Last-Minute 100K DOT Payout đź’° before Bounty 22 (PAL) closure

Ecosystem
1

About a month ago, a referendum was approved to close Bounty 22, which still held a balance of roughly 400K DOT.

Now we’ve discovered that, just before the bounty was closed, one of its members paid themselves over 100K DOT with the description:

Invoice: INV/26-2 | Milestone 3 + 4 | Project: 2501 - Monitoring Tool

What are Milestones 3+4 of project 2501?
What monitoring tool? Where is it?

You can see here what this account has withdrawn +160K DOT in just a couple of months and unsurprisingly, those DOT have already found their way to an exchange.

Does anyone know who is behind this account, and how was this approved by the curators?
@albertov19 @cl0w @VinceCorsica

2

All bounties must be eliminated.

Funding should be direct only through referendum; we must not let them steal from us anymore.

This can never happen again.

3

Hey,

This was part of RFP2501 → 2501 - Monitoring Tool (Closed) | DOT PAL

The Ocelloids team delivered https://xcscan.io & https://hyperion.soda.zone/ through this RFP. These tools have been super helpful for the ecosystem, as they’ve flagged some inconsistencies in XCM transfers, and allow teams to create governance related alerts (to prevent governance attacks) among other things.

DOTPAL (Bounty 22) published community reports were all spends were detailed. The one related to the 100k DOT can be found here → 2026 / Q2 | DOT PAL

This was Milestone 3 (which they completed), and because the bounty was shutting down but the Bounty already committed to Milestone 4 (and they were actively working on it) we proceed with its payout and will upload the report once available, we informed W3F of this before they submitted the proposal to shutdown the bounty.

The note `Invoice: INV/26-2 | Milestone 3 + 4 | Project: 2501 - Monitoring Tool` was per Ocelloids team request, as they needed this for invoicing purposes.

All the work they carried out can be found in their GitHub, as one of the main requirements was that all the code had to be open source → SO/DA zone · GitHub

Happy to answer any other question

4

I have a question regarding the Monitoring Tool project and would appreciate more transparency around the original proposal.

Could you please share the initial proposal submitted by SODA Zone for the development of Ocelloids? It would be helpful for the community to have visibility into the team behind the project and how the funded work was structured.

Looking at the payments made to the SODA Zone account, I noticed the following transfers:

  • 17/12/2025 - 23,712 DOT
  • 31/03/2026 - 37,251 DOT (~3,5 months later)
  • 15/06/2026 - 102,004 DOT (~2,5 months later)

Could you please share the original milestone and payment schedule from the approved proposal so the community can understand how these payments were mapped to the planned deliverables?

In particular, it would be useful to understand:

  • What deliverables were associated with each milestone.
  • The expected timeline for each milestone.
  • The budget allocation for each phase.
  • The reason why the final milestone represented a significantly larger payment compared to the previous ones.

Having the original proposal, milestone breakdown, and deliverables available would help the community evaluate the execution of the project against the initial plan.

5

Community Reports | DOT PAL you can dig around here. We published quarterly reports.

6

Thanks, but that’s not what I’m asking for.

Community reports are not a substitute for the original proposal. I’m asking for the documents that formed the basis for approving and paying more than 160k DOT:

  • the original proposal;
  • the milestone definition;
  • the deliverables;
  • the budget breakdown;
  • and the payment schedule.

Without those documents, it’s impossible for the community to assess whether the project was delivered according to the original plan.

I’m also trying to understand is the timing. The referendum was published on 29 May 2026, while the final payment of 102,004 DOT was made on 15 June 2026, only a couple of weeks later. Could you clarify how these dates relate to the original milestone schedule?

Another point that caught my attention is that the repository still shows commits made after the final payment was released. That naturally raises questions about the project’s completion status at the time the final milestone was approved.

I’m not suggesting there was anything improper, but this is precisely why I’m asking for the original proposal, milestone definitions, and acceptance criteria.

Once the original proposal and milestone breakdown are shared, the community will be able to compare the planned deliverables with the work completed at each payment stage.

7

As I mentioned before we decided to pay the last milestone while is still being developed because that was a commitment we made as curators of the Bounty to Ocelloids before W3F decided to shutdown the bounty. So, after discussions with W3F, we decided to pay up the entire milestone while still being developed as the Ocelloids team have had an excellent track record and have been part of the ecosystem for years.

For transparency purpose we create the community reports and we add all the necessary reporting there. When Ocelloids completes the last milestone, they’ll share a report with us (we are still in touch), and we’ll publish it in the website.

8
9

Thanks for the clarification regarding the decision to release the final payment before the last milestone was completed. That explains the timing.

However, my original questions still haven’t been answered.

I’ve now asked twice for the original proposal submitted by SODA Zone, including:

  • the team behind the proposal and the people responsible for the project;
  • the original scope and objectives;
  • the milestone definitions and expected deliverables;
  • the budget breakdown for each milestone; and
  • the original payment schedule.

The community reports are useful for tracking progress, but they are not a substitute for the proposal that formed the basis for approving more than 160,000 DOT of Treasury funding.

I also understand that the final milestone was paid before completion due to the closure of the bounty, but that makes access to the original proposal even more important. Without it, the community has no way to compare what was originally approved with what was ultimately delivered.

This bounty was overseen by a team of 5–6 curators who, collectively, received significant compensation for managing the program, reviewing milestones, and authorizing Treasury spending. With that responsibility comes an expectation of transparency around the projects that were funded.

Could you therefore please share the original proposal, or explain why it cannot be made public?

I don’t think this is an unreasonable request. Publishing the original proposal, the milestone definitions, the deliverables, and the budget allocation would allow the community to understand how the funding decisions were made and evaluate the project’s execution against the original commitments.

10

Reading this thread, what stands out is that nothing here looks improper. The RFP is public, the deliverables exist and are open source, quarterly reports were published, and Albert answered within hours with a coherent explanation for the early payout.

And yet three posts in, the community still can’t independently verify whether 160K DOT bought what it was supposed to buy… because the original scope, milestone definitions and acceptance criteria were never on-chain in the first place. Everything we’re relying on lives in a website, a quarterly PDF and the memory of the curators who made the call.

That’s the real finding. This is roughly the good case: competent curators, real deliverables, a responsive answer. If verification is still this hard in the good case, we have no mechanism at all for the bad one, we just have trust in the individuals holding the curator seats, which happened to be well placed this time.

Three structural gaps are visible from this thread alone. Scope and acceptance criteria were never committed on-chain before funds moved, so there’s no reference to audit against. A tranche was released for work that was still in progress, on a judgement call made under closure pressure, with no delay window in which anyone could have raised an objection. And whatever the outcome turns out to be, it carries no consequence for the curators either way… approval and outcome are financially disconnected.

Worth saying that “remove the bounties pallet” doesn’t fix any of those three. Routing this through a direct referendum instead would have produced the same missing acceptance criteria and the same unverifiable outcome, just spread across a much larger group with no one specifically answerable. The problem isn’t the pallet, it’s that delegated spending has no accountability layer.

I’ve been building one (why? because i can). Five FRAME pallets are live on Paseo… on-chain milestone definitions before funds move, escrow that withholds part of each tranche until final delivery, a mandatory delay between curator quorum and any large release, and curator reputation scored retrospectively when a project reaches its terminal state rather than at approval. It’s the same failure set this thread surfaced, addressed structurally. Full write-up here: Bounty 22 was close to the good case. We still can't verify it

Disclosure: this is my own project (Two Pebbles Ventures). Happy to have the design attacked… that’s more useful to me than agreement.

11

I think we’re talking about different things.

My question is simple: where is the original proposal submitted by SODA Zone?

Community reports are not a substitute for the original proposal, which should include the team, scope, milestones, deliverables and budget.

Curators are compensated to review proposals and approve Treasury spending, so I think it’s reasonable for the community to have access to the document that justified more than 160k DOT in funding.

12

Why has the original proposal still not been shared, despite being requested multiple times? Transparency should be a basic requirement for treasury-funded initiatives. :thinking: