The first Kusama parachain slot auction will commence now as the Kusama council passed Motion 310 on Tuesday and is set to run for the next week.
It has been reported according to details shared on the Polkadot governance platform Polkassembly that 13 out of the 19 “seats” on the Kusama council voted in favor of commencing the slot auction process.
However, 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 like 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.”
After Wood’s initial schedule, the first slot auction will proceed over five days, with the first two days allowing for preliminary bidding. 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.
The report said that 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.
Thus, the start of the slot auction has yet to spur any major price rally for Kusama's KSM token.
Source: Cointelegraph