Who are five Kusama Parachain auction winners

After months of waiting, the initial five Kusama Parachain auctions went off without a problem. The process was conducted between June 15th and July 20th, and five winners have been chosen. Let’s take a closer look – who are they?

Parachains are custom, project-specific blockchains Integrated within the Polkadot and Kusama networks. Users can customize a Parachain for various use cases and feed them into the main blockchain as Relay Chains, empowering the network with shared security consensus and transaction settlements. Parachains, in many cases, support their own token as well.

1. Karura

Karura won the first-ever Parachain slot auction with more than 501k KSM coming as contributions from the community. Its network has already gone live on Kusama producing its blocks.

The number of total contributions hovered around 20,000, while the total number of locked KSM reached 501,137.66. The number of on-chain contributions was 14,164.

Karura met the Kusama community’s DeFi demand as a result of the Acala team’s two-year work on technical development and one more year on the community and brand-building before submitting Karura for the auction. In return, Karura will be benefiting from Kusama’s plug-and-play security, high-capacity processing speeds, micro-gas fees, and multiple network interoperability.

2. Moonriver

Moonriver, a community-driven sister network to the Moonbeam Foundation, became the second winner of the auction, receiving a total of 205,935.0111 KSM from 5,977 contributors.

It offers a permanently incentivized canary network where new code ships first. As an Ethereum compatible Parachain on Kusama, Moonriver will grow and advance over time to support use cases beyond the field of Moonbeam. It will serve as an easy way for developers to implement existing applications with the Ethereum tech stack. Moreover, the deployment will hardly require any alterations and benefit from its access to the Kusama network.

The Moonriver community members will own a large share of the MOVR tokens. Hereby, it implies substantial community-led control over the network’s future strategy. Moreover, using Moonriver, users can access and leverage the latest builds and features of Moonbeam in a live, incentivized CanaryNet environment, which stays connected to Kusama.

3. Shiden

The third auction witter, Shiden, is a sister project of the Astar Network. Before known as Plasm Network, Astar Network is a leading Polkado-native layer-two decentralized app hub. Shiden is Astar’s sister project, winning the auction with 137,020 KSM tokens bonded. 

Basically, Shiden is a Smart Contract platform for Kusama dApps, which provides multi-chain support to the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the WebAssembly-based contracts. It will also offer layer-two technology on Kusama, including Plasm and Optimistic rollups. The layer-two technology paradigm has come up as a highly beneficial Ethereum scaling solution. By the words of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, the role of optimistic rollups in scaling the Ethereum network will be significant. It’s able to scale the network by 100-times and more.

4. Khala 

Khala, the fourth winner at the auction, secured a parachain slot with a total of 132,280 KSM tokens. It is a Web3 cloud computing project by Phala network. K-PHA is Khala’s native token. It can be swapped with ERC20-PHA and Phala’s native token PHA at a 1:1 ratio.

Phala network launched the pre-mainnet Khala Network on Kusama, with mainnet Phala to be followed on Polkadot. Up to 15,000,000 PHA were available as rewards in the Kusama auction. Also, every KSM that came in support of Khala during the auction will be rewarded with 100 PHA.

As a network, Phala is going to building a platform for general-purpose privacy-preserving Turing-Complete smart contracts, featuring confidentiality, code integrity, state consistency, availability, and interoperability. Furthermore, it avoids the leakage of any input, output, or intermediate state of a confidential contract, while anyone can verify the output on the blockchain is produced by a concrete smart contract.

5. Bifrost

The last but not least project to win the auction is Bifrost, a staking liquidity DeFi project on Polkadot. It got the fifth parachain slot by locking in 136,817 KSM tokens. Bifrost DeFi protocol connects Polkadot and other proof-of-stake blockchains, providing staking derivatives.

Also, it’s the first blockchain middleware enabling multichain technology while providing scalability, interoperability, and flexibility, Bifrost’s advantages are many. Using Bifrost, users can cherry-pick blockchain protocols, customize the network, and switch between blockchains picking a better one.

Bifrost also maintains BiFi, a universal DeFi platform, which is the most transparent, flexible, and comprehensive amid DeFi. As Kusama parachain auctions are over, the slot duration for each of the 5 winners ends on May 13th, 2022, regardless of their starting date. However, the parachain teams can bid for leases in contiguous increments for a maximum of eight 6-week periods. After the lease is over, slots will be up for auction again, and any team willing to retain their position will have to bid the same way as a new bidder

Source: https://www.investingcube.com/the-five-kusama-parachain-auction-winners-who-are-they/