Rococo Revamp : Becoming A Community Parachain Testbed

Rococo V0 enabled the first integrations of Polkadot with Cumulus and HRMP. The next evolution, Rococo V1, was much more focused on parachain consensus, utilizing a production-ready codebase.

After multiple iterations, runtime updates and restarts, the technology was refined to the point where Parity’s parachain team was ready to propose the first implementation of the parachain code to the Kusama Council, laying the groundwork for opening the first Kusama parachain auctions. With disputes and approval voting now finalized and a positive Kusama network stability report, the overall parachain code is now ready to go into production, with the first round of auctions beginning on November 11th.

Rococo’s future

Throughout its history, Rococo has been primarily focused on internal testing of parachain consensus functionality. With sporadic and unpredictable restarts, it lacked the long-term sustainability support needed to build extensive Cross-Consensus Message (XCM) format functionalities between projects.

Now the time has come to change the narrative of Rococo, allowing the network to become the enabler for the Polkadot developer community. Over the next few weeks, Parity Technologies and our fantastic community of builders will roll out different features to Rococo in phases to transition it to a completely community-maintained parachain testbed.

Opening Rococo to the community

The last step in the process, for now at least, will be to open up the validator set to the community and transition to a decentralized network, maintained by the community for the community.

With this network evolution, the community will therefore have a much more stable Rococo that follows the release cycles of Kusama and Polkadot and acts as the community parachain testnet. This will provide a playground for parachain teams to develop and test their parachains.

➡️Source:
https://polkadot.network/blog/rococo-revamp-becoming-a-community-parachain-testbed/