NewsletterKILT Protocol Migrates From Kusama To Polkadot, Highlighting The Benefits Of The Canary Network Model
The Polkadot blockchain’s novel ecosystem design has come into focus this month following the successful migration of KILT Protocol from Kusama to Polkadot’s main Relay Chain.
KILT Protocol’s migration marks the first time any dApp has migrated from a parachain on Kusama to a parachain on Polkadot, highlighting a key use case of the “canary network”, which gives developers a place to trial new decentralized technologies in the real world.
Kusama is one of the most innovative aspects of Polkadot’s ecosystem. It serves as Polkadot’s canary network. The Kusama blockchain itself is almost identical to Polkadot’s chain, but it’s updated far more regularly and less stable.
Polkadot’s ecosystem is based around the idea of having a central Relay Chain that connects with multiple parachains. Users can build a parachain, which is essentially a standalone blockchain, very easily using the Substrate framework. The Relay Chain serves to host multiple parachains, taking care of their security and processing transactions. In addition, it enables each of those parachains to bridge across one another. In this way, all of the parachains within Polkadot’s ecosystem are interoperable, solving a key pain point associated with distributed ledgers.
Kusama was conceived as Polkadot’s canary network, which performs a similar function to what canaries would do in a gas mine. Years ago, miners would carry a caged canary deep underground to serve as a kind of warning system for gas leaks. If the canary fell asleep or died, the miners knew they had to get out quickly. Kusama is an almost identical copy of the Polkadot blockchain, used to test new features and dApps.
In this way, Kusama acts as a testnet that continually battle-tests not only the dApps being built for deployment on Polkadot, but also the network itself. Polkadot’s core developers regularly test new features on Kusama first to ensure they work properly and iron out any issues. In this way, Polkadot itself always remains extremely stable. Thanks to Kusama, Polkadot’s team can really let its imagination run away and test more innovative, and riskier ideas, without worrying about any negative impact on the main Polkadot Relay Chain.
Because of this, Kusama is really an ecosystem within an ecosystem. It has its own token, KSM, and multiple parachains of its own. It has staking and decentralized governance, and everything else that Polkadot has.
The main purpose of Kusama is really to mitigate any risk to Polkadot. In a hyper-innovative industry like blockchain, nothing is guaranteed, and any kind of update to the network can result in technical glitches and other problems. This explains why Kusama says to “expect chaos” in its own tagline.
The Time Was Right
Like many other Polkadot projects, KILT Protocol launched on Kusama first, taking advantage of the canary network to ensure that its identity technology, based on verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers, worked as intended.
Some projects within Polkadot’s ecosystem intend to continue running on both Kusama and Polkadot simultaneously, using the former to test new features and upgrades, and the latter as the actual production network for their dApps. However KILT never had any intention of keeping two parallel networks up and running. For KILT, the plan was always to eventually move everything from Kusama to Polkadot, where users would benefit from a more stable network.
“This decision was spurred by large-scale enterprises starting to implement business cases on KILT,” the protocol’s team wrote in a blog post.
“These use cases require high levels of stability and security that cannot be guaranteed within the more experimental Kusama network, so following a governance decision by the KILT community, it was decided to make the logical move to Polkadot.”
In other words, Kusama had served its purpose for KILT. Thanks to its fast iteration cycles, the KILT developers were able to build new applications far faster and test many ideas, demonstrating the efficiency and utility of the technology. Just 11 months after KILT launched, there were already five decentralized identity services running on its protocol, with each one rapidly gaining new users and builders. KILT had proven its worth in record time, and the moment had come to move to a more stable network.
The migration itself went without a hitch. KILT won the 24th parachain auction slot on August 11, 2022, and announced it had fully shifted from Kusama to Polkadot on October 3, less than two months later. Thanks to technologies such as the XCM cross-chain interoperability standard and the Solo-to-parachain pallet built by Parity Technologies, KILT’s extensive data and transaction history was migrated without any problems.
The shift serves to validate Polkadot’s unique canary network model, enabling projects to build faster on an advanced blockchain network in the real-world, before shifting to a highly secure and stable network once they’re ready for prime time.
