Some of my toxic govfrens have been messaging me, insisting that everything is ok, asserting we have plenty of new builders instead, and suggesting I need to check the numbers and other stuff.
Ok, let’s do some quick math.
Let’s scrutinize the spenders at this moment. We have an expelled small spender with 4 proposals. Currently, there are 13 proposals in medium spender and 4 in large, totaling 21.
What are these proposals about? A total of 11 of them are related to tech. One of them is Apillon (which we skip from the start), another one is on the wrong track by Notify. So, 9 proposals are related to tech (out of an effective 19).
What kind of proposals are these?
5 of them involve continued development (Brushfam (referenda 153), some Libs, and so on).
2 of them are integrations of something existing (Banxa, Notify).
Only 2 of them present new stuff by new teams: Polkadot Live and Motif.
So, we have 2 new tech from 21 proposals.
Polkadot Live (with helping Ross and Decoded showcase (nice YouTube video, though)),
Motif (with research and provides public unique data (50+ pages of numbers, I can’t take so much, cut it!)).
Both are committed. Their team members have been here for a while.
But if you examine the votes, they are hugely NAY-ed! More than 1.1 million dots against both of them. This is quite a substantial chunk of funds, to be clear - $4+ million! Meaning, owners of millions of dollars are against these projects for some reason.
What’s more interesting, these projects have a significant number of votes against equally. Even more: votes against are clustered into two groups - one simultaneously votes for Polkaworld, the other for Apillon and Polkaworld. All have on-chain ID, some activity, and vote in bundles with a difference of a few minutes. Both proposals have no comments from them.
Live votes look better than motif - some whale has already entered it, so the chart looks somewhat better (but without whale they losing). Apparently, motif has no whales or dolphins supporting it.
So, the feeling is that, possibly, this month we will get one new experimental project (with one builder onboard).
Ps. I hope i provide research about full opengov data, but so far, we have only 1 new tech funded so far: Magnet.
PSS. Someone might argue that we don’t need new builders or we don’t need to support them here. This argument becomes quite amusing in light of events such as Astar’s departure, the decommissioning of the parachain concept, a disintegrating ecosystem, and the absence of VC funding within. But again - you can use this post as a research about plutocracy and outcomes.