Picasso: the Composable parachain
The environment where our cross-chain primitives are built, tested, and settled — a chain purpose-built for interoperable DeFi.
Picasso is Composable Finance's parachain — the environment where our cross-chain primitives are built, tested, and settled. It is the home for the modular pallets that power the rest of the stack, giving builders a purpose-built chain for interoperable DeFi.
Picasso at a glance
| Network | Kusama parachain (Polkadot's canary network) |
|---|---|
| Slot won | 12th Kusama parachain auction, November 2021 |
| Crowdloan | 115,071 KSM from more than 10,300 contributors |
| Token | PICA, total supply 10,000,000,000 |
| Sister chain | The Composable parachain on Polkadot, onboarded 11 March 2022 |
A chain built for composability
Rather than forcing cross-chain logic onto a general-purpose chain, Picasso is optimized for the pallets and primitives Composable develops. New modules — bridging, orchestration, messaging — are deployed here first, where they can be composed and reused by other teams. Kusama's faster governance and upgrade cycle make it the natural place to ship first.
Why Picasso matters for IBC
Picasso is where IBC first left Cosmos. The first live Centauri connection ran from Picasso to Osmosis, and by June 2023 the route linked Kusama, Polkadot and Cosmos. Picasso was then the base for extending IBC to Ethereum (mainnet on 3 April 2024) and to Solana later in 2024.
Picasso and the wider stack
Picasso is where Centauri's trustless IBC connections terminate and where the Cross-Chain Virtual Machine (XCVM) coordinates execution. It is the settlement layer that ties the core elements of Composable Finance together.
Build on Picasso
Teams building cross-chain applications can deploy pallets to Picasso and tap into Composable's grants and the work of Composable Labs. New to the protocol underneath? Start with our IBC explainer.