Introduction
This is the 2025-Q4 Polkadot Treasury Report. It is part of the Treasury Report series and is an important tool for informing Polkadot stakeholders.
Key Insights
- The Balance Sheet shows 58m USD (32m DOT).
- On the asset side…
- 42m USD (23m DOT) are free for spending. 6.4m USD of the cash reserves are available as stablecoins, with an additional 1.5m DOT (2.8m USD) allocated to automated stablecoin acquisition.
- 12.3m USD (6.8m DOT) are earmarked for strategic initiatives such as marketing, DeFi tooling, gaming, BD, etc.
- 3.8m USD (2m DOT) are deployed into DeFi market operations.
- 2.7m USD (1.5m DOT) in liabilities are payable within the next 12 months
- On the asset side…
- The Income Statement is (properly) positive for the first time since OpenGov was introduced
- The Treasury has spent 7.4m USD (2.6m DOT) in 2025-Q4. Accounting for inflation and burn, the net profit is 1.6m DOT.
- The top 3 spending categories were Development (2.5m USD), Outreach (1.7m USD), and Operations (1.3m USD)
- Departments (Bounties and Collectives)
- A new record 68% (5.0m USD, 1.8m DOT) of the spending happened via departments.
- Stablecoins: 30% of all Treasury spends were done in stables
- OpenGov is deploying capital into the economy: 3.8m USD are provided as liquidity into 3 different DeFi protocols
- The Polkadot Treasury has grown more conservative and focused on essential operations and development.
About this Report
The Polkadot DAO manages millions of USD in assets. As such, it follows accounting best practices and pioneers them for the Web3 space. This report comes with a balance sheet and income statement. The balance sheet will give a complete overview of all active accounts the Treasury manages and how assets are distributed over its operations. The income statement will break down the categories in which the Treasury spends.
We extend our gratitude to the Web3 Foundation for funding this report as part of the OpenGov.Watch initiative. Thanks also to the OpenSquare team for providing an API to fetch spending data via their subsquare.io project, as well as the Parity data team for providing additional data.
Authors: Alice und Bob, Jeeper
Introduction to the Polkadot Treasury
To help newcomers to Polkadot read this report, we want to begin by offering a few ideas that guide the strategic decision-making of many voters. DAO contributors (“agents”) ensure that the Treasury aligns on strategic initiatives:
- As the guiding strategic principle, Polkadot is committing to the core vision of Web3: Apps that put users back in control of the Internet! Its ecosystem has to be understood as the Polkadot Cloud. A complete stack of Web3 services that allow builders to create powerful and scalable applications and business cases at a fraction of the cost of other ecosystems.
- Polkadot is unstoppable. It sustains itself. Research, development, and operations all focus on delivering secure and resilient Web3 infrastructure. Bridges, wallets, data services, SDKs, governance and developer tooling, and nodes are all paid for by OpenGov. As a result, the network is not dependent on external organizations.
- Polkadot is developing its talent pool. The Polkadot Blockchain Academy provides multi-week in-person education to hundreds of founders and developers multiple times per year to provide new projects with qualified personnel. In addition, hackathons around the globe expose thousands of devs each year to Polkadot’s tech stack.
- OpenGov is differentiating into specialized departments, scaling up its throughput capacity. Dedicated departments, called bounties and fellowships, composed of domain experts are forming around key ecosystem functions (e.g. developing the protocol, FinTech integrations, events etc) to streamline the processing of related proposals. This reduces the load on the main OpenGov voting tracks and allows stakeholders to focus on high-level decisions.
Balance Sheet
The balance of the Polkadot DAO at the end of 2025-Q4 comes out at 32m DOT / 57.8m USD. Accounting for liabilities, there is a surplus of 30.4m DOT / 55.1m USD.
Assets
You can find the full sheet here.
Assets Structure
For the balance sheet, we structure the assets as follows:
- Cash and cash equivalents: 23m DOT / 42m USD
- Designated assets: 6.8m DOT / 12m USD
- Non-custodial liquidity provision: 1m DOT / 1.9m USD
- Loans receivable: 1.1m DOT / 1.9m USD
Cash and Cash Equivalents (23m DOT / 42m USD)
This category consists of DOT, USDT, and USDC which are immediately or very quickly available for the Treasury’s use. In a recent migration, AssetHub has become the home to the main account
- 18m DOT (33m USD)
- 4.2m USDT (2.3m DOT)
- 2.1m USDC (1.2m DOT)
In addition, a trustless and fully automated stablecoin acquisition campaign is currently running on the Hydration DeFi chain: Stablecoin acquisition campaign #3 has 1.6m DOT (2.8m USD) to be swapped until 2026-Q2.
Designated Assets (6.8m DOT / 12m USD)
Designated assets are assets that are under the control of OpenGov, but are already earmarked for specific duties, primarily to fund the DAOs executive bodies (bounties and collectives).
Bounties
Polkadot has 5m USD (2.8m DOT) sitting in bounties, ready to be distributed to teams that perform value-adding activities in the ecosystem.
Technical Fellowship
The Polkadot Technical Fellowship is the core maintainer of the runtime. It is funded through the DAO. The Fellowship has two accounts:
- Salary account: 1m USDT (550k DOT)
- Spending account: 1.8m DOT (3.2m USD)
Polkadot People Initiative
3m HOLLAR (the Hydration USD-pegged stablecoin) have been bought by the Treasury to distribute through the Polkadot People Initiative.
MYTH Airdrop
As part of Polkadot’s strategic partnership with Mythical, it acquired MYTH tokens in exchange for 1m DOT. 2.6m USD-equivalent of MYTH were already distributed to DOT holders and service providers. A remaining reserve of 52k USD-equivalent MYTH remains within the MYTH distribution account to be used in the future.
Non-Custodial Liquidity Provision (1m DOT / 1.9m USD)
The Treasury deploys some of its idle capital into the Polkadot economy. 1m DOT (1.9m USD) sits in the Hydration Omnipool as DOT liquidity.
Loans Receivable (1.1m DOT / 1.9m USD)
These positions are the custodial counterparts of non-custodial liquidity provision.
- Bifrost has deployed 1m DOT into its liquid staked DOT product
- Pendulum has borrowed 50k DOT for its stablecoin bridge vaults
Assets Portfolio
The Treasury holds DOT, aDOT (DOT provided into the Hydration money market), the stablecoins USDT, USDC, and HOLLAR, and a parachain token MYTH. The Treasury’s biggest position is in its native asset DOT, with 24.6m DOT (44.5m USD) making up 77% of the portfolio. While the Treasury is swapping DOT for stables, it keeps the DOT position in a money market to increase liquidity and earn yield. The aDOT portion of the portfolio makes up 1.6m DOT (2.8m USD) or 5% overall. The stablecoin portion of the Treasury is 9.1% USDT (5.3m USD), 5.2% HOLLAR (3m USD), and 3.7% USDC (2.2m USD). A marginal amount of MYTH makes up 52k USD.
Assets by Chain
Polkadot holds assets on multiple chains. Parachains are a significant part of the Treasury economy, with 16% of the Treasury’s owned assets being deployed on various DeFi chains like Hydration (7.7m USD), Bifrost (1.8m USD), and Pendulum (90k USD). Polkadot Governance allows decisions to be executed trustlessly across all chains under the Polkadot security umbrella. 83% of the Treasury is held on the AssetHub and Collectives system chains to be used as free cash and for the various executive bodies.
Liabilities
The Technical Fellowship pays a monthly allowance to members, which we file as “Contributor rewards payable”. The Polkadot Treasury has also introduced a mechanism for claimable future payments. They represent liabilities. We treat them as “Grants payable” in the balance sheet.
- Current Liabilities are those owed within the next 12 months. They make up 2.7m USD (1.5m DOT)
- Fellowship Allowances rewards are estimated to make up 1.6m USD (900k DOT)
- OpenGov has committed to 1.1m USD (620k DOT) in grants to service providers
Grants Payable
Claims on future payments have been granted to the amount of 840k USDC and 160k DOT.
Income Statement
For the income statement, we use DOT as the primary unit of account, since it is the unit that the main Treasury income - inflation - is based on. For the expenses section, we will additionally provide a USD-denominated table for easier comparison.
Polkadot has had expenses of 2.6m DOT (7.4m USD) in the fourth quarter of 2025. After adding revenue, inflation, and burn, the net profit was 1.6m DOT.
Expenses
Polkadot spent 7.4m USD (2.6m DOT) in the fourth quarter of 2025. The biggest position is Development, leading with 2.5m USD (760k DOT). Outreach came next with 1.7m USD (610k DOT). Operations made up 1.3m USD (430k DOT). Business Development initiatives totaled 1.2m USD (480k DOT). Economic incentives were supported with 350k USD (200k DOT). 160k USD (52k DOT) were spent on Research. For Talent & Education, the DAO spent 133k USD (40k DOT).
We will dig into the details below, but before we do so, let’s look at what categories Polkadot spends money on.
Categories
The categories and subcategories in this report have been selected by our team:
- Research: Security, Governance, Anti-Scam efforts, reports, and analytics, UX & DX
- Development: The Polkadot protocol and its core SDKs, Bridges, Wallets, data services & indexers, SDKs, Governance tooling smart contracts, and various other technologies
- Operations: software, hardware, and service costs incurred to operate the network (RPCs, archive nodes), auxiliary services (explorers, indexers), and legal costs (foundations)
- Outreach (Marketing, BD, Community Development): Marketing (media production, PR, advertising) and community development (conference hosting, conference attendance, local outreach, events, community building, ambassador program)
- Business development: developing verticals like gaming, DeFi integrations, GovTech, music industry solutions, consulting, solution architecture, DevRel
- Talent & Education: education, hackathons, recruiting, and talent incubation through the Polkadot Blockchain Academy
- Economy: Liquidity Incentives to stimulate the economy
Spending Overview
Q4 was the quarter with the least expenses since the introduction of OpenGov. While the average proportion of spending for the categories has been roughly the same, the totals have been significantly lower.
Now let’s dive a bit into the individual categories!
Development
Development (2.5m USD) covers software development specifically for the core Polkadot infrastructure and tools necessary to operate and interact with the network.
Polkadot Protocol & SDK (820k USD) included 270k USD for Gossamer’s contributions to Polkadot-SDK v2, 260k USD for Fellowship Salary Cycles 20 and 21, and 108k USD for Subsquare fellowship support. Wallets (800k USD) supported SubWallet with a retroactive payment for development from August 2024 to March 2025. Bridge (750k USD) funded the continued development of Snowbridge’s 2025/2026 stabilized version (v3). Smart Contracts (63k USD) consisted primarily of inkubator milestone deliveries including Dedot & Typink (33k USD) and Verifiable Offchain Computing (7.5k USD).
Software Development (50k USD) funded three projects through the Open Source Grants Bounty: Swush Dex Aggregator (18k USD), Sublua (14k USD), and an OpenGov Voting Tools (10k USD). SDKs (46k USD) supported the Polkadot Java SDK (24k USD), ReactiveDOT (17k USD), and CreateDotApp (5k USD).
Outreach
1.7m USD was spent on outreach for marketing, events, and community building.
Advertising (870k USD) dominated outreach spending with the Blast Marketing Project receiving 520k USD for its kick-off. A Polkadot DeFi Campaign was funded with 75k USD and Sacred Protocol Development received 50k USD. Several smaller campaigns included Leadstacker’s Acurast Marketing Campaign (26k USD), Movimentum’s Marketing Campaign (21k USD), and WebZero Performance Marketing (18k USD). The remainder went to curator work and operational costs across the Marketing Bounty.
Conference Attendance & Side Events (210k USD) covered HK Fintech Week (87k USD), Iguassu Inova 2025 (46k USD), Frequency Korea Blockchain Week (23k USD), and Labitconf (26k USD). Conference Hosting (76k USD) costs include a payment for sub0 2025, Polkadot’s flagship conference in Buenos Aires (34k USD), and Decentralized Lugano 2026 (43k USD). Meetups (81k USD) supported approximately 15 community events around the globe, primarily through curator fees and bounty coordination.
PR (166k USD) consisted of Serotonin Marketing Services engagement fees totaling 147k USD across two months, with additional support for APAC Communications (15k USD). Content Creation & Distribution (150k USD) funded The Kusamarian campaigns with 97k USD across two months, Pala Labs interview clips (23k USD), and DOTCAST platform development (14k USD). Social Media & Community Management (160k USD) supported the Polkadot Editorial Board (26k USD), Dotcast Spanish-speaking platform strategy (27k USD), and Spanish Editorial Board (27k USD).
Operations
Operations (1.3m USD) covers software and hardware essential to operate the network.
RPCs and Nodes (1.1m USD) dominated the category with Infrastructure Builders Program (Bounty 50) payouts accounting for 860k USD. Additional RPC support came from the Public RPCs Bounty, Bounty 31 (140k USD). The category also included 29k USD in collator rewards through Bounty 32.
Testnet (200k USD) funded the Paseo testnet with validator rewards distributed to over 30 providers. Explorers (39k USD) supported Polkawatch for decentralization analytics, infrastructure and maintenance.
Business Development
Business Development (1.2m USD) efforts focused on market penetration of several verticals, as well as funding niche-specific tech and experiments.
DeFi & Fintech Integrations (835k USD) dominated the category with major infrastructure investments. Velocity Labs received 139k USD for curator fees and operations. TheGraph was funded with 124k USD for 50% upfront payment. Range received a combined 220k USD for their explorers and integrations. OpsLayer received 76k USD for Hub EVM RPC services. Meld was funded with 68k USD for Guardarian PAH Integration, Turtle Wizard, and Polimec Wizard. Additional projects included Ginco full integration (57k USD), Houdiniswap milestones (42k USD combined), Zaper Astar Integration (27k USD), and four DeFi Bounty projects at 14k USD each.
Security (197k USD) covered audits and bug bounties. A Factura monitoring tool received 43k USD for milestone 1. Hydration bug bounties totaled 61k USD. Acurast security work was funded with 37k USD across audits and bug bounties. Curator fees accounted for 42k USD across multiple periods. Software Development (86k USD) supported projects through the Fast-Grants Bounty including Anarchy (10k USD), PowerGrid Network (10k USD), Polka RTC (5k USD), and AgentDOT (5k USD).
Legal (50k USD) funded Pebble Law LLC with 43k USD for Q3/Q4 2025 and November/December 2025 legal services. Protocol Subsidies (8k USD) went to NovaShots development.
Economy
Economy (350k USD) supported the next phase of the DeFi Singularity with 200k DOT.
Research
Research (160k USD) funds projects that are experimental, research-driven, or surface new data.
User Experience (130k USD) consisted of multiple UX audits including PDP (29k USD), Bifrost (9k USD), Nova (10k USD), and Acurast (9k USD). Velocity Labs received 4k USD for Turtle Grant milestone 2. The remainder covered curator fees and community feedback program rewards. Anti-Scam (26k USD) supported the Anti-Scam Team with Chainpatrol (4k USD) and various curator fees across multiple months.
Talent & Education
Talent & Education (130k USD) covers costs associated with growing the Polkadot talent pool.
Trainings & Hackathon (73k USD) funded the DKGcon Hackathon 2025 (22k USD), Road to Sub0 events including Builder Party Toronto (3k USD) and India Hackerhouses (3k USD), and Roots events in Bohemia, Tom Yum, and Manila totaling 10k USD. Token2049 Hackathon prizes totaled 11k USD across three winners. Over 40 smaller Builder Party events globally received funding ranging from 300 USD to 2k USD each.
Ambassadors & Agents (61k USD) consisted of a sponsorship for active developers and community members during Polkadot Symbiosis in Buenos Aires (58k USD) and travel allowances (3k USD).
Departments (Bounties & Collectives)
Departments, (sometimes also referred to as executive bodies) are set up to provide a service in a certain area of the ecosystem. They simplify OpenGov by bundling work in a certain area, reducing mental load and volume on the general voting tracks. Since 2024-Q3, executive bodies have processed 22% of the total spending, in 2025-Q4 the ratio was 68%. Keep in mind that these costs were already represented in the previous chapters and this is just a different perspective to represent them.
Bounties
Bounties are similar to departments in traditional organizations. Bounties have a specific mandate to spend money to achieve certain goals. Collectively, Bounties spent 4.5m USD, 62% of the total expenses in 2025-Q4.
The Marketing Bounty (1.4m USD) led bounty spending, followed by the Infrastructure Builders Program (857k USD) which operates crucial node infrastructure. DeFi Infrastructure and Tooling (835k USD) works on onboarding financial services to the Polkadot Hub. Events Bounty (289k USD) funded conference attendance and hosting. Paseo Testnet (200k USD) continued testnet operations. The Polkadot Assurance Legion provided security audits for 197k USD. Public RPCs Bounty (136k USD) and Polkadot UX Bounty (133k USD) supported essential infrastructure and user experience improvements.
Collectives
For the technical Fellowship, two fellowship salary cycles were started in Q4:
- Cycle 20: 127k USD
- Cycle 21: 129k USD
In 2025-Q4, the Fellowship Subtreasury paid out three positions, resulting in 180k USD spending.
Analysis
Trend
In the long-term trend, we can see that the DOT-denominated balance and cash are trending sideways. Since the Treasury is still very heavy on DOT, the overall Treasury value still correlates strongly with the DOT price.
Balance Sheet Development
This quarter added 4.1m DOT to the balance sheet. The Treasury correlation with the DOT price becomes visible in the USD chart, showing an almost halving of the USD valuation:
Treasury Cash Development
In terms of cash, we see a similar development as with the total balance, which indicates that the overall spending behavior stayed consistent with previous quarters.
Notes
- Code
- The raw data for this report can be found in the following places:
- For ease of readability we generally round to the two most significant digits.
- Data Acquisition Methodology
- We extend our thanks to the Subsquare, the Parity data team, and
lolmcshizz for providing valuable data and inputs for this report. - Balance sheet values
- intra-day exchange rates for DOT and MYTH were retrieved on 2025-12-31 from Coingecko
- token holdings on accounts were retrieved via Subscan
- The DOT amount in the Hydration Omnipool is retrieved from the Hydration UI
- Outstanding curator rewards payable are retrieved from the SubSquare collectives UI
- Bounty holdings are retrieved from SubSquare
- Income Statement
- Referenda, Treasury Spends, Child Bounties, and Fellowship Subtreasury spends were fetched through Subsquare’s API
- Determination of DOT and USD values
- We do deep inspection of calls to build a bag of different assets.
- For a given date, the bags value in DOT or USD equivalent is then calculated according to market rates at those days
- Bounty and XCM send values are assumed 0. Typically they just move DOT into designated accounts and later spending can then be recognized independently
- batch calls are traversed
- Determination of DOT and USD values
- Full bounty spend: Two instances in the relevant timeframe is recorded. These were manually taken from Subscan
- Collective spend DOT values are approximated by taking the DOTUSD price in the middle of the period.
- Inflation, Burn, Fees, and other values have been provided on a monthly basis by the Parity data team.
- The Treasury got gifted several memecoins, which we currently do not consider sellable, thus valuing them 0.
- We use the following guiding principles to assign categories:
- Categories are assigned by where the primary effect of the spending
will unfold its value. Titles and descriptions are less relevant here
than the list of actual deliverables. - We consider the perspective of the Polkadot ecosystem. Does it affect core technologies or is it application-specific?
- There are proposals that could belong to multiple categories. We choose the category where the majority of the costs go to.
- Categories are assigned by where the primary effect of the spending
- Referenda, Treasury Spends, Child Bounties, and Fellowship Subtreasury spends were fetched through Subsquare’s API
- We extend our thanks to the Subsquare, the Parity data team, and
- The report uses cash accounting (for the most part)
- This means that expenses and income are considered when money changes accounts, not when the actual service is delivered.
- We strive to arrive at accrual accounting, as it is more in line
with international accounting practices. But we lack the necessary team
capacity and data from spends and bounties. - Cash accounting can create distortions, for example when payments are made that extend over the measurement period, or when transactions (like the Myth swap or the Inter Miami deal) are prepaid but not yet executed (and
might still fail and get refunded). Another example is the new spend()
extrinsic, which we account for at the time of referendum execution. - The current report bases its numbers on the execution date of
proposals, which can deviate from the time tokens are spent. For past
reporting, we only represented direct spending from the Treasury and it
was convenient to represent them on the date of spending. - Expenses
- Loans and liquidity provisions are not represented in the income
statement, as they do not count as expenses per accounting standards.
They will show up on the balance sheet - Bounty creation & bounty refills are also hidden since these are not yet expended but rather become designated assets. Once they are
spent via child bounties (or in a single instance fully), expenses are
accounted.
- Loans and liquidity provisions are not represented in the income
- Refunds: We record income from transfers to the Treasury. These
transactions are most likely refunds from OpenGov proposers that have
been overpaid or decided not to deliver. However, tracking the origin of these transactions is out of the scope of this report.
- Limitations
- we can’t track bounty spends if the bounty decides to liquidate to
fiat to retain value. this leads to a spend being recorded at the time
of liquidation - similarly, the Marketing Bounty moved some funds to the Polkadot Community Foundation. They are not tracked after leaving the bounty main account and are counted as expenses. We will improve this in future reports.
- we can’t track bounty spends if the bounty decides to liquidate to
- This report is created by humans and LLMs and might contain errors. Don’t trust, verify.
