Kusama is an early, unaudited and unrefined release of Polkadot. Kusama will serve as a proving ground, allowing teams and developers to build and deploy a parachain or try out Polkadot’s governance, staking, nomination and validation functionality in a real environment.

With KSM, users can validate, nominate validators, bond parachains, pay for interop message passing, and vote on governance referenda.