Kusama

What is Kusama?

Kusama, often dubbed Polkadot's "canary network," stands as an experimental platform designed by the creators at Polkadot, including Gavin Wood and the Web3 Foundation. It serves as a dynamic testing environment where developers can explore and trial new features, protocols, and upgrades intended for deployment within Polkadot or similar blockchain ecosystems.

Kusama's core purpose revolves around providing developers with a conducive environment for testing, thereby offering them greater flexibility during the finalization of their Polkadot projects. As a result, Kusama adopts more relaxed regulations compared to Polkadot, including less rigid governance protocols.

Additionally, Kusama closely mirrors many of Polkadot's core design elements. For example, it employs a dual-chain structure akin to Polkadot's – comprising a primary network known as the relay chain, where transactions are immutably recorded, and user-created networks are referred to as parachains.

KSM is the native cryptocurrency of the Kusama network which can be use for transaction fees, and lets users vote on network upgrades and other important decisions.

What is Kusama staking?

Staking is a great way for long-term crypto investors to earn passive income on their Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency assets (such as KSM) while taking part in securing the network.

Stakers, by delegating tokens to validators, give voting rights to these to validate transactions on the blockchain and propose new blocks. The more stake is attributed to a validator, the more it will be able to take part in the network consensus and earn rewards for its stakers.

A quick example: Suppose a blockchain network offers a 5% reward rate for a staking period of 1 year (5% APR). You decide to lock up and stake 100 tokens on the network. After a year, you can access your staked tokens, and you receive 5 additional tokens as your reward – minus eventual fees charged by the staking provider.

Staking Proof-of-Stake (PoS) cryptocurrencies such as KSM does not require stakers to transfer their token to validators. It is a non-custodial process.

Why is Stakin a great choice for Kusama staking?

Staking your assets on your own is operationally challenging as it requires specialist expertise to set up nodes and ensure constant uptime to maximize rewards or prevent so-called slashing: partial loss of your staked cryptocurrencies due to prolonged downtime, or inappropriate/malicious behavior by the node operator.

Stakin is an excellent choice for staking your Kusama (KSM) tokens, as we have a strong expertise and track record of reliable operations on this network. Stakin has been an early Kusama validator since September 2019 and a selected member of the Web3 Foundation delegation program.

There are several advantages when staking your KSM tokens with Stakin, such as:

• Triple AAA-rated institutional staking provider by Staking Rewards

• ISO 27001-certified staking provider

• Tracking dashboard, to easily track and generate reports for the performance of your staked assets

• Reliable infrastructure - We distribute our servers across various geographical locations and partner with premier bare metal and cloud providers

• Enhanced yield service for institutional investors, taking into account NPoS constraints

• Automatic claiming of the rewards every era (6 hours) which further enables your staking rewards to compound

• Dedicated support for all your staking, unstaking, and network-related questions

• Institutional grade SLAs with uptime and slashing guarantees

What kind of institutional services does Stakin offer for Kusama (KSM) Staking?

As an institutional-grade Kusama (KSM) node operator, Stakin has a full range of staking services and advantages to cater to the needs of enterprises and investors, such as asset managers, company treasuries, exchanges, VCs and hedge funds, wallets, custodians, and liquid staking services.

• Institutional grade SLAs with 99.5%+ uptime guarantees and slashing guarantees

• Dedicated Account Manager to answer all your technical and commercial questions

• Whitelabel and dedicated nodes with dedicated infrastructure which can be deployed in your preferred region to fit decentralization or compliance needs

• In order to adapt to NPoS (Nominated Proof-of-Stake) specificities, we can deploy as many dedicated servers as required for institutional customers, which contributes to optimizing the yield on Kusama

• To avoid coordinated slashing events, which carry a higher slashing penalty on Kusama, we can set up an infrastructure that is distributed at several bare metal providers in different geographies

• Automated payouts, commissions, reward claims and management with clear reporting. Commissions and rewards can be set to specific addresses and handled directly by the protocol, without any custody from Stakin

• 24/7 monitoring and alerting with a private dashboard for dedicated and whitelabel nodes

• Free premium access to Stakin Dashboard which includes staking data visualization across any validator and premium historical data features (on selected networks)