Decentralized finance (DeFi) network Karura won the first auction slot on Polkadot’s canary, or test, network, Kusama.
- The sister network of Polkadot's main DeFi project Acala, Karura raised more than 500,000 Kusama tokens (KSM) from its community, or about $100 million at current prices.
- "More than 15,000 network stakeholders locked up KSM in favor of Karura being added to yours truly," the Kusama network tweeted Tuesday.
- Karura is a token-trading application that allows users to build scalable DeFi applications without large transaction fees.
- The auction win secures Karura a 48-week lease to build on Kusama, Polkadot's pre-production environment, known as a canary network.
- Networks like Polkadot, Cosmos and Solana are providing developers with a way to avoid the increasing cost and congestion on Ethereum that has come with the explosion in the DeFi market.
- A 48-week lease on Kusama – which shares much of the same code as Polkadot but allows for more experimentation and faster upgrades – is therefore a highly sought-after proposition, albeit an expensive one.
- The second auction is set to begin later today, with three more auctions to follow in the next three weeks.
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