The usual strategy: no one is paid by Polkadot, no one is funded by the treasury, Jam isn’t funded by Polkadot either all his DOTs were magically printed out of thin air. Honestly, the Fed should ask us for a tutorial on how to print magic money.Thank you for your questions @cpiccard they’re always really interesting to read.
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What’s shocking to me is that the Head of Protocol received 7 likes on the post where he claimed Polkadot does’t pay him—while simultaneously having a treasury referendum open asking for money.
Do people actually applaud him for bending the truth as if it were some great feat accomplished?
I don’t mind if the treasury funds parts or all of JAM btw, but introducing a new token would be a slap in the face of every holder.
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A16Z has some pretty good points here:
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“Our Head of Protocol”? Do you work for Global Stake?
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Thanks, I’ve updated my sloppy choice of words in that comment.
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Referring to him as “Head of Protocol” is still incorrect.
His title is “Head of Protocol Partnerships” and he works at Global Stake, an entirely independent company which happens to run some validators on Polkadot.
I think it was obvious to everyone reading his comment in good faith that he means that his salary is not paid by Polkadot or any related entity, not that he never has and never will receive funding from the Polkadot Treasury.
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Currently waiting for my unstaking period… only 8 days left 
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You’re beating the wrong horse here. Phunky is 0% responsible for the state of things and has done a lot to try to sway things in the direction he thinks is best. I don’t always agree with that direction but I don’t always disagree either. Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean that they’re being malicious.
There are a couple ivory towers with many a king and queen who were responsible for planning this whole thing from the start. The ivory towers were directly funded by investors. Those towers were built to better polkadot and polkadot related tech. We’re now ~6 years on with very little and nothing “usable” to show for it. Those towers hesitant, still, even now, to do things that are necessary. The kind of disassociation due to lack of market feedback forces that A16Z mentioned really hits home and would explain a lot of what I’m seeing.
But, If it’s the finances you’re concerned about – You should do some on-chain research about bonuses. The bonuses are all on chain and would put any complaint you have about how much people in the ecosystem are paid – to absolute shame.
The question everyone needs to answer is why will no other VCs work or invest on polkadot tech? Well, that’s not really true though is it – Avail had no problem, Bittensor had no problem. So what’s the difference? Figure it out and you have your answer.
I’ll tell you one thing – working in polkadot has really lowered my view of advanced degrees and institutions of higher learning.
Where are these people? – I can only assume they were murdered and replaced by reptoids.
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You’re probably right about Phunky.
I also see A16Z’s point.
Many who joined Polkadot early on likely started out with idealistic intentions and are now disillusioned.
I assume you’re referring to bonus payments like those made by the Web3 Foundation?
I’m aware of them—though I don’t know the exact figures, I know enough to say that most people would likely be shocked if they heard the numbers.
My impression is that a lot of DOT is being spent with little meaningful impact.
OpenGov seems designed to incentivize contributors to push through their own referenda, rather than focusing on customers or users.
There seems to be a lack of passion and responsibility.
Same goes for the ivory towers you mentioned.
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Realistically, we haven’t really been spending that much comparatively to other ecosystems. We lack the resources of other ecosystems and we lack the full backing of the company and foundation to the ecosystem so expenses hit harder.
- Disclaimer: I am about to say a bunch of things that may be based on 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc hand information that may be completely inaccurate, not completely accurate and/or personal opinions *
IMO, The start of the failure happened when the ethereum became locked in the smart contract. My understanding is, additional funds were raised which is what allowed Giotto to have as much DOT as he did. My understanding is that both ivory towers, financially, are fine and have plenty of capital to persist – but they don’t have enough capital to take chances and fail – which is why you see hesitancy and failure to act.
Technology wise, Polkadot is the best thing since sliced bread. They have fully delivered on the underlying promise of the tech and Jam is just that much more with even someone like myself who “can code” but is not really a “coder” being able to vibe code myself a parachain over a weekend.
All of the failure comes from the ecosystem side, which, is where the DOT token lives, the “Polkadot Ecosystem”. My understanding is that Parity and W3F initially, early on, were focused on bringing on projects and teams more corporate and less Anarcho-capitalist in nature. There were some limited successes but not enough to establish a foot print or a functioning ecosystem. Because Parity is focused on the tech they’re not solely focused on the “Polkadot Ecosystem”, it would be considered a success if a team launches a solo chain using polkadot-sdk which does nothing for core time demand or the polkadot ecosystem. The same is true for the Web3 foundation – if you look at the ecosystem jobs board it includes jobs for projects you’ve never heard of because they don’t live on polkadot even though they are using polkadot-sdk. Even their mission statement has nothing about Polkadot – it’s all generic Web3 terminology. Web3 foundation could fund a project on Ethereum and wouldn’t violate their mandate. Now, the lawyers who would have advised them would have told them to do this to avoid possible issues in the future related to expenditures not on point with their mission. But in the end, we’re the ones getting screwed.
Ok, so, then they all fired a bunch of employees, the people they let go were a lot of the ones responsible for the ecosystem side that led to many of the failures. Then they “handed it over to the ecosystem” with the “decentralized futures”. The ecosystem thought this meant massive funding to build up the necessary structures for an ecosystem to exist perpetually in a decentralized state. But instead it’s just small independent companies operating independently as if they had put in opengov requests. I had incorrectly expected many of the individuals to step up and try to form some cohesive direction but what we got was HACN and Giotto. No collectives, no societies, limited bounties, limited programs, completely structureless. I tried for awhile to push things in a direction with limited success. Then we had Giotto come along with the ability to force his will but unfortunately his will wasn’t very well thought out and very basic. I don’t know how many multi-hour long voice exchanges I had with that guy. Some things he was right about however, the executions lacked forethought. Like, yes, we need marketing, everyone agrees, but no one ever stopped to have the conversation, who should we invite here, why are we inviting them here and what will they do when they get here?
Which, to me, brings it to the crux of the failure, the lack of usable products and services in the ecosystem. Like we have hydradx and bifrost but they can’t live in a vacuum. Without other products and services bring people here those will ultimately die or like other projects move away. Maybe at one point the thought was that projects like Astar, Acala, Moonbeam, etc would have created those ecosystems but the parachains launched too late and they never gained any traction when interest was high and lack or weren’t able to build communities on the level of some other projects out there. This is around the time we started getting system chains and system chains are supposed to provide niche use case to the network and systems. Identity, Bridging, Assets, this is great but without the overall volumes of people we won’t be driving the transactions necessary to generate value for the ecosystem.
Then we bring it to mythical, probably the first actual use case parachain, but if I put my pragmatic hat on, mythical’s only real value to polkadot is in myth cross chain transactions and playing games on mythical. This is a use case, this is something on the network people can be driven to. But even if mythical is doing $100 trillion a year in game asset transactions via market place, they can still do all of that on a single core. It would not for example make sense for the treasury to maintain the inter miami sponsorship to attempt to drive users to fifa rivals. If fifa rivals is successful, it does not help polkadot and certainly not at the cost of 10% of the remaining on-chain treasury.
Then we have basically everything else, A number of the parachains I’m not even sure what they do, many of the parachains are operating on older versions of substrate that they clearly haven’t been maintained going on 2-3+ years – many still operating under substrate 0.9.x. Which, ok, fine, you shouldn’t be required to maintain head on substrate, gav said so himself you can upgrade when you feel like it which allows you to focus on your app but if you check their GH repos they haven’t even been producing new runtimes for years.
There are some new projects that include founders or other members of older projects that already exist here which do have some funds available but collectively, not enough for us to establish a real polkadot ecosystem. Some of the projects are doing well but they’re similarly hurt by lack of cohesive ecosystem. If other VCs and investors aren’t interested in funding projects in the eco system then we’re siloed to the existing VCs and investors that we have now.
Robonomics just posted this the other day – them and their devices could have been a big user of DA.
So, what do we do?
Well, if I were elected dictator for a day of the Polkadot DAO… Here’s what I would do…
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Forget that Parity and W3F exist. You mentioned previously that you don’t understand why anyone won’t be accountable. People can’t be accountable if they don’t think there’s a problem. To them, they have nothing to be accountable for.
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Instruct the fellowship to create a number of open market place system chains that can be utilized to provide peer to peer services or allow additional use cases. Why a system chain? A system chain is the only realistic way to develop a fee based system that can be denominated in DOT or can be denominated in stables that make sense – completely treasury funded to provide treasury with revenue.
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Storage (DA – I have been told this is coming, I have no idea when. But it is in the form that seems most optimal, IMO). This allows purchasers of storage to be matched with suppliers of storage.
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Messaging (Utilizing DA for encrypted peer-to-peer in one-to-one, one-to-many formats). For example, a parachain should be able to issue a message / alert and Nova Wallet or similar should be able to see that and allow the user to read the message with similar systems, filters, and abilities as email. Additionally I believe that we can build element on-chain leveraging “in-memory” DA where, contents are specifically stored in memory of storage nodes (can be enforced by proof requirements minimum MB/s memory bandwidth per time frame for proof generation). DA in-memory nodes would receive compensation for the usage. Storage costs are so low the deposits and on-going costs for this on a per user basis are very small (< $0.50/yr per user). Messages can have a lifespan defined by the sender so the receiver can reap the message and claim back the unused portion of storage for that message. Pay to spam, Get paid to be spammed. Ideally though, parachains could use it for marketing to existing holders or to notify their user base of an issue. As an open chat room system to replace our existing usage of element/matrix and as an email type system. No longer will we need to rely on twitter to get information out to users.
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IaaS Marketplace - One of my go to philosophies for business is, if you can provide the same or slightly better product for a slightly lower price, you win. Every time. If you look at the stats for the Akash network total spend for USDC Total, USDC Daily, AKT Total, and AKT Daily you will see some charts that will get investors excited. But, why do the charts look like this? Because of the popularity of AI and their ability to offer GPU Compute nodes substantially equivalent to leasing a google cloud node with a gpu and they have the newest H200 gpus and 1 gen old H100 gpus available. They do not have a massive number of them available but are typically >70% utilized continuously. But why are people using Akash over google cloud? Because it’s the lowest price available for these gpus anywhere in the world. If the treasury put $10M into purchasing gpus, had IBP members host them, had an akash style system, we could put those nodes and cards available for lease on-chain. With current prices, 50% average utilization and a 10% for provider and 90% return to treasury split (treasury pays for them, ibp hosts them) the return to treasury annually would be ~$12K/card with ~$1.3K/card going to the provider for hosting. For $10M this amounts to $3.9M/yr in USD revenue for treasury and $437K/yr for the providers hosting the cards (and providing the cpu, memory, disk, etc).
More recently many people have started operating their own vector databases so the public AI (chatgpt, claude, etc) can understand their code, documentation, etc up to the most recent commits / changes. I have considered doing this for the entirety of polkadot code, docs, websites, etc because quite often the AI has no idea about something polkadot related or new developments. To turn 1TB of data into a vector database would take a single H200 ~2-3 days.
It should be clear here though that this is a race to the bottom business model with a limited life as hardware is deprecated with time. I would expect a new H200 gpu to be valuable for at least the next 4-8 years. It would also allow the treasury to subsidize video cards for developers, community as needed to do things like making a polkadot vector database that I just discussed which would cost $7,000 on google cloud every time the database was updated. The A100 80GB which is a comparable card is still holding $17,000 resale value from $37,000 MSRP at 4 years of age. Which TBH, doesn’t make a lot of sense considering RTX 6000 PRO Blackwells are ~$8000 new and 1.7Tb/s vs 1.5Tb/s of the A100. But even if the A100 is holding 20% resale value after 4 years is pretty good considering the return would have been ~15M from the ~10M treasury investment.
- DNS Hosting & Registration - Utilizing the PCF we can either instruct the PCF to create a wholly owned LLC subsidiary in caymans to act as the Web 2.5 bridge between the Web 2.0 ↔ Web 3.0 or the PCF itself can act as the Web 2.5 bridge. The LLC would interface with ICANN and other entities as necessary to become compliant in whatever may be necessary to purchase, and own gTLDs. For ICANN to speak with us it may be required that we already own some number of domains. Again, the IBP which would largely be the same people operating validators, rpcs, providing storage, etc can provide the DNS hosting services required and as I mentioned in another thread to you, I have already developed something that can be turned into what would be necessary to bridge the onchain ↔ offchain DNS divide to provide authoritative DNS resolution services.
This would allow anyone to come to polkadot to purchase a .com or a .dot or whatever other domain. By purchasing our own gTLDs we can also create unique service offerings for domains that only we have. We can purchase symbols for other blockchains so if you wanted to buy .eth you have to come to polkadot to get it.
- The sky is kind of the limit but these are things I see we must have as a primarily infra / networking background and things that would play well on the block chain. We could even go so far as to develop open source WAF for deployment by decentralized members to provide PolkaFlare (as opposed to cloudflare). The treasury would collect a fee of all transactions as well as any special deals or incentives worked out with various parties.
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Rebuild all community marketing initiative to focus on user acquisition where user acquisition makes sense for the network. From my perspective we need to on-board additional A) Developers B) Founder Teams C) Users for applications where treasury generates revenue such as those described above.
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Incentivize the collectivization of the network by implementing my idea for “Decentralized Tribes”. The ambassador program is monumental failure and having some minor first hand experience with it prior to the great “decentralization” that happened. Essentially what happens is, people instinctively form tribes based on a variety of commonalities. When something like the ambassador program comes along everyone wants to bring their friends in. People who don’t typically interact due to differences in personality, style, etc are forced to interact and the result is drama. Person A doesn’t think Person B should have X title, they think so and so should have that slot. I would take the DV programs from the hands of the W3F and implement it as one of many verticals in a new ambassador program the “Decentralized Tribes”. We can leverage instinctive human actions of birds of a feather to get them to collectivize themselves. In the ambassador program, people only care if they get paid, they don’t care if someone is grifting, there is no incentive mechanism or possible arbitration to handle this. In the DAO format, the DAOs bottom line would be hurt by a grifter which would directly financially impact every other member of the DAO. This will cause them to self police and remove grifters from their ranks. I would take an outcome based focus to everything defining specific targets and metrics that we need to focus on, and focus on improving, for example, proposals being delivered on time, proposals being delivered, etc. Then we can start to take that “results driven approach” that a16z is talking about. I believe it’s possible for the DAOs that exist in polkadot now such as Chaos, Permanance, Kus, Trustless, Hungarian, and everyone else to do a lot more. Just take the Chaos DAO beer stand as an example – something you still see people in the community talk about on twitter occasionally. It’s ideas like that and people like that who really make a mark. Leverage the strengths of each DAO.
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I would utilize some treasury funds to purchase a hotel somewhere in the world. I would turn this into Polkatel or something similar. It would be utilized to provide a year round academy to train developers, run hackathons, bring together individuals to form teams, special assemblies, and more. It could also be utilizes as a test location to whatever team eventually figures out that you can put an entire lock/key mechanism on chain and for people who rent or are assigned to a room can know what time the maid will have access, when the maid will clean up the room, etc. Hotel on chain to minimize capex and opex of key card systems.
This could possibly be regional with one location in Asia, One location in EU, one location in NA/Caribbean. Ideally, easy to get visa countries that people would want to go to.
We would need an application process and applicants would be screened by criteria. Applicants could enter a number of different programs as a team or individuals. Individuals eventually being assigned to or provided the opportunity to join one or more teams.
- Tell fellowship to expand the people pallet that I’ve discussed in the DV thread. For example, identity type NPO, Corporation, Individual, DAO, etc. Various additional fields to links to forum account, reddit account, linkedin, and more (I need this for the agents program anyway). We could implement DID as a service having registrars do in depth verification to do things like verify business name, identity, age, citizenship / residency, etc. with them having a contractual obligation to the PCF. This would allow us to put some faith in the verifications of registrars as a basis for determining eligibility based on legal requirements of a given person, company, entity. It seems like this was the goal at one point, I’m not sure if it still is or what the future plans are with people.
There’s a lot more but I can’t keep going on this – I need to get back to work. This was my half day post I mentioned earlier in the thread. There’s one person in the eco I would follow to the ends of the earth. So whatever I do will be determined by what he does. As long as he’s here I’m here. If he’s gone, I’ve lost all hope.
TL;DR
Parity and W3F aren’t going to save us. Treasury needs revenue. Revenue would come best from market place system chains. Moar Developers. Right kind of marketing. We need to be more thoughtful.
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Oh, one thing to add that I thought was important.
We need an on-chain casino. We’re the only block chain that could provide a good experience for people who use slot machines with a 250ms block time 12 core chain. All the traditional online casinos are setup in countries where they could steal all the money and get away with it. More than likely they already are with rigged game play. An online casino is something where as long as we can cross the threshold for minimum game quality being provably fair allows the on-chain casino to win and we’ll take the thunder of every other casino out there.
The on-chain casino should be treasury funded so that the revenue flows back to treasury.
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Thanks for your message. The lower DOT’s price goes, the more the entire ecosystem will be forced to open its eyes and real solutions can start to emerge. In the end, this might actually be a good thing.
We’re on the verge of a major structural crisis, and that could finally trigger the awareness we need.
Personally without trying to pat myself on the back I saw this coming, which is why I’ve been trying, in my own way (whether people like it or not), to change the mindset.
The “cyber-cypher” mentality, disconnected from reality, is about to die out.
My entire critique of Gavin Wood’s statements was flagged by the community. When you say things that make people uncomfortable, you don’t stay for long.
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Great post with really good ideas! Makes me wonder who that guy is that’s keeping you in Polkadot.
Maybe sel18290 is right and things must to get worse before they can get better.
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I would like to say I read all of that 
One of the reasons I’m still sticking with Polkadot is because there are still visionary people like you in the space. rn, I’ve only invested about 5% of my target amount, mainly because looking at both the past and the upcoming projects, I haven’t really seen any true “slay project”. It’s either technically solid projects with terrible marketing and PR, or flashy ones that are just meaningless clones. If a project with real vision like yours shows up, I’ll definitely start increasing my position — but it’s just not the right time.. not the time
Hey look, neurolanche and bittensor are connected to polkadot. Who knew? I didn’t. Someone should inform the relay chain, it’s unaware of these developments.
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Peer3 is already funded by treasury and working on poker.
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That deserves a …
Thank you for sharing, I had no idea. It’s things like this that would improve the outlook of community members if they were made aware of it.
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Are you on the team? After reading through the grant and proposal I’m slightly less bullish. While they use the poker example several times, the deliverables are for the SDK. I would be far more bullish if the deliverables were a functioning on-chain poker system where rake goes to treasury. It’s unfortunate but we need alternate treasury revenue because coretime demand is not going to be high enough, soon enough, to counter a number of trends that need to be reversed. Alternate sources of treasury revenue can provide a stop gap to extend runway. With an actual product that generates revenue for the network – the marketing bounty can focus on driving users there which would provide a direct return to treasury for marketing funds spent. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d be more than happy to vote aye on a prop 10x the amount of the original request if we can get that and some long term support. Just make sure to structure it.