DOT Events Bounty Report for Q3 2025 (July 1st - September 30th)

Ecosystem
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Dear Community,

We’re excited to share the Q3 2025 DOT Events Bounty Report, covering the period from July 1st to September 30th. Following the introduction of our Live Reporting Board in the Q2 report, all Events Bounty submissions, decisions, payouts, and returned funds continue to be fully transparent and tracked in real time.

This quarter continued to drive global engagement across major industry activations and community-led initiatives, including strong progress within the Polkadot Roots program and multiple high-impact Extraordinary Events.

Key Highlights

  • Total Submissions: 75

  • Total Approved for Funding: 49

  • Savings Achieved: $593,352.39

  • Operational Overheads: 19,571 DOT

Remaining Bounty Funds

  • 560,172 DOT (Bounty)

  • 3 DOT & 1,397 USDT (Multi)

Funded Events Include

  • GM Vietnam

  • Blockchain Rio

  • Polkadot India Workshop Series

  • SHAKA 2025

  • Coinfest Bali

    • 19 Polkadot Roots events across Berlin, China, India, Toronto & more

:backhand_index_pointing_right: View full event list and payout details here

Reflections & Learnings

This quarter helped refine how we prioritize and evaluate event funding. Key improvements going forward include:

  • Stronger coordination with Parity & W3F on high-impact industry events and KPIs

  • Encouraging more creative, mission-aligned event formats

  • Assessing the impact of online vs. offline hackathon models

  • Introducing Impact Reports for recurring series to better measure long-term value

What’s Next

The Events Bounty will continue focusing on Key Industry Event participation and sustainable community growth throughout the ecosystem.

Key initiatives include:

  • Polkadot Roots — Tiered Organizer Growth
    Introducing a gamified experience so new meetup organizers can progress through tiers as they gain experience developed in collaboration with the Meetups Bounty.

  • Strategic Conference Prioritization
    Finalizing a new 2026 Master Conference List with Parity and the Web3 Foundation,

  • Event Organizer Resource Center
    Publishing a comprehensive hub to support event execution, including manuals, design templates, branding assets, and best-practice guidance for organizers worldwide.

The full report - including financials, curator operations, and onchain data is available below, alongside our real-time tracking dashboard. You can also visit the Events Bounty website to learn how to participate or propose an event:

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Live Reporting Board
:backhand_index_pointing_right: Full Q3 Report
:backhand_index_pointing_right: Events Bounty Website

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Thank you to the team for the Q3 2025 Report and the continued commitment to transparency with the Live Reporting Board.

As was done for the Marketing Bounty, it would be highly beneficial to evaluate the real impact of the Events Bounty activities.

Though the direct ROI or long-term benefit for Polkadot from individual events is difficult to quantify, given that this bounty has been operational for over two years, shouldn’t now the curators be able to present some key ROI indicators (apart from the “Savings“—mainly value of the rejected submissions)?

Furthermore, I would like to raise a concern regarding the curators’ compensation and the operational overheads, as the data provided in this report offers interesting points for re-evaluation.

Each quarter we see an average of ~$85,000 in operational and administrative costs. This means the Event Bounty has cost ~$255,000 so far this year (for the first 9 months of the year), with an estimate of ~$340,000 for the full year 2025.

NOT BAD.

Let’s write down some numbers and breakdown the actual workload:

  • Total Submissions (each quarter): ~75 (approx. 25 per month)

  • Curators: 7 (or 6 + 1/2 Sub-curators)

  • Rejection Rate: ~35%

What do these numbers reveal?

With 25 submissions per month, each curator handles approximately 3.5 requests monthly.

Applying the 65% approval rate (3.5 requests * 0.65), this means each curator handles approximately 2.3 approved requests per month.

Given that 50% of submissions are simpler meetups or Roots (submitted by ‘trusted’ members of the community, potentially requiring less heavy curation), this roughly translates to each curator actively handling around 1.15 more complex event requests per month.

Question: Is the monthly compensation of $4,000 (recently increased to $5,300 or 4,400 EUR for each of the 6/7 curators justified based purely on this calculated volume of curation work?

While I acknowledge that curation involves more than just processing submissions—e.g., strategy (?!), reporting (once per quarter), communications,—the number of highly paid curators relative to the few complex requests raises questions about operational efficiency that maybe need a deeper look.

It would be nice even to have further clarification on the full scope of the curator role and the justification for the recent salary increase, especially in the context of this specific workload calculation.

Appreciate!

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Dear Mark65,

Thank you for the questions!

You can find the full details of the EB curator compensation in the latest top up proposal.

Each proposal needs to be reviewed by a minimum of 4 curators, but in most cases it is reviewed by the entire curator set. Keep in mind that the quorum required to make a decision on a proposal is 4 votes. So the statement that each curator only reviews 3.5 proposals per quarter is not correct.

On top of the proposals, there are reports, which in many cases require far more research and reviews than the actual proposal. The reviews include going through all the receipts (this has been proven to be quite lengthy for Key Events, for an example), swap sheets, slippage returns etc. So the amount of time going into reviews is really much higher than what is stated here, respectfully.

Additionally, each curator has additional responsibilities besides reviewing proposals. These include, for example: reviewing designs, managing the website, X account, advising and guiding proponents, designing, maintaining, and growing the Roots program, putting together a Key Events Calendar, coordinating BD, creating resources…

We would also like to state that once Q4 is over, the EB will release an extensive report in Q1 2026 with full data insights of 2025. We are also liaising with members of Parity & W3F to align on priorities for 2026 and key learnings from the full tenure of the Events Bounty to date.

Thanks.

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Thank you for the detailed clarification and share the top up proposal but this response has unfortunately raised more serious questions regarding operational efficiency and value delivery.

  1. Inefficiency of the Review Process

  • Your statement that “in most cases it is reviewed by the entire curator set” directly contradicts the documented structure outlined in the top-up proposal: “Curators are divided per seat and role for simpler management of bounty tasks…”

    If roles are divided for simpler management, yet all curators review most submissions, this confirms a very inefficient process. This approach is absurdly conterproductive. It is like asking every developer in the fellowship to develop, review, and sign off on the same piece of code. Do you understand the absurdity of this statement?

    In the end, this is a redundant activity driving up the operational costs (~$350,000 projected for 2025) without demonstrably improving the quality and speed of the decision-making for every single proposal.

    Maybe it would be more efficient an approach where simple requests (Meetups/Roots) are fast-tracked by a subset of curators, freeing up the rest to focus their combined efforts only on the most proactively contribute even in persone to key events and strategic planning.

    1. Justification of Duties

    The list of additional responsibilities (reviewing designs, managing the website, X account, creating resources, etc.) unfortunately sounded as an excuses intended to justify the $5,300 USD monthly compensation and the claimed 65 hours of work (for €70/hour).

    These tasks could be covered by one or two specialized roles across other bounties and initiatives (e.g., Marketing, Meetup bounties or Community management, Editorial board, and other initiatives already paid for that), not highly compensated curators.

    1. Call for Proactive Curation and Leadership

    If the curators are being paid for strategic involvement and coordination, the role should shift from being purely passive and reactive to being proactive and leading by example:

  • Active Organization: Instead of just waiting for proposals, evaluating them, and then chasing organizers to return funds (few DOTs), the curators could actively organize and lead major, high-impact events themselves.

  • Demonstrable Leadership: Curators could be present and speak at the events they fund, acting as clear, visible representatives of Polkadot (or at least not their own projects) and the Events Bounty, rather than remaining behind-the-scenes auditors and administrators.

This urge the team to critically re-evaluate the operational structure. A clear, efficient, and proactive model is essential to ensure the operational overheads truly generate value that justifies the expense to the Polkadot Treasury.

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Dear Mark65,

While we understand your concerns – this is how most bounties operate. A single curator cannot make a decision on a proposal, as this would raise conflicts of interest, and create further centralization. Additionally, one person can miss certain details in a proposal.

Historically this is how bounties have functioned. If you have an issue with the process, each DAO member can raise a wish for a change proposal and influence the system.

The roles are separated indeed, as they apply to tasks beyond pure proposal revisions, as described in the previous response.

Labour is weighed differently, and delegating the duties of the Events Bounty operations to other groups would fall outside of their own scope, respectfully. The curators primarily focus on these within the framework of events.

It has never been the role of the Events Bounty curators to organize events themselves, and this will unlikely change in the future without specific approval from OpenGov. Note that such tasks would also require full-time work as event management and production, which are paid far more than the current rates you are flagging as excessive (feel free to check the standards and you will see that senior event managers in tech companies usually get much more than the curator salary).

It would be very counterproductive and expensive to send the curators to the events, as this requires travel and accommodation budgets. The curators are not necessarily speakers who should represent Polkadot; those are the projects within the ecosystem, W3F, Parity, etc. Suitable speakers are selected and funded on an event-by-event basis depending on the relevant topics and geography.

Please be aware that if the changes you are proposing were enacted, the burn rate of the EB would be far higher than it is now.

You are welcome to drop by our office hours this week at 3PM CET on Wednesday and ask further questions, as your comments indicate a fundamental lack of understanding on the topics of financing, reviewing and executing events.