Clarifying Kusama's Governance Direction: Independence or Integration?

[hantoniu-codeberg]

I’d like to raise a question about Kusama’s long-term governance structure. Recent signals point in different directions, and clarity would help the community make informed decisions about where to invest effort.

The Apparent Contradiction

Signal 1: Kusama as Independent Chain

https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/573, passed in August 2025, committed Kusama to an independent JAM upgrade path—32 cores, 1-second block time, a configuration tailored to Kusama’s smaller economy rather than simply mirroring Polkadot. The proposal explicitly framed Kusama as having its own trajectory.

Signal 2: Kusama Governance via Bridge

[P<>K bridge] Kusama Fellowship replaced by the Polkadot Fellowship acting over the bridge · Issue #484 · polkadot-fellows/runtimes · GitHub , opened in October 2024, proposes retiring the Kusama Technical Fellowship entirely. Under this model, the Polkadot Fellowship would govern Kusama remotely via a bridge. The most recent update (January 2025) indicates this was postponed to H2 2025, pending Kusama’s governance migration to Asset Hub.

These two directions seem to be in tension. One positions Kusama as an independent experimental network with its own technical path. The other positions it as a subsidiary governed remotely from Polkadot.

Why This Matters

Community members are actively building Kusama-specific proposals:

• Economic differentiation (burn mechanisms vs. Polkadot’s hard cap)
• Validator set optimization for Kusama’s scale
• Kusama-specific runtime configurations

If Kusama’s governance is being consolidated under Polkadot, these efforts may be misallocated. Proposals that assume Kusama can chart an independent course would face a different reality—one where Kusama-specific decisions compete for attention with Polkadot priorities, reviewed by a Fellowship whose primary focus is elsewhere.

Conversely, if Kusama is meant to remain independent, the community should know that too. It affects how we engage with governance, which proposals we prioritize, and how we think about Kusama’s identity relative to Polkadot.

Questions

I’d appreciate clarity from those with visibility into the strategic direction:

1. Is the plan in issue #484 still being pursued? The H2 2025 timeline has passed. Is this delayed, abandoned, or in progress?
2. How does remote governance via bridge reconcile with WFC 573’s vision of Kusama-specific technical decisions? Who makes Kusama-focused tradeoffs if the Fellowship is Polkadot-centric?
3. What is Kusama’s intended long-term identity? Is it a permanent experimental network with its own governance, or a testing ground that will eventually be governed as a Polkadot appendage?

I’m not advocating for a particular answer—I’m asking for transparency so the community can plan accordingly. Building on Kusama requires understanding what Kusama is meant to become.

Tagging those who may have context: @acatangiu (issue #484 author), @olanod (WFC 573 author), and any Parity or W3F representatives who can speak to the strategic intent.

[hantoniu-codeberg]

Nine days ago, I asked three specific questions about Kusama’s governance direction and tagged those with direct visibility into the strategic intent. No one has responded.

I want to update the community on why this matters more today than when I posted.

A live example

Referendum 1836 — the PAPI team’s funding proposal on Polkadot — sat at approximately 100% approval with 14.7M DOT in support and near-zero opposition. Every comment on Subsquare is supportive. Teams across the ecosystem — Talisman, XCM tooling developers, wallet builders — endorsed it publicly.

Today, six wallets voted Nay with a combined conviction-weighted total of approximately 131M DOT, dropping approval from ~100% to ~10%.

Wallets	Balance	Conviction	Weighted Nay
6 addresses	~43.7M DOT total	All 3x	~131M DOT

For context, the entire Aye side represents ~14.7M DOT of conviction-weighted support. One entity, voting across multiple addresses, now controls nine times the voting power of the entire supporting community combined.

What this illustrates

This is not a comment on the merits of the PAPI proposal. Josep’s detailed account speaks for itself. What I want to highlight is the structural implication.

OpenGov was designed so that any token holder can submit proposals and the community decides through weighted voting. In practice, when a single entity holds enough tokens to outweigh the rest of the voting community by an order of magnitude, the system functions as a veto mechanism — regardless of when or how transparently that vote is cast.

This is the same dynamic that shaped Referendum 627 on Kusama. The specific objections differ, the timing differs, but the structural outcome is identical: community consensus overridden by concentrated voting power.

Why this connects to my original questions

If Kusama’s governance direction is being determined by an entity with this degree of influence over OpenGov outcomes — on both chains — then the questions I raised are not abstract:

1. Is Kusama governance independent? If the same entity can override community consensus on Polkadot and Kusama simultaneously, the distinction between “independent” and “subsidiary” becomes functional rather than formal.

2. Who makes Kusama-specific decisions? WFC 573 envisioned a Kusama that charts its own technical path. But if proposals that differentiate Kusama from Polkadot can be vetoed by an entity whose primary focus is Polkadot, the experimental mandate is constrained by that entity’s preferences.

3. What is the point of community engagement? Teams invest months iterating proposals, gathering feedback, and building support — only to have the outcome determined by a single vote that outweighs all other participants combined. The rational response is to seek that entity’s approval in advance, which is precisely what Josep describes being required to do.

The governance question

I want to be clear: large token holders voting is not illegitimate. It is how the system was designed. The question is whether a system where one entity can routinely override broad community consensus is producing the governance outcomes the ecosystem needs.

That is a design question, not a complaint. And it deserves an answer — from the Foundation, from the Fellowship, and from the community.

The silence on my original post suggests the answer may be uncomfortable. I am still asking.

[hantoniu-codeberg]

W3F just published a Kusama Vision page and an accompanying article announcing three bounties funded through Referendum 498 — W3F’s fulfillment of a genesis-era commitment to allocate 10M DOT for Kusama’s benefit. The language is unambiguous: Kusama is “evolving from a testbed into a peer network,” committed to “radical experimentation,” with “resistance built in code and freedom engineered, not requested.”

This is welcome. It answers the most important of the three questions I raised in my original post: Kusama is meant to be a permanent, independent network with its own identity. Not a subsidiary. Not a testing ground to be eventually absorbed. A peer.

That clarity matters. It validates the work already happening — validator set optimization, economic differentiation, Kusama-specific runtime decisions. Builders now have a public commitment from W3F that Kusama has a future worth building toward.

Two questions remain open.

Governance. Issue #484 — the proposal to retire the Kusama Technical Fellowship and govern Kusama remotely from Polkadot via a bridge — is still open. It was postponed to H2 2025, which has passed. If Kusama is a peer network, does it retain its own governance body? The vision says independence. The issue says integration. One of them needs updating.

Economics. The vision is funded by 10M DOT that W3F committed at genesis — a promise now being fulfilled. The bounties support ZK, Proof of Personhood, and Art — all valuable. But none of them address how Kusama sustains itself economically. Kusama currently inflates at 10% annually with zero burn mechanisms. The treasury holds ~714K KSM while relay chain fees amount to ~0.032 KSM per day. A network whose largest investment comes from an external entity’s DOT holdings isn’t economically self-sustaining — regardless of how bold the vision statement is.

This is where the vision and the economics need to meet. WFC 573 committed Kusama to an independent JAM path. The burn-based tokenomics proposal in this forum proposes reducing net inflation from 10% to ~3.1% through governance-adjustable mechanisms — giving Kusama’s monetary policy a foundation that doesn’t depend on external funding. @olanod’s validator reduction work addresses the cost side. Together, they give the “second age” an economic foundation.

The bounties fund what gets built on Kusama. The economic reforms determine whether Kusama can stand on its own. Both matter. The vision page covers the first. The second is still waiting for engagement.

[hantoniu-codeberg]

Last week, W3F published the Kusama Vision page and a Medium article announcing three bounties. The article reads like a launch: “these three bounties are launching today and the curators are ready to accept proposals.” The website has submission forms. The language is bold — “the future of Kusama is being written by those brave enough to experiment.”

I wanted to see what was behind it, so I checked the on-chain status.

Bounty #35 (Zero-Knowledge), #36 (Proof-of-Personhood), and #37 (Art) were proposed on May 19, 2025. All three are still in Proposed status — no approval referendum, no curators, no funding capability. For reference, Bounty #32 (Shielded Kusama Hub Transfers) went from proposal to active curator in about four weeks. That’s what the process looks like when someone is driving it.

But the real issue is deeper than pace. On January 26, a W3F representative (Karam-W3F) submitted Referendum 632 — titled “Please Vote Nay” — explaining that the existing bounties pallet cannot support the multi-asset / DOT-based flow the Kusama Vision requires. The referendum states that bounties #35, #36, and #37 “are not going to be the correct on-chain mechanism for Kusama Vision going forward.” The plan is to recreate them under a new multi-asset bounties pallet that’s currently being tested on Westend.

Ref 632 was rejected on February 10 — the same week the Medium article announced the bounties were “launching today.”

To be fair, Karam was transparent about the technical limitation and posted the correction publicly. That’s how governance should work. But the sequence raises a question about the announcement itself. The Vision page and Medium article went live promoting bounties that W3F already knew couldn’t function under the current pallet. The submission forms are collecting proposals, but the on-chain mechanism that would actually fund them doesn’t exist yet. The replacement pallet is still on testnet.

None of this is fatal. The multi-asset pallet will presumably ship, new bounties will be created, and the process can start properly. But it does illustrate the pattern I’ve been pointing at throughout this thread: the announcements run ahead of the infrastructure. The vision page describes a “second age of radical experimentation.” The on-chain reality is three dead bounties, a pallet migration still in testing, and a timeline that keeps shifting.

Even once the bounties work — what’s the pitch to a builder considering Kusama? Come build privacy infrastructure, or proof-of-personhood systems, or experimental governance — on a network running 10% annual inflation with no plan to change it, whose entire relay chain fee revenue amounts to ~0.032 KSM per day, and where governance questions go unanswered for weeks. Meanwhile Polkadot just published a concrete timeline for March with dates, pallet names, and parameter changes.

I’m not saying Kusama can’t get there. The vision page articulates something worth building toward. But a vision attracts builders when it’s backed by fundamentals — working funding mechanisms, sustainable economics, responsive governance. Without those, the people with options will build elsewhere. That’s not a criticism. It’s just how it works.

This thread has been a monologue for three weeks. I don’t think I’m the only one noticing these gaps. If others see what I’m seeing, now would be a good time to say so.