As you might already know, parachains are different individual layer-1 blockchains, running in parallel within the Polkadot ecosystem, on the Kusama network – and soon to be Polkadot as well. While they leverage the central Relay Chain to stay connected and secured, they benefit from Polkadot’s other properties, such as its security, scalability, interoperability, and governance. The uses of parachains are multiple. Taking the advantage of Polkadot’s cross-chain composability feature, any sort of data or asset can be sent between parachains. While it makes Parachains eligible to connect to external networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the property also exposes a parachain to a host of new cases and applications. These benefits are what make parachains the talk of the town. Becoming a parachain allows your project to operate without paying any fees, gas, or otherwise. You get unmatched access to the relay chain and can write transactions whenever you want. It gives parachains a striking edge over parathreads, which are essentially pay-as-you-go parachains. Kusama Parachain Auctions What is a Parachain auction? These are auctions held on the Polkadot relay chain. They determine which blockchain will connect to the parachain slot. Quite similar to the regular auctions we see in the world of mainstream physical transactions, here too, the teams bid on Kusama on Polkadot. Bidding on Kusama requires using KSM tokens, the na...
