Shiden secures third parachain slot on Kusama

Shiden, the sister project of the leading Polkadot-native Layer 2 decentralized application hub, Astar Network (formerly Plasm Network), has won the third Parachain auction for Polkadot’s experimental sister network Kusama.

Shiden secured the spot with a total of 137,020 tied KSM tokens – valued at nearly $ 29 million at current prices.

Shiden is a Kusama-based smart contract platform for DApps that offers multi-chain support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly-based contracts. The project also plans to deploy Layer 2 technology, including Plasm and Optimistic rollups, on Kusama.

Layer twos have emerged as the dominant scaling solution for Ethereum, with co-founder Vitalik Buterin predicting rollovers will scale the network 100x and alleviate Ethereum’s scaling issues.

Parachain auctions allow projects to compete for one of Kusama’s 100 parachains, much like shard subchains that interact with the network’s main “relay chain” to enable transactions to be executed and processed.

Auctions are conducted through a community loan where project supporters agree to lock KSM against their parachain bids in exchange for governance tokens.

Kusamas Parachains have so far found their way into the Canarian network of large polkadot-based projects, with Acala Network’s Karura finishing second on the 22nd Moonriver the following week with nearly 206,000 KSMs bound.

The upcoming Parachain auction is expected to feature close competition, with Khala Network and Bifrost recently just under 3,000 KSM apart.

On June 29th, Plasm was renamed Astar Network, expanding the focus from Polkadot-based Layer 2 technology to providing multi-chain support for EVM and WebAssembly.