Kusama Project Update

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Biggest Stories of 2025

• Kusama System Upgrade to v2.0.4 (Referendum 624): A network-wide upgrade to the v2.0.4 release, which passed with 100% of votes in favor. This release also removed treasury burns on Asset Hub, updated Asset Hub Kusama to the latest pallet-revive with an EVM backend, enabled Elastic Scaling and buffered validator selection on Asset Hub Kusama, and added the cumulus-pallet-weight-reclaim to all Kusama system parachains 123 (December 2025).
• Unlock Robonomics Parachain (Referendum 622): Following a runtime incident on Nov. 25, 2025, in which the Robonomics parachain on Kusama stopped producing blocks, this referendum approved unlocking the parachain so its manager account could perform a schedule_code_upgrade to restore block production. The proposal passed with 100% of votes in favor 45 (December 2025).
• Upgrade Kusama Asset Hub to v2.0.3 (Referendum 618): A whitelisted-caller runtime upgrade to Asset Hub v2.0.3 that relaxed some XCM (Cross-Consensus Messaging, Kusama's standard for communication between parachains) permissions to enable more XCM use-cases on Asset Hub 6 (November 2025).
• Asset Hub v2.0.2 Runtime Upgrade (Referendum 614): A runtime upgrade of the Kusama Asset Hub to v2.0.2, which passed with 100% of votes in favor 78 (November 2025).
• Upgrade Kusama Asset Hub to v2.0.1 (Referendum 611): A whitelisted-caller runtime upgrade to Asset Hub v2.0.1 aimed at fixing a security issue affecting Kusama. The proposal passed with 100% of votes in favor 910 (November 2025).
• Kusama Asset Hub Runtime Upgrade to v1.9.3 (Referendum 608): A runtime upgrade of the Kusama Asset Hub to v1.9.3, which passed with 100% of votes in favor 1112 (October 2025).
• Runtime Upgrade v1.9.2 (Referendum 605): A runtime upgrade of the Kusama Relay Chain and Asset Hub to v1.9.2 13 (October 2025).
• Upgrade System Chains to v1.9 for Asset Hub Migration (Referendum 600): A proposal to upgrade the Kusama Relay Chain and System Parachains to v1.9 in preparation for the Asset Hub Migration 14 (September 2025).
• Upgrade Kusama Relay Chain and System Chains to 1.7.0 (Referendum 582): A proposal to upgrade the Kusama Relay Chain and System Chains to v1.7.0 15 (August 2025).
• Kusama JAM Upgrade: Option A – Lightweight and Independent (Referendum 573): A proposal to independently upgrade Kusama to the JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) protocol with a lightweight, non-standard configuration optimized for Kusama—32 cores versus Polkadot's planned 341, 1-second block times, and reduced validator requirements, at an estimated annual cost of roughly $6 million. The proposal passed with 100% of votes in favor 1617 (August 2025).
• Runtime Upgrade to v1.6.1 (Referendum 551): A runtime upgrade to v1.6.1 that slashes and disables "lazy and spammy validators" as part of a new validator disabling strategy, and switches to UpToLimitWithReEnablingDisablingStrategy, which always prioritizes the highest offenders for disabling rather than stopping when the limit is reached 18 (July 2025).
• Upgrade Kusama Asset Hub to 1.6 (Referendum 541): A proposal to upgrade the Kusama Asset Hub to Runtime v1.6.0 and enable the pallet for revive contracts 19 (June 2025).
• Upgrade Kusama to v1.5.0 (Referendum 519): An upgrade of the Kusama network to v1.5.0, incorporating the polkadot-sdk 2412-4 update, which added full relay chain support for Elastic Scaling (a technique that lets a parachain use multiple cores to increase throughput). The proposal passed 2021 (May 2025).
• Kusama Runtime Upgrade to v1.4.1 (Referendum 500): An upgrade of the Relay Chain to v1.4.1 that fixed an issue related to staking in combination with nomination pools. The proposal passed with 100% of votes in favor 2223 (February 2025).
• Upgrade Kusama to v1.4.0 (Referendum 494): An upgrade to v1.4.0 that enabled nomination pools participation in governance, removed funding to the Kappa Sigma Mu Society, allowed burn parameters to be set via OpenGov, lowered parachain and data deposits, integrated all assets in pools with native XCM payment on Asset Hub, added remote proxy support to Asset Hub, and improved bridge functionality. The proposal passed with 100% of votes in favor 2425 (February 2025).