How are Parity and W3F actually funded?

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Hello,

I know this might be a controversial question and I am not even sure if everything I am asking about here can be disclosed but nevertheless, I’ll try. I’ve been recently talking to a few people about the DOT token recently and I was told it is actually not really worth any significant investment since Parity/W3F is dumping it all the time in order to fund Polkadot development. To be honest, I consider it actually a good thing since it makes the ecosystem self-sustainable but it got me thinking about how the funding of development/marketing/etc of Polkadot actually works.

So here comes a few questions I had in my mind about this topic

  • How is the Parity/W3F being paid? Is it staking profits? Development for other projects? DOTs from the treasury?
  • How do W3F grants work? I didn’t notice there’s any on-chain governance involved so where are the grant funds taken from?
  • Are there any other activities that are being paid for marketing/development/etc that don’t go through the regular on-chain governance process?
  • Is it possible to have a peek into the actual numbers?
  • Are there any sources to read on what Parity/W3F is actually doing (yeah, I know, developing & researching:)? Is it just Polkadot or are they involved in other projects/ventures? Would be interesting to know how many developers/researchers we actually have!

Again, I am sorry if these questions are too blunt but on the other hand, more transparency should never hurt :slight_smile: Thanks for any replies!

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I’m not commenting on behalf of Parity / W3F, but I believe a good majority of funding was from the inital private / public sales (thus DOT / KSM isn’t needed to be sold on an ongoing basis to fund things).

W3F grant funds are also usually not paid in DOT/KSM, but in stablecoins, btc, or otherwise. All the details about the grants process is fairly transparent here

Parity / W3F is working on a lot of things, but the focus of it all is generally to flesh out Polkadot and the broader ecosystem. Parity (as of now) is a little over 300 people across multiple teams and departments.

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Hey @pmensik, I don’t have a good answer for you myself - I don’t know what I can say officially on the matter and I don’t know much, but one thing I CAN say in my official capacity is that you should absolutely not feel sorry for asking, it is a perfectly valid question and love that you are inquisitive. Always ask away - worst case in any matter will be that we just can’t give a clear answer, you’ll never be in trouble as long as the ask is constructive and in good tone, and yours is just fantastically nice.

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Just to add a few things here:

  • Compared to almost every other grants program out there, the Web3 Foundation Grants program is completely transparent on GitHub, including the deliveries, and the on-chain payment mostly in stablecoins to avoid market fluctuation. So you can actually see that we are continuously supporting projects in our ecosystem. The grants program is funded via the original token sale and is a way for us to give this money back to the community. (Feel free to apply for a grant! We are always looking for new projects.)
  • Apart from this, we participate with our funds in the Thousand Validators Programme, and this way, we help the network as well as get staking rewards.
  • Neither Web3 Foundation nor Parity does get any direct funding from the treasury at this stage (see all the public treasury spending proposals).
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