I’ll keep this calm, because I mean it that way, not as another rant.
Let me start with where we came from, because it matters. At the beginning the promise was big and simple: a heterogeneous multi-chain, shared security, and a token, DOT, used to govern the network, to stake for its safety, and to bond for parachains. That’s the pitch a lot of us bought into, with real money. In the middle years it changed shape: parachain auctions gave way to Polkadot 2.0 and Agile Coretime, blockspace rented on demand. And now we’re at JAM, a hard-capped DOT, and a network whose running cost the founder himself puts at “around half a billion dollars a year” [1], while describing coretime revenue as “immaterial in comparison to supply” [2]. That’s a long way from the original story, and it’s fair to say so.
In the last two weeks we got two Medium posts from Gavin on top of this. I’ll quote them rather than paraphrase, because the exact words matter.
In the first post (22 June), he states that “The JAM protocol presupposes the existence of a token” [3], argues DOT would be “an extremely suboptimal choice” [4], and reassures readers that the new token “complements and does not prejudice the other functions of DOT” [5]. It opens with the disclaimer that “No token is being offered, sold, or distributed” [6]. Fair enough. But the same post then lays out a supply, an initial owner, a preferred venue and a release path. At some point a thought exploration with a full distribution plan stops feeling like only a thought exploration.
And here’s what actually worries me, in his own words from the second post (27 June). Asked whether the new token should be sold for DOT so that demand for JAM feeds DOT, he answers “I don’t believe ‘direct’ demand is especially important” [7], and says the most obvious unit to price it in “would be dotUSD” [8]. He dismisses the single-token view as a “cryptocurrency mind-virus” [9]. Read plainly: the most valuable new resource the network creates would be sold in a stablecoin, not in DOT, and the route back to the token you actually hold becomes indirect and discretionary, left to the DAO to settle later.
So I’m not here to defend a price or attack a person. I want to ask for three things.
1. Be honest about the direction. If the plan is for the network to run more and more on a stablecoin, for a second token to carry JAM’s scarcest resource, and for governance and maybe even security to drift toward proof of personhood, then say it plainly, in one place. Not spread across posts that each sound modest alone. People can handle a clear thesis. What wears them down is assembling it themselves and then being told they misread it.
2. Tell us where value goes back to DOT, in writing. It’s a simple question. Under JAM and the new token, what is the concrete path from usage back to DOT, and is it a design commitment or just one option among several? “The DAO will decide later” isn’t much of an answer when the framing, the currency and the distribution are already being shaped now.
A philosophical point, and I’ll be honest about it. Building the web3 of the future is hard, and it genuinely costs money. Real research, real infrastructure, real years. I respect that. But there’s a contract underneath a token that nobody likes to name. People didn’t buy DOT to fund pure research. People come into a crypto market, any of them, for one of two reasons: to make money, or at the very least not to lose the savings they walked in with. That isn’t greed, it’s just the premise of the thing. A token trading on an open market is an investment, and an investment carries an implicit promise, that the value the project creates can somehow find its way back to the people who funded it.
If that promise is no longer the intention, then let’s be honest about what we’re doing. Funding a vision with no expectation of value coming back to the holder is a beautiful thing, truly, but it already has a name, and the name is a donation, or a public good, or a grant. It is not a crypto market. You can’t ask people to behave like patrons of pure research when what they were handed was a token, on an exchange, with a price chart attached. Either DOT is an asset, and then the path for value to reach holders has to be a commitment, not an afterthought. Or it’s a contribution to a vision, and then say so, and stop wrapping it in the language and venues of an investment. What isn’t fair is keeping the upside dressed as idealism while the people who put in real savings carry the whole downside.
3. Respect for the people who believed. This is the part I care about most. A lot of people put real savings into DOT over the years. Not to flip it on a Tuesday, but because they believed in the vision that was sold to them, by name, from stages. Many are down badly now. They’re not asking for a bailout, and they’re not asking anyone to promise a price. They’re asking not to be quietly repriced from “owners of the network’s value” into “holders of an optional governance key”, without a single person ever saying it out loud.
None of this is anti-JAM. JAM might genuinely be the right technical step, I’m open to that. But a community isn’t only a technical system. It’s also the people who paid for the runway while it was being built. They’re owed transparency about what their token is turning into, honesty about the trade-offs, and clarity that arrives before the decisions are framed as settled, not after.
That’s the whole ask, really. Tell us the real plan, in plain words, while there’s still time to talk about it.
Notes (verbatim from the source posts):
[1] “During 2024 we estimated that cost of running Polkadot at around half a billion dollars a year.” (Post 2, 27 June)
[2] Coretime “typically fetches up to a thousand USD per year per core. It is immaterial in comparison to supply.” (Post 2, 27 June)
[3] “The JAM protocol presupposes the existence of a token to ensure soundness in its state usage.” (Post 1, 22 June)
[4] “It is for this reason that I believe ‘DOT’ would be an extremely suboptimal choice for a JAM Service State Token.” (Post 1, 22 June)
[5] “complements and does not prejudice the other functions of DOT including as a DAO token, coretime payments, collateral and staking.” (Post 1, 22 June)
[6] “No token is being offered, sold, or distributed by me nor any legal entity I’m affiliated with.” (Post 1, 22 June)
[7] “I don’t believe ‘direct’ demand is especially important.” (Post 2, 27 June)
[8] On whether it would be sold for DOT, dotUSD or another asset: “the most obvious option to me would be dotUSD.” (Post 2, 27 June)
[9] “The idea that one token is better than two is a cryptocurrency mind-virus.” (Post 2, 27 June)Sources: Gavin Wood, “DOT DAO and the need for $JAMKB” (Medium, 22 June 2026); “DOT DAOism under JAM: An Island Story” (Medium, 27 June 2026).
A note on the writing: English isn’t my first language, so I used Claude to help me phrase this clearly and avoid too many mistakes. The thinking, the research and the views are my own.
