A few questions for Gavin Wood
January 20, 2020
For those in the know, then you probably already know about the Polkadot blockchain network and its relation with its “wild cousin”, Kusama. The two networks were both developed by Parity Technologies, with Polkadot aiming to empower blockchain networks to work together through shared security. Kusama is its “canary network” that is meant to provide a mainnet-like environment in which exciting new ideas and concepts can be implemented.
Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot and co-creator of Ethereum, has been leading the charge since founding Parity Technologies in 2016. We were fortunate enough to get his take on Kusama and what his team has discovered since the Kusama launch in 2019.
1. Are there any early indications of a direction that Kusama is taking in terms of the types of parachains or unique value proposition the network will offer?
It’s clear that while Polkadot (mainnet) will be 100% focused on parachain security, reliability and scalability, Kusama is taking a much more diverse path. Through the development and deployment of modules like Society (a social experiment around a group-membership module, not unlike a DAO), Tipping (a mechanism allowing users to suggest, and the council to ratify, that particular users receive a “tip” of KSM for some declared reason, be it a web page, tweet, article or whatever), Recovery (a social-recovery mechanism, similar to the functionality of Ethereum’s Argent wallet) and Long (a module allowing users to “insure” that the KSM token price will rise over a given period), early indications are that Kusama will very much be an experimental testbed, playing around with its incentives and even using its own capital-base and treasury in order to foster community interest and involvement. There are additional such experiments in the pipeline and the council and voting population of Kusama seem fairly happy with the idea of experimenting thick and fast.
2. Ethereum found product fit through financial services, so is an interoperability chain and sharding immediately going to take DeFi to the next level in terms capabilities?
For sure it will eventually take DeFi to the next level, of course it’s difficult to predict the timescale. One thing that is relatively certain: sharding, and in particular the Polkadot-style domain-specific sharding, will increase the amount of capacity available by 100–1,000x over Ethereum without a corresponding loss of security. The problem will shortly become not so much managing capacity but rather finding consumers for these products.
3. When Polkadot and Kusama have been launched, fully decentralized, and out in the wild for 5 years, how do you envision the two networks looking down the road and how will the networks interact?
We have plans to bridge Kusama to Polkadot, and indeed this may even be Polkadot’s first true bridge (Bitcoin and Ethereum bridges are also in development). If you’d have asked me this question about Ethereum five years ago I know I’d have given a dramatically different answer to what is happening now. Back then DeFi was called “crypto-finance” and it was constantly offered as a general use-case for Ethereum (weather insurance, I seem to remember being a notable one). I expected to have it basically done 5 years in and be moving on to crazy other social experiments. Predictive powers notwithstanding, long-term I’d expect Kusama to be a well-recognised partner-chain to Polkadot, retaining a vibrant developer community. Their technologies I would expect to stay in sync, with Kusama acting as a testbed and canary. Their governance and communities though, I would expect to evolve into quite different directions over time, with Polkadot being much more risk-averse, strict and formal and Kusama to retain its happy-go-lucky streak.
4. What made you choose to build a live experimental network like Kusama, which is the first of its kind, instead of going the traditional route of just using testnets?
We certainly don’t want to eschew testnets and we plan on launching a new Polkadot/Kusama testnet in days. Testnets can be useful for testing new features of a chain or for deploying and testing (d)apps in a shared environment. However, they have a major blind spot: There are no incentives. Stakers/validators don’t really care if they’re slashed on a testnet for going offline. Stakeholders don’t bother voting on matters like council membership because even if bad members are elected it won’t materially affect them. Developers don’t get super thrilled about the possibility of fixing a broken testnet because it’s a lot less work to just restart it. Having a canary network, whose underlying economics and security characteristics are more or less equivalent to the mainnet, opens the door to really “testing” these incentives and the mechanisms behind them in a holistic fashion that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
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