Environments And Chains

It is crucial for any project to have the ability to interact with both testing and production environments. Fortunately, the Polkadot ecosystem offers a variety of options, all of which are made available through the Polkadot Deployment Portal for deploying your Polkadot Native Rollup.

Production

Polkadot’s ecosystem has a full production network, Polkadot, as well as a canary network that serves as a production-like environment.

Kusama

Kusama is Polkadot’s canary network. It is a value-bearing network where experimentation is encouraged. All functionality is first rolled out here before being deployed on Polkadot. Teams that want a production-like environment without the demands and expectations of a full production environment should start with Kusama. It’s a great choice for a first look at what it’s like to deploy on Polkadot’s production network. For more details on Kusama’s functionality, check the Kusama Wiki.

Polkadot

Polkadot is the only Polkadot Native Rollup system among all blockchains in the Web3 space. When you're ready, deploy your Polkadot Native Rollup on Polkadot and leverage its extensive ecosystem to grow your project. For more information, check the Polkadot Wiki.

Testing

The Polkadot ecosystem also offers two test networks, Paseo and Westend. Tokens for both chains can be acquired from the faucet.

Paseo

Paseo mimics Polkadot’s code 1:1, providing a stable and secure staging environment. It’s recommended that projects running on Polkadot also maintain a mirror system on Paseo, deploying there first before pushing changes to their Polkadot Native Rollup.

Westend

Westend is the test network where new code is deployed first. It enables users to test the latest features that will eventually roll out to Kusama and Polkadot.