Another first for Polkadot as Kusama council approves first parachain slot auction

The first Kusama parachain slot auction will now commence and is set to run for the next week.

Polkadot's Kusama council passed Motion 310 on Tuesday, confirming the start of the first slot auction on the Kusama network.

According to details shared on the Polkadot governance platform Polkassembly, 13 out of the 19 “seats” on the Kusama council voted in favor of commencing the slot auction process.

First slot auction on Kusama network is approved. Source: Polkassembly

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Polkadot and Kusama co-founder Gavin Wood had published a tentative schedule for the Kusama slot auctions back on June 8.

These slot auctions will decide the parachains that will be added to the Kusama relay chain. Kusama functions as a canary network for Polkadot, which according to Wood helps to secure Polkadot by “allowing functionality to exist in the wild for as long as possible.”

Following Wood’s initial schedule, the first slot auction will proceed over five days, with the first two days allowing for preliminary bidding.

Thus, a winner should emerge by 11:00 am UTC on June 22, with the second slot auction commencing an hour later. In all, Wood proposed the first set of five consecutive slot auctions over five weeks before a temporary pause to evaluate network performance and proceeding to another round of auctions carried out using the same schedule.

Earlier in June, crypto trading platform Kraken announced a parachain auction platform to enable clients to participate in the process from the exchange itself. According to Kraken’s announcement, clients will be able to support bids for Kusama decentralized finance (DeFi) hub Karura and smart contract protocol Shiden.

Related: Polkadot creator Gavin Wood proposes June 15 for first Kusama parachain auction

On the price side, the start of the slot auction has yet to spur any major price rally for Kusama's KSM token. KSM is only up about 2% in the last 24-hour trading period. Meanwhile, Polkadot has seen a much larger price rally within the same period, with DOT securing a 15% gain as of the time of writing.

On Monday, Coinbase Pro announced the addition of Polkadot's DOT coin to its altcoin listing catalog. According to the announcement, DOT trading will commence on Wednesday in all Coinbase supported jurisdictions except Singapore.