Context first, because Polkadot’s own economics moved in March and not everyone tracks it closely.
Three things happened on Polkadot that bear directly on the argument in this RFC. Summarising for anyone who hasn’t followed them:
- Supply capped. Referendum 1710 fixed a maximum of 2.1 billion DOT. On 14 March annual issuance dropped from 120M to ~55.8M — a 53.6% cut — on a schedule that steps down again every two years.
- The burn replaced by a pool. Referendum 1827 created the Dynamic Allocation Pool: newly issued DOT, transaction fees, coretime revenue and slashes all collect in one permanent on-chain account, and governance splits it across separate budgets — validators, stakers, treasury, reserve. Treasury burns stopped. The first split runs ~12.6M DOT/yr to validator self-stake incentives, ~25.2M to staker payouts, ~18M retained in the buffer.
- Polkadot started buying users. Referendum 1783 — executed at 87.7% aye — spends $3,009,600 of stablecoin on incentives for people verified by Project Individuality, Polkadot’s native ZK proof-of-personhood: $200/$100/$50 for the earliest joiners, up to ~$10 a week for useful governance participation, and the bulk into a weekly draw of roughly 140 prizes of $250.
That last one is the important one for us, so we’ve written all three into the RFC as a new §3.5 — What Polkadot chose, and why Kusama should choose differently, along with a seventh objection (“Polkadot already does this — copy Individuality and airdrop instead”). A document arguing about treasury strategy that ignores what the sister network just decided isn’t worth reading, and this one was missing it.
Should Kusama Spend Its Treasury Onboarding Members Instead of Selling KSM? · Birdbrain RFC
Where we think it leaves the argument.
Polkadot and this RFC agree on the diagnosis: a treasury should stop buying projects and start buying people. Worth saying out loud — the position isn’t heterodox any more.
They disagree on the instrument, and that’s the part worth debating here. Polkadot pays individuals in dollars for proving they are human. This RFC pays in KSM for a collective to hold a membership.
- Direction of the money. Theirs goes out, as stablecoin, to individual wallets. Ours moves sideways — KSM between public on-chain accounts — and returns as gas, co-payment and fees. For a network whose treasury is denominated in its own token and which has no stablecoin reserve to hand out, that isn’t a stylistic difference.
- Unit of onboarding. An airdrop recruits atomised individuals, and a cohort attracted by a weekly draw is the hardest cohort there is to retain. A collective arrives with its economic activity already attached.
- What the spend leaves behind. A balance, versus an account in a community that owns its own books and data.
And the honest counterweight: their check at the gate is better than what our join path runs today. Proof-of-Ink and Proof-of-Video-Interaction are a stronger uniqueness proof than passkey attestation and an attendance record, and we’d rather say that than pretend otherwise.
What we’d resist is reading that as the end of the question. pallet-people doesn’t verify personhood itself — it’s a registry (verified humans, rings, per-context aliases, proof validation) and it deliberately outsources verification to pluggable mechanisms. Proof-of-Ink is one of those, not the system. And two things sit above a registration check that a registration check can’t supply:
- Uniqueness isn’t attribution. Ring-VRF aliases are unlinkable across contexts by construction. Excellent privacy, and structurally unable to carry the value of a contribution back to the person who made it — which is the whole point of paying people for what they contribute.
- A one-shot proof is a one-off cost. Pay for the ink and the video once and the identity is permanent and free to operate forever. A proof derived from continuing, witnessed participation gets more expensive to fake the more it’s asked to claim.
So this isn’t an alternative to Individuality — it assumes something like it underneath. Which is also why Kusama rejecting the native proof-of-personhood pallets in #612 at 42.1% aye reads to us as the wrong call: that layer is a prerequisite for anything built on top of it, not a competitor. If it comes back, we’d support it.
The thing we’d actually like a view on.
Polkadot resolved its monetary question. Kusama has rejected every attempt to resolve its own — burn-based tokenomics (#627) rejected at 28.2%, halving and maximum supply (#625) timed out at 8.2% — while inflation runs near 7% and the burn sits at 0%.
This RFC deliberately isn’t a monetary proposal. No cap, no curve, no burn. The supply-side reformers are working supply; the validator-set reformers are working cost; this is the demand side — what the KSM the network already holds should buy. We read those three as complements rather than competitors, and the network could adopt all of them.
Does anyone here read that differently? And the original question stands, sharper now there’s something to compare against: what should a first rule-bound envelope be for?