KILT’s Parachain Plans: An Update
KILT Protocol aims to secure an initial Kusama parachain slot, planning to bid for slots in the 6–10 range. KILT’s team has been hard at work building and testing our technology so that we can launch with significant functionality, rather than adding core elements later. Here’s an update on KILT’s strategies towards network launch.
The long-awaited parachain auctions have started and, like all of you, we’ve been watching with interest.
Behind the scenes we’ve been focused on building and auditing our technology, and fine-tuning a token economy that could enable and incentivise functionalities in the network while aiming to avoid the pitfalls of high inflation. Here’s a brief outline of what we’ve been up to.
The Tech
As promised by Kusama, we can all expect chaos. However, we also like mitigating risk! So we decided to take the time to test our parachain in close to real-life scenarios, doing load testing, figuring out edge cases of the token economy and trying to break the Relay Chain. We surely were the project spending most time on the Westend testnet — thanks to Parity for all the time and engagement!
As a result of this preparation, at launch KILT’s parachain will already include significant activated functionality: staking and our initial token economy.
This means staking will be possible on KILT from genesis. To enable this, we selected and set up the first group of collators who are being onboarded now. We are thrilled by their commitment to KILT and enthusiasm for the protocol at this early stage. Further details on the KILT’s Initial Collator Programme to follow soon.
After the successful golive of the network, the number of Collators will be increased gradually and becoming a Collator will become permissionless.
As we announced last week, KILT will launch as a Limited Delegated Proof of Stake (LDPoS) network. This variation of proof of stake will allow token holders to delegate their stake to the collators. We chose this mechanism as part of a carefully-considered token economy that aims to have relatively low inflation, promoting the efficient use of resources and contributing to the long-term economic stability of the network.
We have engaged external security firms to audit and test our token economy implementation, so it’s ready for the early days of KILT’s parachain. We look forward to sharing a detailed outline of our token economy in the near future.
Obtaining Our Parachain Slot
To date the crowdloans have been extremely successful, with the first five slots anticipated to capture close to 10% of the current KSM supply, which is approximately 11M tokens. In reality the supply is much lower, because half (5.5M of the 11M) of the current distribution is needed for staking to secure the network. So 20% of the available 5.5M KSM in circulation is now locked up by the first five slots, not taking into account some free float and hodlers.
Watching the auctions over the past four weeks, we came to the following conclusions:
We anticipate the momentum with crowdloans to continue through the next few slots and have created a strategy for how to best optimise our entry point while building for the future.
We want KILT to be decentralised and run by community governance. We believe that the stability of the KILT network is best reached by independence from market fluctuations and from short-term adoption.
An important factor for this is the ability of the network to fund all its necessary resources itself, in the long run. These are the options we are currently reflecting on:
Self-funding
As preparation for our launch on Kusama, months ago we accumulated an amount of KSM we believe will be a reasonable long-term average price for a slot. By self-funding this amount, KILT would ideally have the resources to bid for any subsequent slot without further crowdfunding, as the locked KSM is returned at the end of a lease. In addition to generating stability and low inflation, this would make KILT independent of short-term market fluctuations.
Crowdloans
There are two things to consider regarding crowdloans.
First, the momentum in the price of Kusama parachain slots may continue in the short term, making it unwise to over-commit self-funding, and sensible to create a crowdloan.
Even more importantly, crowdloans provide a way for the community to participate and therefore we could begin the process of decentralisation — even before KILT’s mainnet launch. To accommodate this option without introducing extra inflation into the system, we have reserved 3% of the initial distribution of KILT Coins for a crowdloan boost for our first slot.
Future Kusama Auctions
In the Kusama ecosystem, when the first round of 48-week slots ends, we assume that the number of total slots will have greatly increased while the total distribution of KSM will have increased much less, due to the KSM inflation. So we expect that the slot price will be at reasonable levels at that time, and may be comfortably achieved by our self-funding provision, allowing greater freedom to KILT governance.
Entering Polkadot
Additionally, we have worked out a Treasury scheme that we envision will create a secure source of self-funding for KILT’s future parachain slots on Polkadot, as determined by community governance. Stated simply: KILT Coins will be minted into the Treasury on chain over a long period of time. The blockchain’s governance mechanism shall potentially be able to trade these KILT Coins for DOT, building up a DOT treasury on the KILT blockchain that could be held and used for subsequent community-initiated biddings for Polkadot parachain slots. We are continuing to refine this concept, which would add another utility and interesting use case for DOT as well as a new approach for our ecosystem. More details will be outlined in our forthcoming token economy document.
Note that there will be only one KILT Coin. If KILT’s blockchain governance bids on a Polkadot slot, the new Polkadot blockchain will hold the same balances.
The Way Forward
At this point in time, the duration of the pause between Kusama auctions 5 and 6 is yet to be communicated. And we realise it may be a matter of weeks or even months, depending on how much chaos will be observed. While we (and other projects!) are anxious for auctions to proceed so we can launch, we will use any additional time to add even more functionality to KILT’s blockchain on Day One.
As ever, we are extremely grateful for your continued support and patience, and look forward to bringing KILT to the world as soon as possible.
