I want to take the time to thank everyone who has been part of the Treasury management discussion since it emerged during Q1 of this year. We have come a long way and a lot of ideas have been talked about and even tested on chain. My only regret is that we haven’t seen much systemic change, only change in the behavior of a few token-centralized entities. As such I just want to express my continued commitment to the ecosystem and to a sustainable and effective Treasury.
I also want to take a moment to apologize for some of my behavior. I understand that I have been hotheaded at times and may have offended a few key players in the ecosystem. Allowing my passion to enflame the discussion was not correct and moving forward I will attempt to dull my sharp edge when challenging ideas.
Now that the dust has settled, allow me to summarize my current opinions on the topics discussed so far:
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Regarding the Fellowship, I now understand that it is a vitally important group of individuals who are acting in good faith across the board, afaik. At the onset of my setCode referendum, I felt frustrated that my tact was being criticized. At the time I thought a root track referendum was my only option for making any real change since I am not fluent in the Polkadot stack and I thought, from my past trivial PR experiences, the Fellowship would never listen to me. Little did I know there is a reasonable process for someone like me that only requires a little bit of initiative to push engagement from the Fellowship: RFC → PR → Merge & Release.
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Regarding the Treasury, I still believe we should reconfigure the limited spending tracks as I suggested to effectively cap the spending rate. However, with Jonas’ proposal to adjust the inflation model to boost revenue to the Treasury and expose track params to openGov, I think we ought to wait until these features are implemented. A part of me is frustrated that we have to wait, especially when Kusama is supposed to be fast and loose, but I suppose patience and temperance are keys to success.
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Regarding the process for change, I think there needs to be far better documentation laying out the proper avenues for people outside of the Fellowship to suggest changes in a meaningful manner. I don’t think the Fellowship or Parity ever made any earnest attempts to disseminate awareness of this process to the masses. I think people and organizations within the ecosystem should make publications about the proper way to make suggestions for runtime/ client changes. If anything was made clear through all of this it’s that almost no one outside of Parity/ the Fellowship knew there was a proper way.
Finally, I’d like to frame my behavior in some personal context. As some of you may know, Steeber Solutions was funded for Project Gweihir in January and we shipped all of our deliverables which were showcased on AAG #41. Building Gweihir gave our contractors, our business, and my family financial security for the better half of a year. In return we built scalable & decentralizable infrastructure that successfully relayed data from Kusama to Sepolia with a simple smart contract call on Sepolia. However, in response to HACNA and other NAY whales totally strong-arming spending referenda on Kusama, I decided not to pursue further funding from the Treasury to complete Gweihir’s ultimate vision of adapting all of Polkadot’s API to a Chainlink oracle on Ethereum. I didn’t want to do a song and dance just to be NAY’d and I also didn’t feel right asking for funds when the Treasury was bleeding out. So I shifted my focus to fixing the Treasury so that I could ask for funds with a good conscience and get back to building Gweihir. As a result, I’ve been in limbo not really knowing what to do or how to actually make meaningful change. Also frankly, I’m getting crushed financially with the expense of all the infrastructure I’m shouldering now; close to $1,200 per month. I really don’t want to spin down my validator, collator, or Gweihir but I’m running out of options. So the pressure within me to fix the Treasury builds day by day, monthly bill by monthly bill. But I suppose it’s out of my hands. Perhaps I should swallow my pride and throw my hat back into the Treasury for Gweihir’s continuance…
In any case, my next initiative is to comb through all of the discussions and contributions made about Treasury management throughout the last 6 months to discover tip-able individuals. As one of the people helping spearhead Treasury management, I feel personally responsible for making sure that everyone who provided value in this endeavor, who isn’t already on a payroll, is recognized and compensated for their time. I really hope the ecosystem will be willing to spend some of the Treasury to reward these individuals. So keep your eyes peeled on Polkassembly for a discussion (hopefully soon)!
Solemnly yours,
Adam