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.