Polkadot Treasury annual spending in USD & DOT | 2020 - 2023 June

[alice_und_bob]

I wanted to understand the total USD & DOT amount the Polkadot Treasury has been spending so far per year. I used the data from DoTreasury as base, which seems to use the daily rate of treasury grants around the time they were awarded - so in-time USD values, which should provide an accurate view on the value spent.

To solve the task, I…

• fetched all Polkadot Treasury proposals with the status awarded from DoTreasury
• manually copied the values over to this spreadsheet
• processed the data with this Python Notebook

This is the result I arrived at:

year		       USD		      DOT
2020	   565,629 USD	  118,466 DOT
2021	 1,805,639 USD	   70,585 DOT
2022	16,359,027 USD	2,301,333 DOT
2023	 9,106,917 USD	1,464,989 DOT

Disclaimers:

• It was a quick & dirty analysis, so please make sure to verify the data for yourself if you need 100% accurate data.
• I am relying on DoTreasury
• I don’t know which source DoTreasury uses to get DOTUSD multipliers and didn’t thoroughly check if my assumption of in-time data is correct; I just looked at the data and it looks plausible to me.

Related work by @rich: Kusama treasury annual spending analysis - 2020 > 2023 (june)

Screenshot of the notebook at the time of processing:

[nino_apillon]

Would it make sense to compare the spending to development activity before anyone draws any conclusions?

For example: https://app.santiment.net/s/MZI-YBev

[Ricosworks]

Thank you for sharing. Makes a lot of sense.

[alice_und_bob]

I categorized expenses by hand to get a rough estimate. This is the Polkadot spend in USD.

Data: Polkadot Treasury Spend till 2023-06.xlsx - Google Sheets

• Outreach
  • Media
  • Education
  • Online Events
  • Offline Events
  • Hackathons
  • Education
• Software Development
  • Open Source
  • Closed Source
• Operations
  • Software
  • Hardware
• Research
• Security
• Other

Share the tweet: https://twitter.com/alice_und_bob/status/1702584854192197703

[CoinStudio]

Hey @alice_und_bob,

Thanks for starting this interesting and important topic. I am working with @tom.stakeplus on a Treasury Tracker application that will give better visibility into all refs and help with the budgeting process and overview. For this case we have used the existing W3F categories:

1. Infrastructure (deployment and continued operation).
2. Network security operations (monitoring services, anti-scam activities, continuous auditing).
3. Ecosystem provisions (collaborations with friendly chains).
4. Marketing activities (advertising, paid features, collaborations).
5. Community (events and outreach - meetups, hackerspaces).
6. Software development (wallets and wallet integration, clients and client upgrades).
7. Bounties
8. Liquidity provision
9. Others

We are mainly focused on time-based tracking to better understand the evolution of the treasury. Here are some weekly charts from the Polkadot OpenGov referenda that may be useful:

While the given categories may seem too general, I prefer to keep them relatively general. Every proposal in the Treasury is unique and if we spread the categories too thin, it might make analytics less useful because the data set would become too dispersed. While most of this is in Draft version, please let me know if you need data for the category budget work.