Why this WFC?

Kusama was marketed as a project that aimed to challenge established thinking.

It's time to dogfood that claim, by challenging its own accepted wisdom.

Overview

Coretime is Kusama's primary product, exposing computational resources initially to parachains and now to applications building on the network through contracts on Asset Hub.

As noted in WFC 539 Kusama Asset Hub aims to become the centre of economic activity on the network, however as a system chain, it does not purchase coretime and therefore will not contribute to burning KSM throught the consumption of coretime.

In the absence of public demand from Asset Hub, demand (and thus burn) must be stimulated by private market consumers of coretime.

RFC 0149

The enactment of RFC 0149 aims to course correct current issues with the design of coretime sales that have led to the hoarding of cores.

Although it reworks the current mechanism it also acknowledges:

This RFC should solve the immediate problems we are seeing in production right now. Longer term, improvements to the market in terms of price discovery (RFC-17) should be considered, especially once demand grows.

An unsustainable economy

We posit that the coretime experiment should be seen as a useful resource, but deprioritised as a near or even medium term strategy for sustaining the current Kusama economy.

Time for alternatives

in addition to accepting the limitations of coretime, this WFC aims to also encourage alternative and perhaps more radical proposals for burning KSM and building a diversified and productive treasury reserve.