Statemine Upgrade Launches New Phase of Parachain Functionality

The Kusama community has just voted to upgrade the runtime of the Statemine parachain, Kusama’s instance of Statemint. Statemine was Kusama’s first featureful parachain. Like the launches of Kusama and Polkadot themselves, the launch of a parachain is a multi-step process.

Kusama ran with a simple “shell” parachain to ensure block production, inclusion, and finalization. The Shell parachain has extremely limited functionality; it does not even have the notion of accounts. It only accepts a message from the Relay Chain stakeholder body to upgrade itself to something else.

This upgrade process follows almost the exact same procedure as the Shell to Statemine upgrade. First, after passing stakeholder referendum, the Kusama Relay Chain sends a cross-chain message that authorizes the upgrade (technically, an authorization message of the hash of the new runtime). Once Statemine successfully processes the message, anyone can submit the authorized runtime. The network will autonomously upgrade to the new runtime approximately one hour after submission.

➡️Source:
https://polkadot.network/statemine-upgrade-launches-new-phase-of-parachain-functionality