TechFlow News — A community member asked when the Polkadot parachain slot auction would begin. In response, Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood stated today that the Kusama parachain auction will precede Polkadot's. It wouldn't make sense to start auctions before we're ready to truly host parachains on Kusama/Polkadot. Several blocking factors remain:
1. Parachain code needs to be upgraded from Rococo v0 to v1. This work is currently underway and may take a few more weeks. The v1 version forms the foundation for several critical future features, including availability and validity, XCMP, and parathreads.
2. Cumulus also requires upgrades to align with parachains v1 and XCMP-lite, and must be stabilized (Rococo serves as an important environment for testing this stability).
3. Final security for parachains (via availability and validity) must be fully implemented and—specifically for Polkadot—audited.
4. The auction module also requires auditing for Polkadot (which will take 1–2 weeks but is unlikely to become a bottleneck).
Therefore, there is no fixed date yet for the slot auctions, as launching them before completing the underlying technical work would be meaningless. However, we will continue to provide updates as significant milestones are achieved.
