021, Polkadot nodes failed with an out of memory (OOM) error on block 5,202,216. This block contained an on-chain solution to the validator election, which is normally computed off-chain and only takes place on-chain if no off-chain solution is submitted.

The staged launch of Polkadot is about to reach another chapter. As we approach the launch of parachain functionality and the auctions and crowd-loans behind them, let’s look at what’s coming.