'Expect Chaos': Polkadot to Launch Experimental Kusama Network This Summer

An experimental version of blockchain interoperability protocol Polkadot will go live later this summer.

Led by Swiss nonprofit Web3 Foundation, the Polkadot team says the "Early, unaudited and unrefined release of Polkadot" will be called Kusama.

"Kusama will serve as a proving ground, allowing teams and developers to build and deploy a parachain or try out Polkadot's governance, staking and validation functionality in a real environment," Gavin Wood, the ethereum co-founder and creator of Polkadot, said in a blog post.

The highly anticipated project was reported last month to have closed a private sale of half a million DOT tokens for an implied valuation of $1.2 billion.

Wood stresses that the Kusama network is meant to cater to "New, early, high-risk functionality" projects that are already building products for Polkadot.

The network's mainnet launch is tentatively slated for later this year.

Starting tomorrow, DOT holders can claim an equal amount of Kusama coins and begin experimenting on the network no later than August.

For users who hold no DOT tokens, Woods explained that the Web3 Foundation will also be allocating 100,000 DOTs to fund "a frictional faucet" of KST for additional experimentation on Kusama.

"We are building bleeding-edge, experimental technology, which means there are no promises about what Kusama will do or how it will work - expect a lot of chaos."