Marketing Bounty Deep Dive (Revived)

[sorpaas]

@flez

numbers this bad should have sparked a reset months ago.

the marketing bounty reports keep coming out, but its the same ol’ story. months of big spending, vague updates, and no clear proof of growth. before another top up hits the treasury, it’s worth looking at what the data actually says.

I tried to look deeper into marketing bounty’s accounting sheet, and I think what happened is this:

• There’s a budget of marketing bounty (200000 DOT per month), and their goal seems to be just spending them all.

In another word, the spending is not based on what is required (“we need to do this, so let’s spend this amount of dots”), but what they had (“we have 200k DOT budget per month, and let’s find ways to spend it”). This will explain a lot of the rather unethical behaviors.

In the end, the returned amount, from marketing bounty back to the treasury (197,617 DOT), just corresponds to roughly one month of the budget, which further proves this theory.

If you ask me, I would say that the issue is the entire OpenGov bounty system, which encourages this kind of misuse, because it’s based on budget, not on need.