Emiel, Arief - the position paper does things most big asks skip, and the financing route leans on something real: W3F’s 10 million DOT Vision commitment is the kind of institutional backing most ecosystems never get; how much of it remains is for W3F and KSM DAO to reconcile. It prices its own assumption in the open: the $108,000 coretime-year is declared a negotiating reference, not a market rate. And it engages the footprint question instead of orbiting it. Appendix D is also a fair summary of my earlier posts, including the parts where I push back.
On direction first - and I will say it plainly, because the thread has been weighing endings this week. Between decay as the default, a merger that prices KSM at the bottom of the chart, or an independence Kusama cannot fund, I would rather see an endowment like this priced than any of them. What the paper calls an endowment is bounded tenure, prepaid. Renewal is scheduled years before expiry. That is the lease family by another name, and the family compatibility matters more than the naming: a bounded prepaid term with explicit renewal mechanics is one of the few shapes where the counterparty does not have to hold the other side’s infrastructure hostage forever. I will argue about what the term costs and how renewal works, but not about the name.
For the DOT-side case in section 3.6, two things are still open, and the paper itself names both.
The first is footprint pricing. Inside the $8.64 million envelope it is bundled with compute at a price the paper does not break out: “Their prices are not separately derived by the formula” (section 3.2). Your template is more exact than that, though: it says the final agreement must identify “consideration and proceeds treatment for each component, including the footprint-policy requirements examined in Appendix D.3” (section 3.1). The first thing that settles is whether an allocation like this counts as a release form or a retention usage. Max (Harbour Industrial Capital) and the DAO already answered the proceeds side for release forms: 1926 burns that income outright, and your section 3.6 rightly notes that burned proceeds “would be unavailable for operating or maintenance expenditure”. If the allocation is classified as retention usage - a lease with defined renewal and return conditions - then the governing policy is the retention policy. The classification comes first; it belongs to the footprint-policy layer, not the arithmetic.
The second is renewal at expiry. Within the term, A.5.1’s protection standard is a fair ask. Because the tenure is bounded, the expiry mechanics are load-bearing: cost, terms, advance knowledge. Your answer is a year-3 review, and that gives you a process. The anchor tenant needs renewal economics published in advance; that is the property I argued from the retention side, and it is what your A.5 standard amounts to, from the tenant side. If the term’s protection standard is credible, publishing the renewal terms is cheap. If it is not credible, the review does not rescue it.
I have a DOT-side draft for exactly this slot, open for feedback in topic 18567 (Wish for Change draft: release JAM state footprint as metered leases, not freehold sales): retention stays with DOT DAO, access goes out as metered leases, release-form proceeds burn per 1926, renewal terms published, long default terms as the answer to anchor tenants. Push back where it is wrong, in the open - 18567 is the live DOT-side venue for the footprint-policy question your WFC template leaves open. Whether an endowment along your lines is priced at one of section 3.3’s three scenarios is for the electorates on both sides; the foothold they need first is a legible footprint policy.