Table of Contents
1. Choose a crypto exchange
First things first, you need an exchange that both has Kusama, and is trustworthy!
You can find our top 3 exchanges for buying Kusama here, alternatively you can also check our comparison of the best crypto exchanges in Australia if you’re generally interested in seeing which exchanges work for Australians.
2. Sign up with the crypto exchange
Once you’ve chosen your crypto exchange, it’s just a matter of signing up and getting your account verified. Most exchanges have streamlined this process very well so it shouldn’t take long.
3. Fund your account
The next step is to transfer AUD or another cryptocurrency into your account. Most top crypto exchanges offer various payment methods. From bank transfer to PayID, POLi pay and credit cards, it’s very straightforward.
4. Buy Kusama
And of course, the final step is to find Kusama on the exchange and buy it. A lot of exchanges offer different ways of buying cryptocurrencies, like market orders and limit orders.
Where to Buy Kusama (KSM)
| Exchange | Rating | Available Cryptocurrencies | Fees | Visit Site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | 5/5 | 350+ | 0.6% | VISIT SITE |
 | 4.5/5 | 300+ | 0.1% | VISIT SITE |
 | 4/5 | 200+ | Varies | VISIT SITE |
How to Sell Kusama
- Sign into the exchange
- Find where you stored your Kusama, either on a hardware wallet or on the exchange.
- Transfer your Kusama to the right place on the exchange, it could just be the same wallet or a dedicated trading account.
- Sell Kusama.
Considerations when looking to buy Kusama.
Kusama, also known as "Polkadot’s wild cousin", is an experimental blockchain platform. It is intended to be a highly interoperable and scalable platform for developers.
Kusama was built on Substrate, a blockchain-building kit created by Parity Technologies. Kusama uses the same codebase that Polkadot, one of the most popular interoperable blockchains.
Kusama allows fast-paced projects to have access to a highly scalable and interoperable sharded network with features not available on Polkadot. Kusama is a "canary network" to that end.
This platform is intended to be used by developers who want to invent and deploy their own blockchain. It can also serve as a pre-launch network for Polkadot, though many projects choose to stay with Kusama for the final product.
Kusama has a low barrier of entry to deploy parachains and low bond requirements for validators. It is most often used by early-stage companies and experimentation.
Kusama is a unique blockchain platform because it was designed for developers who want to launch ambitious, bold projects at a rapid pace.
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 allows it to quickly upgrade on-chains without the use of a fork. It also supports cross-chain message passing (XCMP), which allows communication with other parachains on Kusama's network.
Kusama, like Polkadot has on-chain governance capabilities. On-chain governance is decentralized and permissionless. Anyone can vote on their governance proposals using Kusama tokens (KSM) or parachain tokens. These could include protocol changes, putative upgrades, feature requests, and protocol modifications. The on-chain governance process is four times faster than the Polkadot one, and takes only 15 days to complete both voting and enactment. This allows for a rapid pace of development of Kusama projects.
This project supports projects that are eager to get off the ground, and launches updates and improvements without having to implement a fork. It also ensures maximum community cohesion.