KSM Starter: A Substrate Vision
While the speed at which many projects have launched thus far within the cryptocurrency ecosystem may paint a different picture, launching a new project is exciting, daunting, and quite often extremely challenging. KSM Starter also faced its fair share of hindrance, yet we are extremely thrilled to see our community growing and the vision of KSM Starter beginning to expand. In this article, we would like to share the vision of KSM Starter and provide sufficient background to ensure that our community truly understands the motivation behind KSM Starter.
Providing Niche Solutions for Niche Projects
KSM Starter is not a standalone product. We understand that the Substrate ecosystem spearheaded by Kusama and Polkadot are intricate, and KSM Starter is built to provide further value within the ecosystem and provide a lower barrier to entry for promising projects with extremely strong fundamental and exciting technology that can truly take the market by the cusp.
Currently, many new projects in development building on Substrate have many different sources of funding, but only one that can provide engagement with the Substrate ecosystem — the Crowdloan. Crowdloan allows for new parachain projects to acquire funding from the larger Substrate community, which is an exciting and inviting way for new projects to receive both funding and the initial community support.
However, this also means that new projects that do not necessarily wish to build their own parachains but rather utilise some of the existing parachains as the base to build upon may not be eligible to participate in the Crowdloan. Of course, projects with strong fundamentals and a dedicated team will be able to secure funding from various ventures. This is not a funding issue, but rather an issue of providing both funding and the initial support of the community involved or interested in Substrate. KSM Starter provides an option for these projects.
With KSM Starter, Substrate-based projects that do not wish to contend for a parachain slot yet rather build on an existing parachain can receive funding, initial exposure, and connection to the larger Substrate community. KSM Starter provides niche solutions for these niche, yet promising projects.
Migrating Solutions, Migrating Community
To prove that Substrate — the most fundamentally strong ecosystem in our opinion — is still in its early days, one can simply look at the amount of people who hold Substrate-based wallets compared to Ethereum-based wallets such as Metamask. Ethereum and its ERC20 standard have become a norm for the majority of the wider cryptocurrency community. One of KSM Starter’s early concerns to resolve was migrating the community from the Ethereum-centric narrative to the Substrate-centric narrative. If KSM Starter could bring the mass from Ethereum to Substrate, it could significantly contribute to kickstarting a thriving community on Substrate.
In the beginning, KSM Starter aimed to achieve this goal by issuing its token as an ERC20 token. This would allow KSM Starter to tap into the largest community to ever exist in the industry, therefore inviting this community to the KSM Starter platform. Then, this community could be leveraged to support projects building on Substrate. The full Substrate migration was scheduled for Q4 of 2021, which has been communicated to all our partners, investors, and other stakeholders.
However, based on the feedback we have received from a few key members of the Substrate community, KSM Starter has decided to bring forward the Substrate migration to pre-launch, and therefore launch the KSM Starter Token (KST) on Substrate. In order to achieve this, our development effort has been expanded, while we onboarded several Substrate-based projects as partners which will be announced in due course.
The change in direction based on feedback has presented KSM Starter to provide solutions that can still largely appeal to those used to the ERC20 standard to start supporting Substrate-based projects launching on KSM Starter. We are currently exploring various partnerships that would allow anyone to stake ERC20 tokens to receive a KSM loan, and vice versa, so that the barrier of entry does not cost the community to lose their positions within the market. This partnership, too, will be announced in due course.
Protected Growth for Projects and Communities
While participating in IDOs is exciting, KSM Starter is also aware that IDOs tend to be volatile in the outcome. Through the recently-announced partnership with Union Finance and Sanctum, each individual IDO smart contract will be protected and audited. This will ensure that all IDOs have an extra layer of security, while flagging any potential launch issues at an earlier stage so that a phenomenon of delayed IDOs can be a thing of the past. This is certainly not an easy task, yet KSM Starter is motivated to make this a reality.
KSM Starter is also in the middle of researching other groundbreaking solutions that can provide further protection for the IDO participants. Due to the sensitivity of the potential solutions, we cannot release any further details. However, the proposed solutions will set KSM Starter to be the most protected launchpad on Kusama, and potentially in the entire industry.
Monitoring the Infrastructural Readiness
The entire notion of KSM Starter Token (KST) launching on Substrate must be supported by an infrastructure that allows KST to acquire its value. A large portion of the value comes from trading activities that KST holders will be able to partake in, thus setting the market valuation of KSM Starter in a fair, decentralised, democratic way. However, such may be difficult should a Substrate-based DEX (decentralised exchange) not come to fruition.
Our current observation has high confidence in the infrastructural readiness of Substrate-based DEX, and KSM Starter is engaging in conversation with these particular DEXes while monitoring their current progress. Our community comes first, and we believe it is our duty as KSM Starter to ensure that the community experience is shaped as the best as it can be.
Moving Forward
During the past few days, KSM Starter has experienced incredible growth in our community. We would like to sincerely thank all of our supporters, and we wish to include our community as much as possible especially during the early days of KSM Starter.
Soon, we will start announcing various ways for the community to be involved with KSM Starter — whether that is through community moderation, marketing help, or development efforts. The unique tokenomics of KSM Starter allows for the early community participation to be significantly rewarded, and we believe that the valuable, passion-driven input from our community will only make KSM Starter stronger.
Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to working closely with you to fulfill KSM Starter’s Substrate vision and more.
Here are the links of the official channels of KSM Starter:
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/KSMstarter
- Telegram Community: https://t.me/ksm_starter
- Telegram Announcement Channel: https://t.me/ksm_starterANN
- Medium: https://ksmstarter.medium.com/
