A few questions on the paper, then one thing on the canary role.
1. Why are nine cores in the package for bulk coretime sales?
Clause 7 puts 7 cores on system workloads and up to 9 into bulk coretime sales. At your own benchmark those 9 cores are US$4.86m of the US$8.64m. 5.4 says willingness to prepay at cost recovery scale is unlikely, and keeps the route in “for completeness, rather than as a financing assumption”. Sale #32 had no new purchases. That is paying US$4.86m for capacity you don’t expect anyone to buy.
2. What test decides “underfunded”?
5.1 says Scenario B and C merit consideration where the larger commitment would leave delivery underfunded. That is the right test and there is no way to apply it. The gap between A and C is US$4.32m of programme funding. What number, or what evidence, would make you recommend 60 or 40 CTYs instead of 80?
3. What is the fallback if DOT DAO buys the compute but not the bundle?
The formula prices compute. Footprint, accumulation, sovereignty, migration and maintenance are inside the envelope as a request. 5.1 says a lower price for incomplete delivery would fail the proposal’s purpose. So if the counterparty agrees to some of it and not the rest, is there a smaller package, or is there no deal?
Separately, on the renewed canary role.
Polkadot’s proof of personhood stack runs on the relay chain, Asset Hub, People and Bulletin. Parity’s tests for it run on Previewnet, Paseo and local forks. Kusama isn’t in them and isn’t in the App docs. The Polkadot App and Trinity are both built around identity. Kusama isn’t in those either.
So on the most identity critical thing Polkadot has built, Kusama was there and wasn’t used. If we’re going to price a canary role into the negotiation, we need to know why the last round didn’t come here.
Personhood doesn’t fail like infrastructure fails. It fails behaviourally. Collusion, Sybil farming, credential resale, coercion. Those only show up when there’s real value and real people involved. Previewnet and Paseo can tell you the code works. They can’t tell you what happens when a credential is worth stealing, because nothing on them is worth stealing.
Kusama is the only place in the ecosystem with real money at stake and a failure budget that isn’t catastrophic. No testnet can do that.
Kusama also has its own People Chain, and your migration baseline pays to move it. The chain this would run on is already inside the package you’re pricing.