Kusama and Thorchain are prime examples of these both projects seem to have some serious utility partnerships and community engagements. Neither of the two has really made the crypto headlines even though ksm and rune have both seen a 10x increase in price over the past 6 months.

What is Kusama ?

Kusama was founded by Dr. Gavin wood who is also one of the co-founders of ethereum if the name sounds familiar that’s because Gavin is also the founder of Polkadot. Kusama is referred to as canary network. this is a reference to the canary bird which was used by coal miners as an early warning signal for toxic gases in the air underground.

Kusama exits as a means of testing the polka dot network under real economic conditions and almost every feature that will ever be added to polka dot will be tested on Kusama. calling Kusama polka dot test net is not entirely accurate because unlike regular test nets Kusama is intended to exist as its own network long after Polkadot is finished. Gavin expects both projects to evolve differently given that Kusama is focused around experimenting with economic incentives and pushing the network to the limit.

While R & D stands for research and development on Polkadot on Kusama R & D stands for risk and danger. Kusama was soft-launched in august 2019 and officially went live at the end of October that same year.

This rollout served as a dry run for polka dot’s own main net launch which took place between May and august of 2020.

How does kusama Work?

Kusama is basically a carbon copy of polka dot with a few key differences.For beginners kusama’s code has not been audited.kusama’s governance process is also four times faster than polkadots to allow for faster upgrades to the network.

On polkadot one percent of any unused treasury funds is burned whereas on kusama 0.2 percent of any unspent treasury funds.you can go to the kappa sigma miu is a quote economic game to incentivize users to join a society that coordinates around whatever the rules are decided to be.The current rules dictate that to become a member of kappa sigma mu you must get a permanent tattoo of the kusama bird now if you’re wondering why anyone has would be crazy enough to get a tattoo to join a crypto society it’s because that 0.2 percent of treasury rewards works out to around over 225000 per month since there are currently only 50 members of kappa sigma mu that means four and half thousand dollars per member per month.

KSM Tokenomics ?

Kusama’s ksm never underwent a 100x redenomination this means ksm’s initial supply is just 10 million around 9 million ksm is currently in circulation however since 50 of ksm’s supply is being currently staked this works out to an actual circulating supply that is closer to four and a half million.

In case of staking ksm has an inflation rate of about seven and half percent per year which is not bad as far as inflationary cryptocurrencies.It’s also worth pointing out that any stacked ksm has a seven day unlock period this means if and when ksm goes parabolic the ksm is being staked won’t be making it to the exchanges right away which could super charge any price volatility.

On the other hand most of the ksm supply seems to be held by dozen accounts with the largest holding nearly eight hundred thousand ksm.although that’s only eight percent of ksm’s initial supply it’s nearly twenty percent of ksm circulating supply dumping even just half of the ksm in that wallet could seriously suppress a parabolic move still ksm has one big advantage over many other altcoin from a technical analysis perspective.

Kusama Potential :

There are many reasons why ksm has the potential to explode.polkadot is supposed to begin rolling out it’s para chain loan offerings sometime this year. Polka dot team is planning to pilot these parachain loan offerings on kusama first.

This means that some or possibly even all the projects that are competing to lauch on polkadot will make their debut on kusama although many of those projects will eventually transition to polkadot.Kusama is where all their users will be until that day comes in short Kusama may soon host a substantial amount of the user’s developers and projects in Polkadot’s ecosystem.

Polkadot’s rely chain has a limit of 100 para chain slots every project is going to need it’s own para chain and what will happen to the projects that didn’t make the cut for Polkadot. Gavin wood has noted on many occasions that the team plans to bridge Kusama and Polkadot. given that their networks are basically identical this bridge sounds more like a merge. 

What is Thorchain ?

Thor chain was founded in the fall of 2018 by nobody that’s right Thor chain has no founder, no CEO , no directors and apparently no concrete team instead the developers working on Thor chain are quote as self-organized. I  think this sketchy origin story and set up is part of why we haven’t seen much about the Thor chain in the news.

Thor chain is a cross liquidity protocol this means that thor chain makes it possible to trade different types of cryptocurrencies without the use of a centralized exchange.Thor chain is not a decentralized exchange.thor chain is intended to be the backend protocol for decentralized exchanges like uniswap.

How does Thor chain work ?

Thor chain uses a proof of stake blockchain that was built using the cosmos sdk.You can think of thor chain as being a middle layer that makes it possible to swap between cryptocurrencies on different blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum.how thor chain works is very complicated.

As you already know decentralized exchanges rely on liquidity pools to execute trades each liquidity pool on decks is like uniswap consists of two assets like usdc and eth. The price of each asset is determined by the ratio of the assets in the pool 

For example if there are 10000 usdc and 10 eth in a pool then each eth worth one thousand dollars.when someone buys one eth for 1000 usdc this increases the amount of usdc in that pool and reduces the amount of eth which gives the remaining 90th a higher price.

Thor chain takes this idea to the next level by creating a series of liquidity pools consisting of a cryptocurrency from any blockchain and the rune token. As with regular dex protocol, anyone can provide liquidity to those thor chain liquidity pools and earn interest on those funds and arbitrage traders can profit by taking advantage of any discrepancies in the market price of the assets in those liquidity pools.

A network of anonymous nodes on the thor chain blockchain hold the assets in these liquidity pools in various faults and watch for signals from the two blockchains involved to execute the desired transition.

RUNE Tokenomics :

Rune is actually p2p on the binance smart chain which was also built using the cosmos SDK thor chain held an initial decentralized exchange offering ido of their rune token on the Binance platform which took place a few months earlier in July 2019 although 20 million rune were allocated for this sale. Only 7 million rune was sold and the rest were burned with a price tag of just over 3 cents.

60 million rune token were allocated to community reserves and 65 million rune tokens went to operational reserves the team and advisors get dips on 50 million rune and over 220 million rune have been set aside for liquidity providers and thor chain nodes. When you add all these tokens together you get 500 million which is the maximum supply of rune.

Thor chain has been remarkably transparent in pointing out which wallets are holding these rune tokens and even monthly treasury reports on their medium.

Thor chain Potential :

According to thor chains documentation, BEPSwap will eventually be replaced by the Asgard which is described as a censorship-resistant desktop client that will be the main portal into the system and that system isn’t just going to be a binance chain. Thor chain market cap is nearly a billion dollars with Binance chain support alone.