This introductory post is aimed at opening up a dialogue between Edgeware and Kusama communities, ahead of the mainnet launch of Kabocha on Kusama.

It is rooted in the ongoing experience of contributing to the evolution of Edgeware’s leaderless Substrate network and the successful incubation of grass-roots parachain projects such as Kabocha that have been curated and funded through a series of interlinked proposals by different contributing teams.

Values aligned collaboration

As a solo-chain, Edgeware is operating at the highly experimental and decentralised end of the spectrum, but ultimately lacks financial clout and awareness, whilst Kusama is not short of funding, or awareness but lacks the chaotic verve that it was established to promote.

We believe there is an interesting opportunity to foster innovation together and in turn further the founding ideals of the Polkadot project by returning to first principles and building on the basic super-powers of Substrate.

Our aim is to unlock co-funding of research and development from Kusama for specific areas of investigation that can sit alongside and extend Edgeware’s own investment in R&D.

This work is initially designed to establish philosophical context and design frameworks for a third category of parachains known as Network Publics that offer the potential to become a vital balancing force to the established for profit and common good categories.

Network Publics will be developed through Edgeware’s emerging grass-roots processes and community with a view to onboarding to Kusama and then Polkadot over time.

Edgeware, Kusama and Polkadot

Although not immediately obvious given their relative market caps, the three oldest Substrate chains are organically evolving from their shared codebases and genesis distributions into a curious family that each offer different pros/cons, cultures and interests.

Polkadot relay chain

The most valuable, the slowest moving, with the largest public profile, but the most centralised when it comes to governance and contributions.

Kusama relay chain

More decentralised and risk taking than Polkadot, but inheriting the same genesis distribution.

Edgeware solo chain

The least valuable but most decentralised at launch owing to 2019's lockdrop distribution, and with a large share still held by Parity/W3F.

Some background

Edgeware was bootstrapped using a lockdrop, where holders of ETH could lock their tokens for 3, 6, 9 or 12 months in return for receiving EDG.

It was also possible for smart contracts holding ETH to signal on behalf of their holdings, enabling Binance, Coinbase and Aragon to receive distributions on behalf of their users.

The total ETH locked in the process finalised at 1,199,728 ETH, with signaled funds (from smart contracts) at 4,346,544 ETH with over 4000 different Edgeware addresses created in the lockdrop process, from over 10,000 transactions.

Binance finally distributed the tokens in March 2022, creating a massive long-tail of EDG holders.

Wide and fair distribution

With 90% of the token distributed to the public in the lockdrop, the door was opened to a community of holders who could mediate the decision making powers of the founding team.

Edgeware was originally positioned as a platform for incubating governance experiments, however the broad distribution has ensured Edgeware is itself the primary experiment, created conditions for a deadlock between the largest holders, with parties disagreeing principally not on what to fund, but on how to fund which eventually led to the departure of the team who launched the project.

This has ensured things move more slowly than with a more centralised project but over the long term enables the primary value proposition of public network protocols: credible neutrality.

Adding Kabocha to the mix

With Kabocha becoming a community incubated parachain bonded to Kusama's relay, we have added the final step in the development lifecycle, demonstrating that public chains beginning in Edgeware can migrate upstream.

Understanding this emerging hierarchy we see an opportunity to develop a grass-roots incubator of fairly distributed, sustainably funded and transparently governed parachains that aim to prioritise and scale contributions over speculation.

This can in turn create a nursery of decentralised parachain candidates that can begin their life cycle as R&D projects in Edgeware, extending to Kabocha, before onboarding as fully fledged networks in Kusama, before reaching Polkadot as they economically mature.

The next post will introduce Network Publics in more depth for further discussion and debate ahead of a funding proposal.

If you’re interested, you can also dig into related thinking around the Network Services model developed by Decent Partners in Edgeware and Kabocha and our thesis around Network Public Service Media.