Kusama
Kusama is Polkadot's canary network, a permissionless layer 1 where teams ship parachains and governance changes before, or instead of, Polkadot.
Transaction Fees, Open-source
What is Kusama?
Kusama is an independent layer 1 sharing most of Polkadot's codebase, used as a live-fire testing ground for parachain teams, runtime upgrades, and on-chain governance. It runs Nominated Proof-of-Stake, supports its own parachain auctions, and is fully sovereign, with staked KSM securing the relay chain and voting on referenda. Treat it as the place to ship fast and break things at production scale.
Web3 dapps and developer tools related to Kusama
Discover blockchain applications that are frequently used with Kusama.
Areum
OORT
Saakuru
AIOZ W3S
Developer resources from Alchemy
Permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains
Permissioned blockchains restrict one or more network roles. Permissionless blockchains open participation. Compare access, trust, and when each model fits.
How we fine tune our RPC for speed and reliability
We moved compression for large RPC responses to a better layer in our serving path, cutting P95 latency on heavy calls and reducing connection churn.
How Goldsky kept transactions flowing with zero downtime
Goldsky migrated its Compose bundler and paymaster to Alchemy and built a provider abstraction layer that makes failover a single environment variable change—no code deploy, no downtime.
Kusama alternatives
Explore web3 competitors and apps like Kusama.
Ethereum
Solana
Oasis Network
Kadena App store listings are independently reviewed and written by Alchemy using a combination of inbound submissions, editorial research, public project sources, and third-party directories, including ecosystem data from The Grid under the Open Database License, DefiLlama, DappRadar, Reown, and chain ecosystem pages.
