Apron Network will join the Kusama Parachain Slot Auction

5 min readMay 11, 2021

A new version of Polkadot v0.9.2 has already been released on May 21st. Kusama’s parachain functionality is now available, and it is safe to say Crowdloan and Kusama slot auctions will be happening during the subsequent days. Apron Network will join the Kusama slot auction as part of its effort to provide infrastructure services for the Polkadot ecosystem as early as possible.

Introducing Kpron Network

Kpron Network is the testnet that Apron Network deployed on the Kusama Network. The Kpron Network’s token: KPN, is the APN on Kusama.
KPN was issued on Kpron Network as a portion of the tokens allocated by Apron Network and can be swapped with APN at a 1:1 rate (1KPN=1APN). There is no change on Apron’s tokenomics, and the total amount of APN remains the same.

Overview of Apron Network Slot Auction

Apron will reserve 8 % of native tokens: APN (80 million APN) as the Polkadot and Kusama’s reward during the auction.
The Kusama slot lease period is divided into 8 periods of 6 weeks each, a total of 48 weeks. Apron will participate in the Kusama parachain slot auction starting from the 3rd slot.
To get a slot for testing as quickly as possible, Apron will first bid on 1 lease period for 6 weeks; the following bidding periods will be determined according to the actual test conditions. The detailed rewards for the slot leasing period are as follows:

Contributor Reward

Participating in Apron’s crowdloan activities on the Kusama network in support of slot auctions, Apron will reward contributors with a fixed return of tokens awarded for 6 weeks:

Note: Contributors who continue to support beyond 100,000 KSM will not be rewarded;
The KPN obtained can be converted 1:1 into APN.

Distribution Period

When Kpron wins a slot and successfully runs a parachain, contributors will directly receive a 35% of corresponding rewards, 35% on the second month, and 30% on the third month.

How to Join

Once Kusama officially launches its parachain slot auction campaign, Apron will launch a Crowdloan program across the Kusama Network. Kusama local Crowdloan mechanism does not require users to participate in crowdloan by sending KSM from their wallet/account to a third-party address. Instead, local Crowdloan makes particular transactions using Campaign Index, which allows people to contribute by agreeing to lock up their own KSM until the end of the lease.

What is the Kusama parachain slot auction?

Why is parachain auction so concerned and expected by the project? This brings us to the architecture of Polkadot and how to get the slots.

Polkadot is a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain blockchain, consisting of “relay chain + parachain”. To become a parachain, it can share Polkadot’s security, cross-chain interoperability, on-chain governance, fork-free on-chain upgrade, scalability, low commission, and many other benefits. The parachain slot is the interface between the parachain and relay chain. That’s the reason why Apron needs a parachain to share these functionalities as well.

The key to Kusama’s scalable multi-chain architecture, parachains connect to the network by leasing a slot on the Relay Chain via permissionless auction. As Polkadot’s canary network, Kusama will roll out parachain auctions first for testing and optimization. Parachains will likely be onboarded to Kusama gradually to ensure everything is running smoothly, but no promises.

Auction Mechanics

Parachain slot auctions follow a modified candle auction format, where the exact endpoint of the auction is unknown by participants in order to prevent auction sniping (the strategy of bidding at the last moment) for more accurate price discovery.

Teams bid by specifying at least one contiguous range of 1–8 lease periods (each lease period is 6 weeks) and the amount of KSM they are willing to lock up for the duration of the chosen range.
Open bidding continues for the duration of the auction. Teams can see other bids and increase their bid over time to stay competitive throughout the auction.
At the end of the auction, the precise moment of the auction’s close is randomly determined by a verifiable random function (VRF).
The winning parachain is automatically onboarded at the start of the lease. The KSM amount that was bid remains locked for the duration of the lease, after which it can be unlocked.
Teams can extend their lease by winning another auction before the conclusion of their current slot lease period.

Crowdloans

Some teams may choose to crowdfund their slot lease using Kusama’s built-in crowdloan mechanism, which allows people to contribute by agreeing to lock up their own KSM until the end of the lease. Teams can reward their contributors however they see fit, and can structure their crowdloan in various ways, hosting it either natively on Kusama or on a 3rd-party platform.

The typical process for a crowdloan conducted natively on Kusama will look something like this:

The team creates a crowdloan campaign, setting a maximum of total allowed contributions and a campaign end date (to account for the possibility of losing one or more auctions, a campaign can last for several auctions), and invites their community to participate.
Crowdloan contributors initiate a special transaction allocating transferable KSM to the campaign’s index (this is different from a normal send transaction, contributors should NOT send KSM to an external account).
KSM contributions can be submitted throughout the duration of the crowdloan campaign or until an auction is won, up to the maximum amount of contributions set by the parachain team when creating the campaign.
If there are enough contributions to win an auction, the chain is automatically deployed at the start of the lease, and the full amount of KSM contributed to the campaign index will remain locked for the duration of the lease.
Crowdloaned KSM can be unlocked and returned to contributor’s control at the end of the lease period. In the event that a crowdloan campaign ends without the team winning an auction, contributors’ KSM can be unlocked at the end of the campaign.

Disclaimer:

The above strategy may be adjusted accordingly due to the changes in the actual situation; Apron will publish the guidance on how to support Apron’s auctions.

About Apron Network

Apron Network is a decentralized infrastructure service provider based on the Polkadot ecosystem. Apron connects infrastructure service providers to DApp developers with a decentralized service market and provides DApp and DeFi developers services to help their efficient development and rapid generation of API service interfaces. In addition, it uses decentralized billing and payment systems to bring decentralized and anonymous payments to users.

Apron Network will connect to multiple public chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Filecoin, Helium, including Layer 2, providing developers with low-cost various blockchain ecological infrastructure services in the forthcoming future.

🛎 Know more about Apron Network here: