DeFi Network Karura Wins First Auction Slot on Kusama

More than 15,000 network stakeholders locked up KSM in favor of Karura being added.

By Jamie Crawley

Jun 22, 2021 at 9:48 a.m. UTC

Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 1:14 p.m. UTC

Jamie Crawley

Decentralized finance (DeFi) network Karura won the first auction slot on Polkadot's canary, or test, network, Kusama.

The sister network of Polkadot's main DeFi project Acala, Karura raised more than 500,000 Kusama tokens (KSM) from its community, or about $100 million at current prices.
"More than 15,000 network stakeholders locked up KSM in favor of Karura being added to yours truly," the Kusama network tweeted Tuesday.
Karura is a token-trading application that allows users to build scalable DeFi applications without large transaction fees.

The auction win secures Karura a 48-week lease to build on Kusama, Polkadot's pre-production environment, known as a canary network.
Networks like Polkadot, Cosmos and Solana are providing developers with a way to avoid the increasing cost and congestion on Ethereum that has come with the explosion in the DeFi market.
A 48-week lease on Kusama – which shares much of the same code as Polkadot but allows for more experimentation and faster upgrades – is therefore a highly sought-after proposition, albeit an expensive one.
The second auction is set to begin later today, with three more auctions to follow in the next three weeks.

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