Over the last month, following the announcement that Parity Technologies would be sunsetting its own “go-to-market operations,” several key contributors to Polkadot’s early success have been gathering around this coalition to help manage these important functions going forward.
Our proposed Polkadot coalition includes early respected employees and advisors to Parity and the Web3 Foundation, DOT ICO investors, parachain founding teams, and broader crypto ecosystem operators. Our collective opinion is that this approach — where a smaller set of agile, specialized teams take on much of the responsibility for these crucial operations — is the only way this service-provider decentralization will be effective. Polkadot needs a significant work culture reboot, and this proposed coalition is prepared to bring in new blood, fresh ideas, and the Web3-native bona fides to get it done.
Myself and Yoon Kim (@eumenes) have formed Transistor to focus on business development and engineering + onboarding support in North America and have posted our detailed proposal below this coalition brief.
Coalition Background
As the Transistor team engaged with the Distractive team (the team behind Moonbeam’s successful launch and associated onboarding efforts) to discuss their intention to manage Polkadot’s Global Marketing and Communications functions, we agreed that working together on a strategy for Polkadot would make the Web3 Foundation’s proposed “Decentralized Futures” funding go much further.
The Distractive and Transistor teams then had a series of conversations with other potential coalition contributors and have secured the support of BlokHaus who will work alongside Distractive to manage the Polkadot brand and content; MarketAcross who managed public relations through the Polkadot launch; and the proposed PoKe team incubated by BotLabs and Scytale to focus on business development in Europe and the Middle East. Along with announced ongoing support for Parity’s Asia team, we have realized a plan that will cover all key regions and work verticals needed to maintain and grow Polkadot’s footprint globally.
The screenshot below includes a rough layout of teams and funding for these operations. During our planning, we initially focused on putting together three-year budgets for these network support teams, as hiring for a one-year project will make hiring and scaling adoption incredibly complex. We believe that these core operations will need to continue in earnest for at least the next five years of Polkadot’s development if the network is going to successfully implement CoreTime and reach a sustainable level of adoption. We understand that the W3F’s Decentralized Futures funds may need to be spent within one year, so we will potentially consider pulling costs forward and several coalition members may be making additional, complementary OpenGov proposals to ensure they have the necessary operating runway for this mission-critical work.
We look forward to continuing this conversation with the Web3 Foundation and the Polkadot community as we finalize bootstrap funding and launch full-time operations. Please let us know what you think below – if you’d like to contribute to the coalition or if you want to work with any of these teams, please reach out to apply.
Thank you!
