My idea and part of what I am trying to create an initial process on is having it be an entry way from Universities. When I started learning about this platform and those who use it, it was clear to me that this was an arena to experiment, like lab class. I have a process play book I am hoping to execute on with you Once you get the ball rolling others can use that formula in their regions. Hopefully my product mindset at work can unfold appropriately here.
I’m very aligned with the mentioned focus topics any initiative to make our birdie friend more lively is very welcomed building in the most advanced and decentralized network is what brought me in the first place to PolkadotKusama and made me stay, I hope those attributes can stay.
However I never liked so much the word chaos, I interpreted more as innovation and creativity(hence Kreivo) which lead me to shape our parachain and solutions towards entrepreneurs and SMEs, I believe Kusama should be the default starting place for anyone in the ecosystem, the place for the 99% where you start your journey building community or finding product market fit before moving to the big pink leagues.
Stuff is happening in Kusama, a bit slow but we are getting there, in Virto we are seeing real world businesses and organizations approach and makes me happy we can offer them solutions to their problems(not chaos but innovation ), the values remain so it’s interesting that we’ll end up offering the cypherpunk movement in disguise to normal users completely foreign to web3 and its ideals.
Glad to help in any Kusama initiative … and if the Virto tech can help even better(there are DAOs in Kreivo people can join or ping me to help create your own)
Brilliant - Thank you for the inspiration! Absolutely totally LOVE the dark/cyperpunk Privacy-focused/Privacy-Preserving/ZK-tools orientation … which should be coupled with high innovation / tinkering speed.
Can we put a KSM Wish for Change along these lines and ALSO get away from the “Kusama is a Canary Network” historical original concept for Kusama? Maybe have Kusama not undergo JAM / Minimal relay chain? Kusama Hub’s revive-pallet instead on the Kusama Relay Chain? This will test a lot of people’s religion.
I don’t have much to add aside from sharing that, as an anonymous validator on Kusama, I am very much looking forward to privacy being something we pay attention to and value. Thank you for this great post @shawntabrizi.
I don’t think this is a good idea. Once JAM lands, a lot of new possibilities open up, and I would like to see Kusama remain cutting edge. A refresh of the messaging would do just fine without altering it technically. The best way to upend people’s expectations is by doing.
While Polkadot is a nice, stable, predictable, enterprise-friendly space similar to RHEL or Debian LTS, Kusama should be that bold, brave, reckless canary that thrives on adrenaline. An early JAM release to put the tools in developers hands in an active network is precisely what Kusama’s “Expect Chaos” entails. A live Hackerspace to try new ideas and push the boundaries of what a decentralized Internet can be. The best tools will naturally bubble to the top for Polkadot to refine after a thorough battle testing.
I reminisce about Kusama from '21-'22 and the excitement of simply talking with other people about new things launching each week. I think the Spammening event has been a great return focus of what benefit Kusama can provide.
I’ll dust off my neon visor and leather, studded jacket and meet you all in the Cyphersphere
Treating Kusama like a cloud (not hosting smart contracts directly on the “cloud layer”, but as an application on top if it) and using the latest “cloud hardware” (JAM), all is in the spirit of making this Cypherpunk platform as scalable as possible.
The path Kusama should share with Polkadot is the path toward scaling. This is how Kusama can remain relevant and important for the safety and security of Polkadot.
What I describe above, and where Kusama should take its own path, is the community and ethos it should foster. There are some unique technical features which can help it along that path, but it would be hard to argue, if you believe that Polkadot is making the right decisions on scaling, that Kusama shouldn’t be doing those things.
Yes. I think Kusama should stay the canary. Worth pointing out that coretime on Kusama is really cheap right now and we are also cutting storage deposits for the PVF to a tenth of what it is right now. I hope that this helps in fostering interesting experiments and explorations.
This is a great initiative! I had my thumbs squeezed that we would have zk in the polkadot space through the manta parachain, doesnt seem so bright now doe…
Zcash has been a great privacy centric project for a long time and Zooko and the team there have done a great job with developing zk library and shielded transactions.
One of the most used ethereum privacy projects is tornado cash which is just solidity deployed on the EVM, deploying evm side premade smart contracts could be one option. (Tornado cash has not been maintained for over 2 years but i would assume there are other solidity tumblers)
Another good reference point is Penumbra, which is the most active Cosmo ecosystem privacy centric project: https://penumbra.zone/
Two privacy centric substrate built chains, which also might be a good reference point:
Another great newer privacy project is Veilid, which may be worth exploring integrating anonymous packet routing(adding a privacy layer on top of end to end TCP connections, Similar to the Tor project and all the .onion rpc nodes other ecosystem utilize to make connecting to the rpc nodes more privacy friendly)
Trusted Setup Ceremonies are nice for news and gather eyes but there is a better alternative now with Halo2 so that no trusted/single individuals/entities are ever needed for such a setup.
Even when the KZG - “powers-of-tau” ceremony happened there was not a need for trusted setups as Halo 2 was already public and published. Fun fact. Going full speed with Powers of Tau and not even considering Halo was one of the rare cases when Ethereum was not slow and clunky in development.
I believe the unique selling point of Kusama is its ability to enable fast shipping. The builders on Kusama are brave enough to innovate and quickly bring their ideas to market.
From a startup founder’s perspective, I am looking for a place where I can create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 1-2 weeks, test it, and validate the market. At this stage, my primary concern is not about privacy, decentralization, or scaling. It’s all about whether people need this product.
For this reason, I fully agree with @olanod that Kusama should be the starting point for every team in the ecosystem. While I don’t know exactly how to achieve this, here are a few ideas I have in mind:
A sandbox environment to allow for quick deployment of applications on Kusama, enabling the rapid validation of ideas.
No-code or low-code tools to help build applications on Kusama within a few days.
A support program for builders on Kusama, providing technical assistance, financial aid, bootcamps, marketing support, and any other resources needed to help founders launch their products and go to market within 2-4 weeks, not years.
Honestly, I haven’t been closely following Polkadot and Kusama for the past two years because there wasn’t much for me to do. As a result, my knowledge about the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems is outdated. However, I still believe that “live fast, die young” should be a key unique selling point of Kusama.
Thank you for reading my comment. I hope it contributes something valuable to Kusama.
And you just described Virto’s MVP. As a regular mortal you can create a (private) autonomous organization instantly(not necessarily decentralized as newcomers don’t care), have a robust payments infrastructure and all the tools you need to test your idea quickly, like agent generated mini stores or applets that help you test for product market fit without spending months/years and the millions startups normally burn and know that if you hit the jackpot and are ready to grow, Kusama got you covered because your organization can scale to serve millions of new users without effort.
Awesome right? ready to invest and give us your millions? …can’t do, it’s no coincidence Virto is a non profit DAO building Kreivo as a tokenless protocol, we build slowly with no dependence on big money with specific interests so you can be fast and free. It’s extremely important that every aspect of the system is kept fully decentralized to guarantee real censorship resistance, that includes the power structures and funds that make the engine go, because ultimately Kusama(+Kreivo) is the one true platform in the world that can realistically deliver world scale anarchism, NOT the chaotic (naive?) kind for a few cypherpunks ranting from their basements, but a friendly(solarpunk?), patiently built multi-generational kind that welcomes all humans and ai overlords as it becomes society’s next natural evolutionary step delivering fair autonomous societies … that’s my Kusama experiment
This experiment comes with its own small (decades long?) MVP and its the real reason we built a payments and DAO infrastructure, the Local Incentives Protocol allows autonomous local communities to collect “contributions” from regular commercial activities, every time anyone pays for a product or service some funds land somewhere on the planet to incentivize the creation and growth of said communities and all this as a segway to a more complex system in the future where autonomous societies have their tax policies changing smartly by the minute with the goal of maximizing global welfare and happiness.
But let’s keep this between us for now let’s focus on making it easy for people to build useful products people need and make the system mainstream instead of a small niche for a few. We already have all the infrastructure we need for many years to come(JAM’s a plus, not a must), we just need to do better at abstracting all the complexity we love to create away, that’s where most of our resources should go.
There are computing companies (Google, Apple) that make phones and tablets and laptops and quantum computers, car companies (Tesla, Ford) that also make trucks and like powerwalls … hell, you’ll get your Coke/Coke Zero/diet Coke in different sizes+temp+prices+sugar+packaging depending on if you’re on a plane, a 7-Eleven, Costco or a movie theater. There are features in some of these “form factors” that are NOT in the others because they serve different purposes, with different architectures optimized for those different purposes. No one says “spaceships can get us to the Moon and Mars” … and then proceeds to make spaceships the dominant mode of travel for walking across the street. With an amazing tech stack from Substrate to JAM, you can definitely make different product designs between Polkadot and Kusama in how their Clouds + Hubs can be structured, from a little revive contract to the whole JAM Cloud grid. Its insanely great!
Because ( I would guess ) the Polkadot JAM Chain will not have the regular upgrades between Kusama JAM => Polkadot JAM that Kusama Relay Chain => Polkadot Relay Chain except in the CoreChains services, the canary function and “new dark/privacy-X ideas” is largely on Kusama Hub => Polkadot Hub. But the average engineer needs to see different pallets – the “Kusama Hub can do what Polkadot Hub CANNOT” has to have some actual substance behind it lest it be chalked up to vaporware of the month =)
I would put it the other way as well: if something was so great about Kusama Cloud/Hub in having features xyz (say, specialized host functions), why couldn’t Polkadot Cloud/Hub also have it? We have to dive into the actual features at the chain spec / pallet / GP Parameter level in addition to great brand (re-)positioning. Please keep going – this is totally worth doing!
We need to be careful about this since there is heavy government crackdown on this stuff. For example Tornado Cash Devs going jail. Although there the US courts have recently overturned such measures, I doubt the EU will follow.
Anyone who chooses to work on this stuff may have to work as a complete anon, which could prove difficult to acquire funding? Food for thought.
Completely agree, one of the primitives in Dark.FI is an anon on-chain treasury / forum system. If we want to protect devs, this should be one of the first tasks to tackle. To receive funding as anon, maybe we can build a service that delivers credibility proofs on a users activity on Polkadot with ZK without revealing their public address.
Once you get the ball rolling others can use that formula in their regions. Hopefully my product mindset at work can unfold appropriately here.
any initiative to make our birdie friend more lively is very welcomed 
building in the most advanced and decentralized network is what brought me in the first place to 
), the values remain so it’s interesting that we’ll end up offering the cypherpunk movement in disguise to normal users completely foreign to web3 and its ideals.
for now let’s focus on making it easy for people to build useful products people need and make the system mainstream instead of a small niche for a few. We already have all the infrastructure we need for many years to come(JAM’s a plus, not a must), we just need to do better at abstracting all the complexity we love to create away, that’s where most of our resources should go.