Created by the founders of Polkadot, Kusama is a community-focused "Canary network" – an experimental network for developers to research, develop and test features in a real environment. The Kusama ecosystem runs on a network of specialised parachains, which enable developers to fully control the blockchain-underlying DApps and to optimise them for future use cases, thus offering great scalability, interconnectivity, seamless on-chain upgrades and more. Kusama is based on a nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism running via a network of nominators (KSM stakers) that elect nodes to participate in the transaction validation process. KSM is the native token behind Kusama.