About Us:
We are Saxemberg. Operating validators and collators in the Polkadot ecosystem since 2020. Now with nodes in the Near ecosystem. We have been involved in on-chain governance outside of Polkadot since the early days of DAO designs on Ethereum as well as early voting on Cosmos chains. On Polkadot we have been involved in Gov1 governance, parachain governance and OpenGov both as regular voters and as DV delegates on Cohort 1 and 2.
We are publicly making a declaration of joining W3F’s Decentralized Voices program as part of the third cohort.
Our main governance addresses on Polkadot and Kusama are the following:
Polkadot: 153YD8ZHD9dRh82U419bSCB5SzWhbdAFzjj4NtA5pMazR2yC
Kusama: HcEbeTviCK33EddVN3mfJ6WymWLyKfFuekjhjn5PFirjJ5F
Operations
Ours main public communication platform is on X: @saxemberg
Our preferred direct line of contact is our on-chain email where we will be able to organize and reply in orderly fashion.
During our first and second DV tenure, we have published rationale on our proposed as well as extended regarding our votes upon request.
We are open to pre-publication feedback. So, if proposers get in touch with us before their referenda and ask us for feedback before a proposal becomes public, we usually accept it and we designate one person in our team to get in touch and interact with proposers directly whenever necessary. Importantly, we never become authors of referenda unless we form part of it either as proposer, curator or beneficiary of the proposal. Our participation in public proposals by other entities is limited to feedback alone. This service is completely free for the entity requesting it. We reserve the right to engage or deny engagement with proposers based on our own criteria and based on own previous experience, however. An important addition for this cohort is that we reserve the right to deny direct contact with any party and publish strong-arming attempts, intimidation, insults, or attempts to pressure from any party.
We are also open to invitations to discussions within private channels that seek to develop proposals or explain proposals. The same logic applies as we can provide feedback but we won’t contribute as authors of the referenda unless we are an active part of them.
Our OpenGov watchdog project was discontinued shortly in favor of OpenGovWatch, a recipient of the Decentralized Futures program as well as the OG Tracker a treasury funded governance referenda tracker. We still continue working on the revision of our own OpenGov watchdog data for future publication as some dependencies became discontinued like the archive links for governance platforms.
As a rule of thumb, discussion is kept public for the vast majority of cases. Our experience has shown us that private information, pseudo-confidential or privileged information usually contain insignificant weight and it’s often misleading so public discourse is a must for our operations. In consequence, we have never signed NDAs or confidentiality agreements of any kind with any proposer despite certain proposers asking for it. So, our push will always favor open communication. We currently maintain a canary on our website concerning that.
We have never sought bribes or any proposer of referenda has offered a bribe. If that ever happened, we would denounce it publicly on all possible public channels and with the W3F according to the recent rules for this cohort.
We are currently expanding and projecting our governance efforts outside the Polkadot ecosystem so we maintain that Polkadot OpenGov remains at the forefront of on-chain governance innovation but we will continue expanding to other ecosystems that welcome our efforts.
Political Philosophy
Pragmatism. Unlike traditional politics where voting is not (as) liquid, delegation removal in legacy governance systems can take years and politicians make long careers out of decision-making, we believe that on-chain governance is an emerging field and radically different in the sense that on-chain representation allows for faster evolution and dynamism when compared to the regular world of politics. We consider on-chain governance an emergent field where there is still an ample field that has not been researched yet, therefore, a pragmatical and flexible approach to governance is our main philosophy. In the future, when ideas like Futarchy and automated voting have been already tested out completely, we might change the political philosophy to something more delimited.
For that reason we have developed concrete guidelines that guide our voting as well as serving as a first line of explanation for our decision-making. The operations of Saxmeberg are now written succinctly as part of our operation directives. Both guidelines and directives are currently available at: Treasury Guidelines and Directives – Saxemberg.
These guidelines have already been adopted and adapted by an external party in the Cardano ecosystem so we will continue polishing these guidelines as the need arises.
These guidelines and directives were created from lessons and past experience on on-chain governance on Polkadot and on-chain governance other blockchains and DAOs.
These guidelines and directives are not final and unmovable. The likeliest scenario is that more guidelines and directives will be added and the current ones will be kept more or less the same unless a significant event or lesson triggers a change.
For the time being, we will attempt to support missionaries over mercenaries. All native or heavily integrated efforts will take priority over other more general outside projects or teams.
Our current view is that we don’t plan to use the concept of social contract as a valid excuse for any referendum. If the token holders decide that a bounty should not be funded anymore or if a referendum doesn’t deserve a milestone follow-up we won’t push for the continuation based on the social contract concept. Each proposal has to be analyzed case by case and token holders have the right to defund such proposals.
An important addition will be the reluctance to continue DOT top-ups. There have been projects that have finished their referenda and deliveries with a shortfall of DOT (ex. Kodadot) so DOT referenda will have to carry the risk of lacking a top-up. These top-up requests will only be reserved for extremely important cases for which we will have to decide upon.
Our plans for the 3rd cohort
Despite our declaration to maintain a positive bias towards voting during our 2nd delegation, our voting tendency during our 2nd tenure leaned towards center – negative. Our voting distribution became more negative than previously announced due to the significant drop in price of DOT that didn’t allow for more increased spending. We still consider to this day that the treasury remains unbalanced and leans towards a negative flow so we would like to maintain this conservative approach to spending unless the price of DOT improves significantly. So our plan for large requests 10M USD and more will be almost always negative with 5M USD requests will be analyzed with extreme prejudice due to the shape of the treasury. We hope to switch to a positive bias in order to create an appropriate ground for new projects to flourish. This optimistic bias, we hope, will help all the promising early projects as well as established ones that have proven to be worth maintaining.
- Core Research and Development
Core research and development like Snowbridge, PAPI, JAM, Plaza, Fellowship, etc. Will be seen in a positive light and we would like to fully support its development as long as they show commitment.
- Tooling
We would like to put emphasis of wallets, explorers and analytics into the heavily supported alternatives. This will have to be heavily analyzed for effectiveness, interconnectivity as well as use however. This happens so we don’t end up having a large suite of tools that are not used or that risk becoming abandonware (Example, the Chainlink pallet).
- Decentralized Applications
We didn’t include applications in our previous proposals. Now we have changed our minds so applications is something we would like to support heavily considering that apps are the life of the ecosystem and we already have examples of incentivization of app development on other ecosystems like ZKSync, NEAR’s AI funding NEAR | AI, etc. So: DeFi, Bridges, RWA, AI, DePIN, Smart Contract Platforms will also be supported but heavily scrutinized as long as can be proven effective. DOT or stable funding in exchange for native tokens is also encouraged. With the MYTH tokenswap precedent, other projects should also be encouraged to provide tokens to the Polkadot treasury, in that way, the Polkadot treasury will also enjoy of some of the success of the projects with tokens it funds so it can reach a positive influx and even self-reliance in the long term. Tokenswaps can be one of many ways to achieve that.
- Outreach
Events should reach out to the event bounty but there is nothing wrong with a direct request either, these will be analyzed case by case. Other outreach proposals like marketing or advertisement like CoinGecko’s referendum should be preferable to be presented directly to OpenGov.
- Marketing and Advertisement
Native efforts or deeply integrated creators such as The Kusamarian, Alpha Airdrop, CultureDot etc. will take priority over other creators or marketing initiatives. So a reiteration of our missionary over mercenary approach on this side will be significant from now onward. The use of agencies has proven effective for some projects those will be evaluated case-by-case. Large names entities like Real Vision, Unchained or Mario Nawfal will also be evaluated on case-by-case basis with more emphasis on professionalism over controversy and native reach over paid reach. KOLs have brought a good deal of controversy during our second tenure as DVs so all KOL efforts should be heavily scrutinized and umbrella marketing or advertisement referendum should also explain in detail the use of KOLs.
- Business Development
Now we have seen several BD teams take a direct role with DF backing. So these teams will also have a positive bias in our view. We will have a careful approach regardless, as these teams should have a careful balance between expenses, technical support for potential clients, public announcements, private conversations with potential partners, competence and awareness of competing chains trying to poach potential partners. We hope to see more of this as long as the teams are aware of the goals and not just spending funds unnecessarily.
Plan for Kusama.
This is a very important point worth noting. The cohort 3 requires that Polkadot and Kusama votes are provided by the same entity. However, Saxemberg members have already begun testing Kusama referenda for automated voting which is still under heavy development on our side as it’s the canary network also for governance. So Kusama vote will be extremely experimental and feedback won’t be provided in the same way as Polkadot’s. So we will do our best to provide a comparable experience to Polkadot but Kusama is bound to have significant experimentation during our 3rd tenure if selected. Kusama experiments aim at increasing voting throughput.
Why should the W3F delegate their voting power to us?
Saxemberg has been involved in Polkadot governance since the early days and for that reason we have shared our expertise and experience for our current delegators, proposers and other governance participants alike. Just like with our delegated DOT on our validators, relayers and collators, we always keep in mind our delegators concerns and questions and we try to answer as promptly as possible. Like it was previously mentioned, it is great to have a highly dynamic delegation system as it allows for quick replies and quick decision making.
With this in mind, we would like to have the decentralized voices’ delegation again so that our approach to decision making gets amplified as much as possible and we can make fast iterations and improvements upon this model for the greater good of the Polkadot ecosystem.
The future is decentralized.
Disclosures: No current disclosures are required at the moment.
definitely should be in DV III.