We organized Kusama Demo Day as a vehicle to showcase the latest and greatest thinking by projects who have actually made it into production on Kusama Network. Our agenda was a veritable who’s-who of DeFi, and we’re so grateful to all the participants who helped us put on a high-quality event at absolutely no charge to the attendees.
We had more than 1,000 people tune in to watch the program live, but as this was a virtual event, the entire day’s agenda was captured for posterity. If you want to watch the video playback, just head over to the according Crowdcast page to see a playback of the full slate of speakers and panels.
If you’d rather read a text digest of each panel, then simply continue reading. Here’s what you missed at our Kusama Demo Day event last week!
Current Kusama Network Landscape — Eric Wang, Ecosystem Development Lead, Parity
Who better to give an overview of Kusama than Eric Wang? Eric is leading a lot of the ecosystem initiatives here, particularly around growth — his job is essentially to convince projects to join Kusama. He began by giving background on Kusama, parachain auctions, and crowdloans. Then he covered how the Kusama community came about, and how it differs from Polkadot. Replay is available here.
Multi Virtual Machine (EVM + WASM) dApp Hub on Kusama — Sota Watanabe, Founder, Astar Network
Sota talked about his project’s rebrand, the difference between Astar and Shiden, and generally got everyone on the same page about what his team is working on. In a sentence, Astar is a Polkadot-native dApp hub that supports Ethereum, WebAssembly, dApp staking, and assorted Layer 2 solutions. He concluded with a demo that involved converting a WASM smart contract address into an Ethereum address! Watch the demo.
How does Bifrost forward the liquidity of parachain auction? — Tyrone Pan, Product Manager, Bifrost
Tyrone gave us an overview of Bifrost, its SALP protocol and how it works. SALP (Slot Auction Liquidity Procol) was created for parachain auction to release users’ KSM/DOT liquidity locked in Crowdloan by generating derivatives. Check the full presentation here.
Genshiro launch party! How to run a stand-alone DeFi substrate safely — Alex Melikhov Founder & CEO, Equilibrium & Genshiro / Peter Sergeev, Senior Project Manager, Equilibrium & Genshiro
If you’re reading this recap, then you probably already know Alex and Peter. They began with some happy vibes about the Genshiro launch, which has been a long time coming and is a very exciting development for the Equilibrium team. The second part of their presentation delved into best practices for running a safe and secure DeFi substrate — the guys have quite a bit of experience doing exactly this. Watch Genshiro’s demo!
Best practices to launch parachains on Kusama Network — Brian Hoffman Crypto Platform Product Lead, Kraken / Sota Watanabe Founder, Astar Network / Dominik Harz CTO & Co-Founder, Interlay / Santiago Balaguer Ecosystem Development, Parity / Ricardo Rius Solutions Engineer, Parity
This was a panel of several experts sharing knowledge across a wide variety of Kusama topics. This discussion touched a little bit of everything, like what kinds of resources Parity offered in order to grow the ecosystem, how Web3 Foundation grant money gets spent, and how teams can improve their products. There was no shortage of expert knowledge on offer during this panel. Check out the discussion replay here.
The ERC20-Khala bridge and Phala’s staking demo — Hang Yin, co-founder and lead developer, Phala Network
Hang gave a figurative “state of the union” on Phala Network for his portion of Kusama Demo Day. Phala is a next-generation Web3 cloud that supports data privacy in a trustless fashion. It will compete with the likes of AWS, Tencent Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. After explaining some of its technicalities, he jumped into a demo that saw him move a token between two blockchains and demonstrate Phala’s staking functionality. Find a replay here.
Centrifuge demo — Cassidy Daly, token design and research, Centrifuge
Cassidy works at Centrifuge, the team behind Altair Network, and comes from an economics background. For Kusama Demo Day, she gave an overview of Altair and how it’s financing an art revolution, then got right into a demo of how Centrifuge works. Centrifuge Chain is live right now and uses parachain interoperability to increase liquidity. Watch her full presentation here — there were a lot of interesting audience questions answered as well.
Robonomics frontier network demo — Yakub Sheikh, chief marketing officer, Robonomics Network
Robonomics is an open source platform for robotics and the Internet of Things — 13 of its smart contracts have existed on GitHub since April 2019, and CMO Yakub Sheikh was on hand to go into detail on the project. As a decentralized cloud structure for the Internet of Things, Robonomics offers a number of “robot actions” for turning things on and off, storing data in a blockchain, and sending an unlimited number of messages over a secure protocol. A number of use cases are live on Kusama right now, such as a civilian-driven sensor network that talks to GIS data to do accurately reflect data on a map. Check the video.
Takes on Kusama Network auctions from experienced participants and newbies — Andrey Shevchenko, consultant at Hypersphere Ventures / Jakub Panik CTO, HydraDX / Kenny Li, COO, Manta Network / Alex Melikhov, Founder & CEO, Equilibrium / Jorrin Bruns, support engineer, Polkadot
“Always expect chaos,” said one expert on the panel. Kusama can be tricky, but “don’t underestimate the community,” said another. For about 40 minutes, this brain trust of experienced DeFi pros dropped major wisdom on the dos and don’ts of building on Kusama. Feel free to watch a replay!
Kintsugi: radically open Bitcoin for Kusama — Alexei Zamyatin CEO & Co-Founder, Interlay
Bitcoin is the granddaddy of digital currency, but it’s mostly limited to one blockchain unless you put forward a new technical solution. Alexei from Intelay was on hand to talk about exactly this topic — the endgame is about bringing access to any asset on any chain, and this is exactly what Kusama-enabled interoperability can deliver. InterBTC and Kintsugi BTC involve locking up collateral, guaranteeing that users can always redeem their tokens for true BTC. The full presentation is available here.
We want to thank all our participants and attendees for making Kusama Demo Day as great as it was — we couldn’t do it without you, so thanks to all for your expert insights and meaningful questions. The future of finance is being developed as we speak, and it’s completely heartening to know we’ve got a critical mass of community members along for the ride.
See you at the next Equilibrium event!
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Here’s What You Missed At Kusama Demo Day was originally published in Equilibrium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
