Agile Coretime on Kusama is around the corner. Once the upcoming Fellowship release 1.2 gets out and approved by governance, Agile Coretime will finally be in production.
We have done a lot of testing and made as sure as possible that the launch will be frictionless. Existing leases will be migrated or if they are starting in the future, will be refunded. For Polkadot even swaps will be migrated, despite swaps not being supported by Agile Coretime. For Kusama, please let us know if you are relying on swaps, we will figure out a solution!
Nevertheless it came to our attention that some parachain teams are kind of anxious of this upcoming feature. The number one concern is pricing: Will we be able to still afford a core, with crowdloans going away? Is there a price guarantee?
Obviously there can be no price guarantee as the system is permissionless, but that’s the same as it has been. With auctions there has been no price guarantee either. If we assume demand stays similar to what we had before, then there is no reason for prices to go up.
But even if demand goes up (which would be desired to be honest), Agile Coretime was designed to reduce barrier to entry, not increase it! You can buy coretime on a monthly basis now and with secondary markets and on-demand you can buy way more fine-grained. If you are an early startup, you likely won’t need to build a block every 6 seconds and can share a core with others, cutting on costs.
This is not only good for you, but also for allocation efficiency, which allows us to handle more demand with the same resources, which should also reduce price and not bring it up.
On top of that, we are also constantly improving the system’s throughput, which should also bring prices down, read more on what we are building on my recently shared post here.
The lack of crowdloans should also be easy to mitigate, by charging fees or by issuing your own token.
Last but not least, if you have any further questions, please check out our FAQ, which should answer all your questions on this upcoming launch.
And definitely feel free to share any other concerns you might have. We are excited about this new feature and want you to be as well!