Host: Hello everybody, I’m Lizzie, welcome to today’s Kusama AMA in our ZBG community!!! As we all know, Kusama will be list on ZBG tomorrow. Lots of our users are very interested in this amazing project. And today we are glad to invite the VP at Parity — -Nicole Zhu, hello Nicole, please say hi to our friends in community~
Nicole Zhu: Hello every one～
Host: Ok, let’s start today’s AMA.
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how does your work affect Kusama?
I’m Nicole, I’m the VP of strategic initiatives at Parity. I come from a dev background and still code a lot in Rust. I managed the launch of Kusama.
Q2: Can you briefly describe what is Kusama in 3–5 sentences? What technology stands behind Kusama and why it’s better than the existing one?
Kusama is an experimental network (a canary network) that has a one to one feature parity with what Polkadot will have. Because of this parity, Kusama offers builders/devs a real environment for testing their products/ideas.
Q3：Why the name “Kusama”? Does it mean something special ？
Some folks in the community have mentioned the association to Yayoi Kusama, a famous artist known for her drawings using Dots. We just like the sound of “Kusama” and don’t advocate that association.
Q4: What are the major milestones Kusama has achieved so far, and can you share with us the latest progress of Kusama first?
1. “Time Warp” on Kusama — there was a consensus failure that caused the network to halt completely, and we did some time-travel to resolve the issue. To elaborate, we inserted a piece of code in the client that made it believe that it was running a week in the past as compared to real-time, but that time was moving 4x faster than reality, so the node gradually caught up with the real world. Every validator “time travelled” simultaneously, building up a history of blocks at 4x the block production speed as normal, that looked as if the past week had happened in real time — the only evidence of this happening in block explorers is the copious amounts of slashing and dropped validators because all of the timestamps look like everything was normal.
2. What is Kappa Sigma Mu/The Society
Ruitao @laminar who made a Kusama raspberry pi lego thing.
- find a video/picture of it
-[https://twitter.com/ruitao_su/status/1208305894083022848](https://twitter.com/ruitao_su/status/1208305894083022848)
3. In general, we don’t talk enough about the boring but important stuff: e.g. healthy transaction volumes, a few thousand a day, stable block times, 6 secs as promised.
4. Community: Big storage migration without runtime upgrade — we can talk about the process and cooperation within the community that was required to build the extrinsic (data dump from polkascan, and help to diagnose the issue — matching data to claims on Ethereum from the w3f — creation of the proposal and execution — JAM)
5. Council Bounties initiated by Emiel from polkascan (discussion in Kusama Direction chatroom: [https://matrix.to/#/!QXMnIJzxlnVrvRzhUA:matrix.parity.io](https://matrix.to/#/!QXMnIJzxlnVrvRzhUA:matrix.parity.io))
1. Recurring bounty for a weekly digest and full transcript of the “Kusama Direction” riot Channel.
2. Bounty Blog post “Bounties & the Kusama Treasury” covering existing bounty tools in the space, and tools on Kusama, and the challenges of bounties in the crypto space. What would good bounty logic look like onchain?
3. Bounty for a Blog post on: “What makes a good council member?” — what are the objectives of the Kusama Council, how do council members contribute to those objectives, what are the virtues and vices of a councillor, how to quantify those qualities and any other suggestions to the council.
4. recurring bounty (~every 3 months) semi-structured survey of Council Members, to allow the community to better understand their motivations, why they are on the council, and what they have done to progress the people they represent (see the chart for a more complete list of suggested questions)
6. one-time bounty to extend the Treasury pallet with a curated bounty system — if this is still available at the time of the AMA, will very much recommend looking at requirements in chat.
Q5: Why did you choose to solve just Scalability and Incompatibility issues? Don’t you think to neglect the other 3 key issues which are Developability, Governance and Applicability?
We are also addressing those 3 things, which is one thing: “how does the chain improve itself” So far, Kusama has received multiple onchain updates that have changed its logic. 0 forks, 0 community disputes.
This was accomplished by a democratic process (through the technical council) which is a group of developers in the community, at the foundation, at parity, who actively contribute to the code.
Q6: What is Kusama’s validators mechanism? Could you pls give us a brief introduction？
Kusama uses nPoS: nominated proof of stake. Every block, a random group of validators are selected to finalize the block. As a token holder, you can simply delegate your tokens to existing validators. If you choose the less popular validators, I think there’s a mechanism where if you get slashed, you don’t lose as many tokens as if you were to have backed more popular validators. You can assess various validators using this community built tool: https://polkascan.io/pre/kusama/session/validator
Q7. Is Kusama an extension of Polkadot?
It will be a bridge to Polkadot
Q8：What did Kusama decide to use Polkadot to run it network protocol instead of Casper or Cosmos? Both Polkadot and Casper represent interesting new protocols. Can you please tell us some of the differences between the two and is it possible for the two to co-exist under a mutually beneficial relationship in the future?
Yeah, it’s possible to co-exist. That’s the point of Polkadot/Kusama’s interoperability. In terms of features, Kusama is a superset of what Cosmos/Casper has. So it doesn’t make much sense to build Kusama on top of some other platform that has fewer features. You can think of it as Ethereum 2.0 come early, with more features.
Q9: The upkeep of Polkadot network requires participants to play four basic roles which are collator, fisherman, nominator and validator. Can you please tell us what each role mean in the Polkadot network?
Collator: collects and submits transactions at a para chain level, they are compensated by para chain transaction fees, and submit blocks to the relay chain to be finalized
Fisherman: these are independent actors that traverse any para chain/blocks they want to find issues. They can earn rewards from valid issues, and their actions might revert the blockchain.
Validator: validators secure the blockchain. They run full blockchain nodes to review the state transitions in each of the transactions in a block. Validators bond their tokens for a few months, so that if they are proven malicious by fishermen, then they lose their tokens.
Nominators are any user with tokens, who decide to pool their tokens towards validators.
They earn a share of those rewards without having to operate any nodes or do anything technical.
Q10: As in Kusama guide, everyone can participate in Kusama but I’m not a developer, I don’t have programming skill, code skills, how will I contribute to this experiment?
Let me show you how to do the following:
https://www.loom.com/share/251ac6f0de834c96a2e9471d17a4ac68
Q11: What’s real-world use of Kusama? Where can we expect the use of Kusama services? For which types of problems relief is expected from Kusama ecosystem?
Kusama is for developers
Developers can use Kusama to battle test their newest features/staging commits before launching it on Polkadot.
Q12. When will the para chain online?
In a few months. The tech is ready-ish
Q13.Will Kusama have an independent marketing team after the launch on polkadot？
There’s no marketing team for Kusama. It’s a fully decentralized and community-owned project now. So people are just promoting it independently I guess.
Host：Wow, so cool, what a valuable sharing. I believe we have learned a lot in today’s AMA and have a better understanding of the Kusama. Thanks again to Nicole for speaking today！I hope we can learn more about Kusama in the future！
And I want to emphasize again that Kusama will be listed on ZBG exchange tomorrow and open trading at 18:00 HKT, so please stay tuned ~ Thank you for your support and concern of Kusama and ZBG.
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