Kusama

Kusama is Polkadot’s canary network. It is designed to act as a risk-taking, fast-paced mainnet environment. Kusama is built with Substrate on a codebase that is nearly identical to Polkadot. The network is an innovative development environment for teams that want to move quickly and innovate on Kusama or prepare for Polkadot deployment. Kusama was founded in 2019 by Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot and co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum. Kusama is a scalable network of interoperable blockchains. Like Polkadot, Kusama is a Relay Chain connecting to many parachains that earned their slot via an auction mechanism. With Substrate, developers can build and configure their blockchain and connect to Kusama.