Kusama KSM

Where KSM sits in the market

#289 places Kusama in the middle of the mid-cap band. This is where continuous two-sided quoting stops being guaranteed. KSM still prints regularly, but the depth behind each print thins out through the session, and the same order that barely registers in the morning can set the day's high in a quieter hour.

CryptoPingAi is currently streaming 6 live KSM order books (Binance, OKX, Bitget, Gate.io, HTX, Bithumb). That is wider coverage than most assets ranked near #289 carry, so a divergence on any one of them is far more likely to be a local liquidity event than a genuine repricing. One of them is a Korean won market, so the Kimchi-premium spread between the KRW and USDT quote is visible on this page.

KSM against its all-time high

KSM is down more than 95% from its $621.71 peak (on 2021-05-17), leaving a 177x gap to reclaim. A drawdown this deep strips the record of analytical use: the supply structure, the holder base and usually the market cycle behind that print no longer exist. For KSM the informative reference is the downside, which makes the range section below more relevant than this one. It was set 5 years ago. A reference that old says more about the cycle it belongs to than about the asset as it trades now.

KSM across its historical range

KSM has traded across a 709x range, between $0.8766 and $621.71. Any volatility figure quoted for this asset depends heavily on which part of that range it is measured over.

KSM trades roughly 4.00x above its record low of $0.8766 (on 2020-01-14). Recovery from the bottom has been limited, which means the low is still close enough to function as a real reference level rather than a historical footnote.

KSM supply structure

There is no fixed maximum supply for KSM. Total supply stands at 18.2 million KSM and essentially all of it — 100.0% — is circulating. With no locked treasury to unlock, dilution comes from protocol issuance over time rather than from a cliff on a vesting calendar, which tends to produce slow supply drift instead of discrete unlock shocks. The supply is small in unit terms, so the per-token price is high and each whole-unit level carries real weight as a psychological threshold.

What kind of asset KSM is

Kusama is a base-layer network, so KSM is simultaneously the chain's security budget and its unit of account rather than a claim on a business. Value accrual runs through validator economics and through whatever activity settles on the chain itself. It is secured by proof of stake, so a portion of the supply is bonded to validators at any moment and the float genuinely available to trade is smaller than the circulating figure implies; unstaking queues, not order books, set how fast that can change.

CoinGecko files KSM under 7 categories, including Polkadot Ecosystem, Proof of Stake (PoS), Pantera Capital Portfolio, Made in USA, Coinbase 50 Index. Worth flagging from the metadata: KSM is tagged as US-originated, and is a constituent of the Coinbase 50 Index.

How to set a Kusama alert that is worth receiving

Kusama (KSM) — quoted on 6 venues we stream — high dated 2021-05-17 — rank #289. On this profile the condition that carries signal is thresholds anchored to the recent range rather than to the all-time high.

Full alert-design method: thresholds, RSI/MACD and volume conditions →