Malicious – maybe. But certainly yet another ecosystem actor that is trying to extract as much value as possible from the network under the guise of “I’m doing it for your benefit, don’t you see that?”
Exploitative? Yes, by all appearances the system was set up with a loophole that created an unfair market condition, and that has been taken advantage of to the short term detriment of teams building on the network.
Or if the initial design of coretime sales predicted this would have happened, would guardrails have been put in place, or would everyone have thrown up their hands and said “let the market figure it out”?
That is true, I don’t think anyone in the initial Coretime Sales discussion anticipated that multiple chains would simply forget to renew the one resource they can’t function without. I’m honestly still surprised by that, never saw it coming.
I guess you can call that a “loophole,” but it seems to me like it’s just negligence.
Core time should have start as a public good and projects could apply for it through proposals and community votes who gets the core time and how long time. This core time wouldn’t be possible to transfer or sold on secondary markets. This would show how much there is ask for the true need of computation. Kind of base level.
Afterwards we could adjust how much of the core time is set for free markets and that should be build on automated market maker mechanics where price grows rapidly if demand is high. Core time bought through AMM should be transferrable and retraidable.
We have acquired two additional Polkadot cores at 92.271 DOT each, bringing our holdings to 11 of the 20 available Polkadot cores and 73 of the 94 Kusama cores.
We are offering Polkadot cores for sale via two routes:
Direct paraID assignment (available through 31 May 2025).
Paramanager account transfer for paraID 3420, which carries nine cores with a renewal fee of approximately 9 DOT per core. Ownership is transferred by assigning the proxy controller account.
Pricing is negotiable; prospective buyers may refer to earlier forum posts for benchmark figures. Prices are of course negotiable within reason. The next sale cycle is expected to start at around 920 DOT per core, with renewals at a similar rate—about 3,680 DOT over four months. It will be substantially cheaper to purchase these 90 DOT renewable cores rather than purchase and renew the 900 DOT cores within a few months.
Kusama cores remain available as well. Multiple parachains in our portfolio are assigned 12 cores apiece; we estimate the price to sell one such chain at roughly 800 KSM, which covers parachain registration costs, 12 cores at 50 KSM each, and a modest markup. Those wishing to purchase cores on Kusama must take this into account, we cannot sell individual cores at this time on Kusama.
Regarding governance, we are well aware of Kusama opengov referendum 522 that proposes releasing the remaining 46 cores to the market. In our opinion this referendum should pass, as should a similar referendum on Polkadot. The supply of cores is arbitrarily limited in order to protect the price of cores. We argue that current supply caps artificially support core prices and reveal flaws in the allocation and renewal mechanisms. We further urge the Polkadot Technical Fellowship, Web3 Foundation, and Parity Technologies to only deploy upgrades to the relay chains that are robust enough to work in a permissionless system, and do not rely on manual interventions to safeguard market stability.
We have previously stated in our email correspondence with Bastian that we are aware that the Polkadot Technical Fellowship could whitelist cores to specific projects. Once again, we believe that such actions undermine core market integrity and further instances would contradict assurances made in Polkadot opengov referendum 1536.
