What is parachain auction?
Let’s have a brief introduction about Polkadot.
Think of Polkadot as a giant connector with 100 slots that can be used to connect different public chains. This socket provides them with shared security, on-chain governance, scalability, cross-chain interoperability, fork-free on-chain upgrades, low Gas fee, and more.
Most projects wanted to connect to Polkadot, but the number of slots was limited. Polkadot would reserve 20 for its own use, leaving 80 to be auctioned for the projects on the market.
Therefore, those projects need to bid, and only if the project successfully wins the auction and connects to the Polkadot chain, it can be regarded as the parachain of Polkadot.
How can regular user benefit from parachain auction?
The parachain auction has begun, and users can choose to “bet” on one of the crowdloan participated projects, and then deposit DOT/ KSM through the official Crowdloan page of Polkadot to increase the possibility to win auctioned slot for the project.
In order to attract more users to deposit their DOT/KSM, many projects has special incentive mechanism. If the project wins the auction, the user will receive reward, and if the project loses, the deposited DOT/ KSM will be refunded.
Please remind that every private fundraising has risks and make your research before any investment.
For your safety, it is recommended to participate the crowdloan through Math Cloud Wallet. Check more details here: https://blog.mathwallet.org/?p=3096
Or you can participate through CrowdLoan at polkadot.js.org.
For more information about Kusama crowdloan, please check on Polkaproject.com
Note that the longer the leasing period last, the longer your DOT/KSM will be locked.
Kusama is the wild and fast; early-stage deployment of Polkadot. All new functions will be launched on Kusama first, and will later only be moved onto Polkadot if everything goes well.
In addition to buy DOT and KSM in advance and participate in crowdloan, keep an eye on the crowdloan projects, once the project wins the auction, it will bring certain benefit to the project ecosystem and growth.
The auction success rate of the project can be considered from the following perspectives:
1. Have it obtained the support of the Web3 Foundation founded by the founder of Polkadot? Please check:
https://github.com/w3f/General-Grants-Program/blob/master/grants/accepted_grant_applications.md
2. If it is a star project in this field, please check:
3. Whether the project was built on the Polkadot ecosystem at the beginning, rather than migrated to Polkadot?
4. Is the project open source and has a detailed white paper?
5. Whether the community is active and whether the code is constantly updated and optimized?
Parachain Crowdloan process
Kusama has launched 4 parachain, namely Statemine which is a public interest chain that allows anyone to issue tokens, Karura, Moonriver and Shiden which won the auction, and are currently producing block.
Up to now, a total of $1.09 million KSM have been crowdloaned. Karura, Moonriver and Shiden won 1-3 Parachain Slots at 501,000 KSM, 206,000 KSM, and 138,000 KSM respectively.
The remaining ongoing projects have raised a total of 244,000 KSM. You can check out the project which is still crowdloaning on the official website of Polkadot JS: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Frpc.pinknode.io%2Fkusama%2Fexplorer#/parachains/crowdloan
Today Math Cloud Wallet supports crowdloan of Altair, Robonomics, Basilisk, SubGame and Loom.
Conclusion
This auction has a total of 5 rounds, and 3 rounds have been finalized. Only if the parachain run smoothly at later stage, the second round of auctions will be started again.
The last bull market led to the boom of Polkadot, but the true builders will keep working on the project and delivering great products to the community.
The parachain auction is just the beginning of Polkadot ecosystem booming, and also the starting point where Polkadot to prove its value. It remains to be seen whether Polkadot can achieve the expected function and value, and whether it can truly usher in a new era of cross-chain, we will know after the completion of parachain auction.