Polkadot vs. Kusama
Although they are like cousins and share many parts of their code, Polkadot and Kusama are independent, standalone networks with different priorities. Kusama is wild and fast, and great for bold experimentation and early-stage deployment. Polkadot is more conservative, prioritizing stability and dependability. Cousins have their differences after all.
To get a better understanding of the key similarities and difference between Polkadot and Kusama, checkout this support article.
Cost and Speed
Teams wishing to run a parachain are required to bond tokens as security. The bonding requirement on Kusama is lower than on Polkadot, making it the more affordable development environment.
Another key technical difference between Polkadot and Kusama is that Kusama has modified governance parameters that allow for faster upgrades. Kusama is up to four times faster than Polkadot. This does not mean that the Kusama blockchain itself is faster, in the sense of faster block times or transaction throughput (these are the same on both networks), but that there's a shorter amount of time between governance events such as proposing new referenda, voting, and enacting approved upgrades. This allows Kusama to adapt and evolve faster than Polkadot.
Canary network
The initial use case for Kusama was as a pre-production environment, a “canary network”.
Canary is a type of bird: back in the day, coal miners would put canaries into coal mines as a way to measure the amount of toxic gases in the tunnels. Similarly, canary testing is a way to validate software by releasing software to a limited number of users, or perhaps, an isolated environment - without hurting a wide range of users.
Releases made onto Kusama can be thought of as Canary Releases. These releases are usually staged. In Kusama's early days, the network won't just be used for parachain candidates to innovate and test changes, but a proof of concept for Polkadot's sharded model.
Kusama is not simply a testnet, the blockchain is fully functional with attached economic value, and own governance. The future of Kusama is in the hands of its participants. In a typical blockchain development pipeline, Kusama would sit in between a "testnet" and a "mainnet":
As you can imagine, building on Kusama first allows teams to test things out in a live, fully decentralized, and community-controlled network with real-world conditions and lower stakes in the event of problems or bugs than on Polkadot.
Many projects will maintain parachains on both networks, experimenting and testing new technologies and features on Kusama before deploying them to Polkadot. Some teams will decide just to stay on Kusama, which is likely to be a place where we see some exciting experimentation with new technologies going forward. Projects that require high-throughput but don’t necessarily require bank-like security, such as some gaming, social networking, and content distribution applications, are particularly good candidates for this use case.
Kusama may also prove to be the perfect environment for ambitious experiments with new ideas and innovations in areas like governance, incentives, monetary policy, and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). Future upgrades to the Polkadot runtime will also likely be deployed to Kusama before Polkadot mainnet. This way, not only will we be able to see how these new technologies and features will perform under real-world conditions before bringing them to Polkadot, but teams who have deployed to both networks will also get an advanced look at how their own technology will perform under those upgrades.
Going forward
Ultimately, Kusama and Polkadot will live on as independent, standalone networks with their own communities, their own governance, and their own complementary use cases, though they will continue to maintain a close relationship, with many teams likely deploying applications to both networks. In the future, we’re also likely to see Kusama bridged to Polkadot for cross-network interoperability. Web3 Foundation remains committed to both networks going forward, providing crucial support and guidance to teams building for the ecosystem.