About Us:
We are Saxemberg operate validators, collators and other nodes in the Polkadot ecosystem since 2020. Our Polkadot mission started with a dream of collocating Polkadot validators in all continents except Antarctica. Unfortunately, the all-continent-validator-dream is still far away but our Polkadot Validators, Collators, other nodes and RPCs we have finally reached these continents: North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia thanks to the strengthening of ties with old infrastructure partners and emergence of new partners. With both institutional clients in North and South America and public infrastructure elsewhere.
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, 2 and 3.
We are publicly making a declaration of joining W3F’s Decentralized Voices program as part of the fourth cohort.
Our main governance addresses on Polkadot and Kusama are the following:
Polkadot: 153YD8ZHD9dRh82U419bSCB5SzWhbdAFzjj4NtA5pMazR2yC
Kusama: HcEbeTviCK33EddVN3mfJ6WymWLyKfFuekjhjn5PFirjJ5F
Payment address on Polkadot:
11fx8xKPNd4zVSBxkpN8qhhaGEmNJvPgKqwhDATZQXs7dkM
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.
DMs on X with OpenGov requests will be redirected to the other channels.
A new secondary attention line is now Telegram
where the same process from the email communication will happen. Seemingly, OpenGov participants found telegram the easiest way of communicating. But this does not ensue an instant communication line or a 24/7 help desk, rather, a paused communication line with official replies from the team just with e-mail.
Communication Rules
During our first, second and third DV tenure, we have published rationale on our proposed as well as extended rationale regarding our votes upon request.
We are open to pre-publication feedback which has already been used by dozens of participants. 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.
Post-publication rationale expansion, further explanations and direct contact can also be requested but this will also normally include a vote on our side. All referenda are monitored internally until the very end but continuous follow-up and continuous communication with referenda proposers until the very end of the referendum is something that is not normally done and should not be considered part of our operations (See guidelines 2 and 3).
We now however, require either a text with information about the referendum that is about to be published, the link to the discussion or even the published referendum if it’s post-publication extended comments or a request for direct communication. Meaning, a more mature idea that is relatively close to the discussion phase. We do this for the sake of efficiency.
Referendum Involvement
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. Since cohort 3 we reserve the right to deny direct contact with any party and the right to publish as well as report strong-arming attempts, intimidation, insults, or attempts to pressure from any party. This is also in line with the current DV rules so be very mindful of that.
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. Clarys should also aid in the natural language explanation of the OpenGov archives, past referenda and OpenGov data. We hope it becomes a day-to-day tool for all voters.
Referendum Transparency
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 little to 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 or referendum. So, our push will always favor open communication. We currently maintain a canary on our website concerning that which hasn’t been changed since publication.
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 DV rules.
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.
Polkadot OpenGov Proposed Operations for Cohort 4
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. This expansion is mostly focused on the development and “export” of our analytic tools and software.
For the time being, we will attempt to support missionaries over mercenaries. All native or heavily integrated efforts will take priority over other outside projects, general crypto projects, general research or teams in many ecosystems. The main idea is to support either deeply integrated teams or to support teams seeking deep integration with the ecosystem.
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.
DOT top-ups are to be discontinued. There have been projects that have finished their referenda and deliveries with a shortfall of DOT. So DOT requests in 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.
Retroactive payments will be limited to already ongoing well known vital operations as well as small efforts. However, high cost retroactive referenda for products or projects is something that we have chosen to not support anymore. It is our current belief that granting a large amount of funds should entail analysis by OpenGov first and not be accepted retroactively anymore. Retroactive payments was a good idea on paper which showed results before payments in order to build reputation and display results first but exaggerated costs, lack of impact of retroactive efforts, bad administration and long time requests have made us reconsider retroactive payments altogether. We don’t want them being used as a loophole for increased costs and lack of oversight and analysis.
Time bias is a linked item to the previous paragraph, if the referendum wants to be rewarded retroactively, make sure it’s a recent one. We are considering a 3 month to 6 month maximum age for retroactive efforts. A further decantation of that maximum range should come with more experience and cases.
Bounty redirection is what we expect for media, content creation, (bounty 33) events (Bounty 17), meetups and localized social efforts (Bounties 43, 17) , core Rust development (bounty 64), miscellaneous projects looking to kickstart their operations (bounty 63), etc. We will consider referenda in those categories if they want to be evaluated independently by OpenGov but at least an honest attempt to use the well funded bounties should be made in order to evaluate both the proposers as well as the bounty operations.
Bounty efficiency and focus. In cohort 3 we have led the bounty removal of what we deem inactive and overlapping bounties. With these returned funds as well as more focused efforts we hope to continue a more efficient use of the bounty structures which ultimately should provide their reports to DOT token holders. We will also continue to push for the bounty compliance standards accepted by the referendum 1254 Bounty Compliance Standards 1.0
Another plan is to continue the pilot of the Cardano x Polkadot background checks which should be extremely simplified and open for all Polkadot OpenGov and Cardano Governance participants 2Days Devs Meetups with Polkadot (East Africa Community)
Our plans for the 4th cohort
Currently the treasury doesn’t lean heavily towards negative outflows and it’s rather balanced but due to recent low market conditions we are more hesitant to create a more positive bias towards funding and made us lean towards conservatism. We still consider to this day that the treasury remains unbalanced and with a heavy tendency towards a negative flow if only a few heavy spending referenda were approved so we would like to maintain this conservative approach to spending unless the market conditions improve significantly. So our plan for large requests 10M USD and more will be almost always negative with +3M 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.
Funding fields.
- Core Research and Development
Core research and development like Snowbridge, Storage, PAPI, Plaza, Technical Fellowship, etc. Will be seen in a positive light and we would like to fully support its development as long as they show commitment. Due to the large size of the JAM prize we believe that most of the funding towards JAM should be funded by it. In addition, only research closely related to Polkadot and related technologies will be considered for treasury funding as edge research should be funded by the 10 million DOT fund that is going to be provided by the W3F introduced by: A New Chapter for Kusama | Web3 Foundation Proposes 10M DOT Initiative to Fuel ZK Innovation and Network Sovereignty | by Web3 Foundation Team | Web3 Foundation | Feb, 2025 | Medium (if approved)
- Tooling
We would like to put emphasis of wallets, explorers, governance forums 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). In addition to that, given the size of some fund requests, quality and sustained support will be pushed by us. We’ve had already surprises with more expensive second milestones, lack of continued support as well as (lack of) quality of certain deliveries so tooling will continue to be more scrutinized. Impact is now a consideration too, tools that don’t gain significant adoption within a reasonable period will also be discontinued, there are already sites that got support from the treasury that are defunct.
- Decentralized Applications
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, Payment Rails 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.
- Economic Incentives to projects
Only applicable to large products with either high potential of growth (Hydration, Hyperbridge) or a concise plan for returns (Bifrost, Centrifuge). We would like to continue support towards growth economic incentives as long as projects don’t become dependent on them. So possibly a single support for projects seeking incentives will be considered and multiple times support for those who can provide returns. Risk of losing funds, hack risk and other risks will be considered for other types of repeated economic incentives to projects.
- Outreach
Events and meetups should reach out to the event and meetups bounties but there is nothing wrong with a direct request either, these will be analyzed case by case. Other outreach proposals like marketing, advertisement, sponsorships should be redirected to bounty 33 or be presented directly to OpenGov if the maximum funding limit is reached. There is nothing wrong with direct referenda either and they will be analyzed case-by-case with bias for native content creators. KOL expenditure will likely be NAYed by us.
As for sponsorships, we find that it’s one of the costs that can balloon up expenditures significantly and become widespread due to its ease of inclusion. With three approved sponsorships in 2024 and already 3 sponsorship proposals in two months of 2025 as well as rumors of a 4th and 5th we believe that outreach efforts should not be focused on seeking sponsorship partners as heavily as it is now. These will be judged with extreme prejudice due to the significant number of them.
- 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.
- DF funded teams
A common misconception among voters is that DF funded teams have all the funds that they need and more so treasury funding becomes redundant. We are aware of many of the actual numbers and lock times so helping DF teams fund their final vision is also something that we aim to support as long as it is well structured.
- Bounty expansion
The reality is that with a larger and more specialized community and (decentralized) applications, a larger number and more specialized number of bounties will appear. In principle, we don’t think an increase in the number of bounties as well as more specialization is a bad thing as long as they remain conclusively useful and active.
[EDIT March 6th]
- Ambassador Fellowship
We believe that this effort still needs to mature significantly, it needs more coordination and it also requires to be significantly more functional than what it is today in order to take on more ambitious roles and increased funding. Future funding should be analyzed carefully for that reason and past results should be a core decision rationale.
[EDIT ends]
Plan for Kusama.
We believe we did our best during cohort 3 to provide a comparable experience to Polkadot despite Kusama’s faster referendum times. We will continue significant experimentation during our 4th tenure if selected specially in the areas of spam detection, malicious detection as well as error referenda detection and its automatic voting.
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.