KILT Protocol, an open-source blockchain protocol for issuing self-sovereign, anonymous and verifiable credentials, has won the sixth Kusama parachain auction and has launched its mainnet, the project announced yesterday. Kusama is Polkadot’s canary network for blockchain developers to build and test out their code as well as products and services.
Fast facts
- KILT Protocol had received tremendous support from its community for its participation in the auction. The project, on Sept. 1, hit its max cap of 220,000 Kusama (KSM) for the Kusama parachain auction crowdloan. “THANK YOU to our passionate community for supporting KILT in the #6 auction. Our 12,211 contributing votes placed KILT firmly in the lead,” KILT Protocol tweeted following its win.
- Speaking at a Crowdcast event yesterday, KILT Protocol founder Ingo Rübe said the project will now begin onboarding its global network of collators, introduce governance and treasury and add KILT functionalities such as Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials, with the goal to complete its next steps and achieve decentralization in the next two to three months.
- In August, KILT Protocol announced its first batch of 16 “collators” that will hold the data of the blockchain, collect transactions and build blocks. The collators included China-based Glacier Blockchain Technology, with whom KILT Protocol founded the Web3 Identity Lab in Berlin and Yantai, China.
- This latest Kusama parachain auction is the first in the second batch of five parachain slot auctions on Kusama, which is instrumental to the future success of the Polkadot network, whose mainnet has launched but is not yet fully operational. Polkadot is a blockchain protocol that connects multiple specialized blockchains into a multi-chain network in which individual blockchains, or parachains, connect to and are secured by a relay chain. Given the limited number of parachains that can be supported on the main relay chain, slot auctions are being used to select the parachains to be added to it.
- Acala’s Karura Network, Moonbeam’s Moonriver Network, Astar’s (previously called Plasm) Shiden Network, Phala’s Khala Network and Bifrost secured their Kusama parachain slots in the first batch of auctions that took place earlier this year.
- According to a Polkadot blog post on the second batch of Kusama parachain auctions: “While our recommendations for the parachain launch on Kusama are cautious due to the uncertainty of the new environment, this experience paves the way for a swift and fluid scaling of Polkadot to the same level of sharding because the technology is proven. The more that Kusama is stress-tested, the faster and easier it will be for a smooth Polkadot rollout.”