Kusama Endpoints
When interacting with the Kusama network via Polkadot Apps or other UIs and programmatic methods, you'd ideally be running your own node (text guide, video guide). Granted, that's not something everyone can or wants to do, so convenience trumps ideals in most cases. To facilitate this convenience, Kusama has several public endpoints you can use for your apps.
Parity Archive Node
The development company Parity maintains an archive node at endpoint
wss://kusama-rpc.polkadot.io/.
To connect to the Parity node, use the endpoint in your JavaScript apps like so:
const{ ApiPromise, WsProvider } = require('@polkadot/api')
(async () => {
const provider = new WsProvider('wss://kusama-rpc.polkadot.io/')
const api = await ApiPromise.create({ provider })
// ...
or in Polkadot Apps UI by clicking the top-left corner of the screen and selecting the appropriate option:
Web3 Foundation Archive Node
The Web3 Foundation maintains an archive node at endpoint wss://cc3-5.kusama.network/.
To connect to this node, replace the endpoint in the JavaScript snippet above.
Connect to it in Polkadot Apps UI by clicking the top-left corner of the screen and selecting the appropriate option:
Kusama RYO Full Node Cloud
RYO (Run Your Own) infrastructure from Avado is a load balancer - a server redirecting requests randomly to other computers - to which you can attach your own home-run node. This means that by connecting to the load balancer's endpoint, you're randomly connecting to another person's public node: the convenience of one reliable endpoint, without the downside of centralization*.
Check the current status of the Kusama RYO cloud including available nodes at https://status.cloud.ava.do/
To connect to the RYO cloud, use the endpoint wss://kusama.polkadot.cloud.ava.do/ in the
JavaScript code.
Connect to the endpoint in Polkadot Apps UI by clicking the top-left corner of the screen and selecting the appropriate option:
Things to know
Reliability
There is no incentive to run these public nodes yet. We're working on making that happen. Ideally, the Kusama Treasury would fund this public infrastructure venture. For now, running the nodes is altruistic.
*Centralization
The nodes are distributed and decentralized, but the load balancer serving them requests isn't. The Ava.do team is actively looking for other companies and organizations willing to run load balancers as backups to the main one - get in touch if you'd like to lend a hand.
Full nodes
The nodes in the RYO cloud are currently full nodes, not archive nodes. To learn the difference, watch this crash course. If you need archive data, run your own archive node or use a Parity or W3F hosted node for now. Archive nodes in RYO are planned for a future update.
Avado Only
For now, the RYO cloud can be joined only with Ava.do hardware. This is a guarantee that the hardware is at or above minimum requirements, so that the endpoint can guarantee a reliable node on the other end. In the future, fully custom remote-run and even cloud-run nodes will be able to join the RYO cloud.