Kusama test network, which is officially described as Canary Network, implies that the birds flying to explore the path before Polkadot goes online, to eliminate possible problems in advance, so as to ensure that the main network goes online smoothly.
Kusama will be fully functional, almost the same as Poka Chain Polkadot, except that the experimental network will not disappear after Poka Main goes live.
Kusama is built on Substrate — a blockchain building kit developed by Parity Technologies. Kusama has almost the same codebase as Polkadot — one of the most successful interoperable blockchains. An earlier release of the code that is available first and holds real economic value. For developers, Kusama is a proving ground for runtime upgrades, on-chain governance, and parachains. Future participants in the Polkadot network, such as Verifier nodes, parallel chain teams, and builders of Poca's ecological tools, can use Kusama to prepare ahead of time and fully test.
Why Kusama Unique?
Kusama is unusual among blockchain platforms since it is predominantly built for developers that want to launch bold, ambitious projects, with a fast-evolving pace of development.
It is built on a multichain, heterogeneously-sharded design that uses a nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) consensus system — an alternative consensus mechanism to the energy-intensive proof-of-work (POW) scheme employed by several other blockchains.
This system enables it to perform rapid on-chain upgrades without a fork, and supports cross-chain message passing (XCMP) to enable communication with other parachains on the Kusama network.
Like Polkadot, Kusama features on-chain governance capabilities. This on-chain governance is both decentralized and permission-less, allowing anybody with Kusama (KSM) tokens or parachain tokens to vote on their respective governance proposals, which might include putative upgrades, changes to the protocol, and feature requests. This on-chain governance procedure is roughly four times faster than that offered by Polkadot, with a combined voting and enactment period of just 15 days — leading to the rapid pace of development for projects built on Kusama.
The project serves projects that want to hit the ground running, launching updates and improvements without the need to implement a fork to do so — thereby ensuring maximum community cohesion.