A Unified Grant and Bounty Progress Tracking Dashboard

[BuildUnion]

Submitting this post in response to the W3F request to get feedback from the community. We are in the process of developing a Grant and Bounty Progress Tracking Dashboard for the Polkadot ecosystem, designed to provide the community with a transparent, user-friendly platform for monitoring the progress of funded proposals, project milestones, spending, and overall impact. The tracker will offer detailed milestone tracking, real-time updates, and automated alerts for deviations or delays, providing an early warning system that prevents problems rather than just reporting them after they occur. The goal is to offer unified access to all past and active grants and bounties, along with their statuses, while proactively identifying risks before they become failures and reducing poor ROI on grants and bounties.

Problem

The Polkadot network has distributed over hundreds of millions funding grants, bounties, incentive programs, ecosystem investments, and service partnerships. While this has accelerated growth, it has also outpaced the network’s ability to track, evaluate, and ensure accountability for how funds are used.

Currently, tracking the progress of the Polkadot grant and bounty progress is fragmented, with updates scattered across various update posts and channels including Forum, Polkassembly, Discord, Telegram, Twitter, etc.—creating a fragmented, inconsistent, and ultimately unreliable reporting environment. This lack of cohesion hinders stakeholders and the community’s ability to effectively oversee projects, evaluate progress, and address potential issues promptly.

Blind spots in milestone tracking, deliverables, and cross-chain activities, burying critical data on milestones, spending, and deliverables, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of the ecosystem, leading to increasing inefficient allocation of DOT resources. Furthermore, the lack of real-time, data-driven early warning systems hampers the timely identification of underperformance and misuse of funds. Several incidents of misuse have already surfaced, and more may go unnoticed without active monitoring.

The network needs a unified, transparent, and independent oversight to track treasury deployment and outcomes with early risk detection that can empower DOT holders and governance participants with reliable, actionable insights.

Proposed Solution

SafeGuard is a real-time, unified grant and bounty progress tracking dashboard purpose-built for the Polkadot ecosystem. It consolidates fragmented data sources into a single, transparent interface, giving stakeholders live insights into treasury spending, project progress, and outcomes via a Polkadot-branded interface. SafeGuard introduces a proactive accountability layer by combining automation, community verification, and AI-driven oversight.

The aim is to improve project transparency and accountability while reducing reporting overhead, protecting the DAO from fund misuse, eliminating noise and poor ROI on grants and bounties.

Features

Milestone Tracking: Dedicated pages for each grant and bounty, displaying key indicators (e.g., progress bars, percentages), completion status, so you can see milestones, spending, and progress at a glance.

Real-time Updates: Timely updates on milestone completion and overall project progress

Automated Alerts: Notifications for overdue milestones or significant deviations from the grant or bounty scope, delivered via in-app notifications and email

Risk Detection: Using machine learning to detect early signs of risk (delays, stalled projects, deviations, and misuse)

Data Consolidation: Consolidating fragmented data into a standardized, actionable format for the community and stakeholders, reducing noise.

Visualizations: Charts and graphs to provide a visual representation of project progress and trends

Enforced Accountability: Missed deadlines and overdue reports trigger instant flags and follow-ups. Automated tracking of project deadlines, milestones, and deliverables, with instant notifications for missed updates or progress reports.

Automated Governance Workflows: Reduce manual follow-ups on proposals for grantees, bounty recipients, and stakeholders

Grant and Bounty Impact Assessment: Tracks real-world outcomes, ecosystem contributions, adoption metrics, and long-term value creation from funded projects to measure actual ROI and community benefit.

By transforming fragmented data into verified, intelligent, and actionable insights, SafeGuard introduces a robust layer of decentralized accountability specifically designed for Polkadot’s unique architecture.

Structured Reporting Framework

Mandatory Updates from Grant Recipients:

• Bi-weekly: Status updates and blockers
• Monthly: Budget updates and key results achieved
• Final Report: Impact assessment comparing initial goals to actual outcomes

Inputs come from automated APIs and manual updates, ensuring accuracy and flexibility.

Formalizing Reporting Standards

To ensure consistent usage and reliable progress tracking, SafeGuard reporting will be a mandatory requirement for all grant recipients operating under Treasury authority. Standardizing reporting across the Polkadot ecosystem guarantees transparency, accountability, and data integrity. Following discussions with ecosystem stakeholders, this mandate will work in alignment with existing initiatives, creating a shared commitment to responsible grant oversight and ecosystem growth.

Impact and Value Proposition

By transforming reactive grant monitoring into predictive risk management, SafeGuard will:

• Prevent failed projects through early intervention based on proven failure indicators
• Improve Treasury efficiency with higher success rates through proactive project support
• Enhance community trust via transparent, data-driven accountability
• Reduce governance overhead through automated response systems
• Protect ecosystem reputation by preventing high-profile grant failures

Who is it for

SafeGuard aligns with Polkadot’s values of transparency, decentralization, and verifiability. It serves multiple stakeholder groups:

Grant and Bounty Administrators: Tools to streamline oversight, automate progress reporting, generate insights, and trigger follow-ups

DOT/KSM Holders: Visibility into how Treasury and OpenGov funds are allocated and used

OpenGov Voters: Actionable insights to inform ongoing and future decisions

Contributors, Grantees, and Bounty Recipients: Reduced manual reporting burdens and clearer expectations

Community Members: Access to a verifiable, centralized source for project updates and accountability

Team

Build Union – Aggregate Team of Web3 Builders

Build Union is a collaborative collective of talented developers, designers, strategists, and innovators dedicated to shaping the future of the decentralized web. As an aggregate team of Web3 builders, Build Union brings together diverse expertise to create cutting-edge blockchain applications, DAO services, and other decentralized solutions. We are focused on fostering innovation and accelerating the adoption of Web3 technologies.

Live link: https://watchdog2.vercel.app/

We plan to integrate this into the forum, polkassembly, and any existing grant/bounty tool for easy access. We’d love your thoughts on this initiative

SafeGuard – Tracking Grants and Bounties. Exposing Gaps. Empowering Governance.

[BuildUnion]

[LisaKole]

Strongly support this, accountability is long overdue. I don’t have a lot of detailed feedback, but I really like the concept. This will help clean up the current mess of scattered updates and fragmented information, which makes it nearly impossible to track what’s actually happening with funded projects.
There’s been a blind spot here for too long, and frankly, a unified tracking system is badly needed. Having to dig through multiple platforms just to get basic progress status updates is inefficient for everyone involved.

[BuildUnion]

Thank you for the support and for highlighting exactly the pain points that SafeGuard is designed to address.

[Mork]

Looks like a great idea.
Definitely one of the governance tools we need, and correctly scoped (ie is covers all that it needs to, without bleeding over into areas that it doesn’t).

Two potential implementation problems stand out for me, which I would like to know what your approach is in addressing:

Taxonomy:
As you rightly identify, the problem is that there are too many differently-shaped funding mechanisms, in too many different places, to keep track of.
A glance at your test app highlights why this creates a potential implementation problem. How do you plan to keep track when each different grant, bounty, etc., has a different relationship to the funding source (eg OpenGov track/ w3f/ etc.), and when their success criteria are structurally different from each other? And even if you manage to code up a taxonomy that encompasses everything, how to you plan to keep it updated while: 1- new bounties, fellowships, ad-hoc programmes, etc. continue to emerge?; and 2- when there are not only leaf-nodes (ie individual funds recipients) to monitor for progress, but also branches (eg a whole bounty or sub-bounty programme ) to monitor for their fitness-for-purpose?

Obvs not looking for an actual taxonomy here, but more like how can you make a structure which is flexible enough to deal with this, without requiring an open-ended commitment to taxonomy maintenance?

" SafeGuard reporting will be a mandatory requirement for all grant recipients operating under Treasury authority":
Hmmm.. not sure that’s going to work.
We have had some really basic and easy-to-follow ‘mandatory’ requirements, especially for OpenGov proposals. But if people ignore them (not just proponents, but also curators/ voters) - what happens then?
Is there any plan to phase-in, or otherwise push adoption of, the SafeGuard standard?
Alternatively, is there a plan to keep the system robust even if it gets routinely ignored?

[BuildUnion]

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. Really appreciate the detailed points you raised, especially around the taxonomy challenge and the realities of adoption. Both are core design considerations for us, and we’d love to share how we’re thinking about them:

1. Architecture: Flexible by Design, Built for Evolving Needs

SafeGuard’s architecture is designed to be flexible and future-proof, without relying on a single rigid structure. Instead of forcing all grants and bounties to fit one format, each funding type can define its own “tracking profile”, which includes:

• What it’s supposed to deliver
• How often it reports updates
• How success is measured (aligned with KPIs agreed upon by the funding body)

These profiles are reusable, adaptable, and versioned, which allows us to support new funding types as they emerge, without needing to overhaul the system each time. We also distinguish between:

• Leaf nodes: individual grants, bounties, or tasks
• Branch nodes: broader programs or tracks (e.g. an entire fellowship or bounty initiative)

This lets us offer both granular detail and big-picture oversight. Instead of relying on a rigid taxonomy, we use tagging and flexible categorization, which enables powerful filtering and searchability without introducing schema rigidity.

2. Adoption: Phased, Incentivized, and Resilient by Default

Fully agree that “mandatory” doesn’t mean much in decentralized systems unless it’s backed by incentives, usability, and organic buy-in. So our rollout strategy is grounded in three principles:

a. Soft Onboarding First

We’re not expecting SafeGuard to be enforced on day one. Instead, we’re making it:

• Easier than current workflows: plug-and-play templates, milestone editors, automated reminders, pre-filled forms, etc.
• Integrated where people already operate: in-line embeds for Polkassembly, Forum, and Discord/webhooks
  Our goal is to make SafeGuard the path of least resistance, not another burden.

b. Curator + Funder Buy-In

We’re already engaging with bounty curators and grant admins, since their support is often more impactful than a top-down rule.
Over time, we also believe OpenGov voters will favor proposals that use SafeGuard to demonstrate transparency, and that preference can drive broader adoption organically.

c. Designed for Partial Adoption

Even if only a portion of grants/bounties opt in (voluntarily or via curator enforcement), SafeGuard remains valuable. The system:

• Highlights low-visibility or untracked proposals
• Enables comparisons between well-tracked and poorly-tracked efforts
• Surfaces ecosystem blind spots and risk clusters

In essence, even non-compliance becomes data, and that alone helps improve accountability.

We’re continuing to refine the design and would love further thoughts, especially around what success signals or metrics you think would be most valuable from a voter or curator perspective. Thanks again for engaging. Feedback like this helps strengthen the tool.