Tapping the underused developer power of PBA graduates

Ecosystem
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About me

I’m Ankan. I was part of the first PBA cohort (July 2022), then joined Parity as a runtime developer (my first Web3 job), and have worked extensively on staking since then. I’ve also been an instructor and TA at PBA Hong Kong (2024) and PBA Bali (2025).

The Problem

PBA is an excellent academy. It turns motivated engineers into capable substrate runtime developers. But:

  • After graduation, some join Parity or ecosystem teams, a few receive OpenGov funding, but many drift back to Web2 or other ecosystems.
  • Parity cannot absorb everyone. It has its own roadmap and priorities.
  • The Polkadot community has treasury funds and open bounties but not enough active developers.
  • External contributors who try to submit PRs to polkadot-sdk often get blocked and discouraged trying to get meaningful feedback and reviews.

As a result, we have hundreds of developers who want to help and an ecosystem that needs help, but no clear bridge between the two.

The gap and vision

What we are missing after PBA is continuity. Developers graduate with strong technical skills but often lose momentum because there is no structure guiding them toward real work in the ecosystem.

New developers need help with context, feedback, and access to people who can connect them with problems worth solving and help them get their first few PRs through review and merge. After that, most can stand on their own and mentor others.

PBA itself has raised this point several times in its opengov proposals: support after graduation is missing. If we can build that layer through a growing network of mentors, we can turn PBA from a one-time bootcamp into a continuous developer pipeline for Polkadot.

With OpenGov bounties, it is now possible to make a real living by building for Polkadot as a freelance developer. Working as part of a group with shared identity and learning, like the PBA community, is much more effective than doing it alone.

Many graduates also bring experience from other blockchain ecosystems. They can help Polkadot collaborate better with the wider blockchain world, something we have not done well so far. These people can quietly become the bridges and ambassadors that Polkadot needs.

The long-term goal is to create an open, self-run system organised by PBA alumni, sustainable and not dependent on any one person or company. If it works, it becomes the missing middle layer that connects training with real, ongoing impact in the ecosystem.

Pilot

Together with Alexander Popiak and six recent graduates from PBA Bali - Eman, Jeff, Johanan, Lucas Grasso, Veronika, Yash, and with blessings from the PBA team, we are starting a small pilot.
We’ll take on around three tasks as bounties (OG Rust) and help deliver them end-to-end. We have already submitted a bounty proposal for one issue, and almost ready with two others:

We are starting small, but if this works, we will gradually bring in more mentors and more PBA developers to work on tasks that the community cares about.

Both developers and mentors will be paid through the bounties.
I am still exploring whether we should find a different way to compensate mentors, perhaps through OpenGov funding, a fellowship mechanism, or something else. I would appreciate any opinions or experience others can share.

Contribution Portal

We want to work in public and keep everything transparent. To know whether we are succeeding, we also need to measure our impact.

We plan to build a public Contribution Portal, developed by PBA alumni, that tracks:

  • Contributions from PBA developers to polkadot-sdk and the broader ecosystem:
    • PRs merged
    • Issues closed
    • Active contributors
  • Review and audit times, from ready for review to first feedback, audit, and merge
  • Ongoing bounties and mentors

The goal is to make contributions visible and feedback cycles shorter - for both pba devs and core protocol devs.

I already vibe-coded a POC that you can checkout here: Contribution Portal.

Closing Note

Similar efforts have been tried before and have sometimes lost momentum. We want to learn from those experiences and keep this one practical and open. If we succeed, we could drive a step change in how quickly Polkadot evolves, whilst guiding PBA graduate developers to the right issues, building their experience and profile within the ecosystem and driving efficient utilisation of the developers we have invested in through PBA Campus.

Coordination is our superpower. If you believe you can help, or have thoughts or experiences to share, we would love to hear from you.

24 Likes
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Subject: Re: Tapping the Underused Developer Power of PBA Graduates

I participated in the 3rd cohort of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy at UC Berkeley, and your post resonates deeply with me. From my experience, a core challenge in onboarding new developers isn’t just skills—it’s the market structure itself, particularly the extreme token concentration that creates a formidable trust barrier.

To put numbers to it:
The top 50 accounts already hold over 55% of the circulating supply toward Polkadot’s new 2.1 billion DOT cap.
Source: CoinCarp

This isn’t covered in PBA curricula, yet it’s central to understanding the ecosystem. Polkadot’s marketing emphasizes decentralization, but the economic reality leans heavily centralized—tokens largely funneled into basic financial primitives like transfers, lending, exchanges, perps, and stablecoins. Evolving beyond that requires labor and capital, but concentration inevitably ties progress to the priorities of those major holders.

I’ve felt this firsthand: During the Berkeley cohort, I encountered subtle discrimination when my views showed even mild misalignment with the dominant directives. Without counterbalancing voices like Ben Habermeier’s—whose openness and generosity in direct community chats have been invaluable—the ecosystem risks drifting further from its purpose, deepening that concentration. I’m grateful for such leaders keeping the flame alive.

The core trust barrier boils down to: Are we aligned with the market concentrators’ vision?

This feeds into broader issues like selectivity and marginalization, as you’ve astutely noted with PBA outcomes. It’s not isolated to the Academy; divides like maximalist vs. altcoin mentalities only amplify exclusion when that trust hurdle isn’t addressed head-on.

Infinite funding could brute-force more hires, but token liquidations have backfired—mostly hurting small holders and eroding ecosystem trust.

I’m not shilling alternatives; token concentration plagues early-stage blockchains broadly. It makes me optimistic for a new DLT era with true technical and economic decentralization, reshaping finance long-term. That’s the path I’m pursuing through my work on decentralized convex optimization and equilibrium theory.

Best of luck with your initiative—it’s vital. If you see alignment here and think my collaboration could add value, I’d love to contribute for the broader good. This mindset—prioritizing the majority—will be key to winning the global private money race. Stable solutions endure.

—
Diego Correa Tristain
Polkadot Blockchain Academy, Cohort 3
onedge-network/Emergent_Properties_paper

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Thanks for your thoughtful response, Diego.

The top 50 accounts already hold over 55% of the circulating supply toward Polkadot’s new 2.1 billion DOT cap.

It was a bit shocking for me too to see how economically centralised Polkadot is currently, even compared to other chains that we often criticise. Why do you think that is? Is this just a symptom of fewer successful businesses being built on Polkadot that can drive the economic decentralisation?

Without counterbalancing voices like Ben Habermeier’s—whose openness and generosity in direct community chats have been invaluable—the ecosystem risks drifting further from its purpose, deepening that concentration

Did you mean Robert Habermeier?

This mindset—prioritizing the majority—will be key to winning the global private money race

Reminds me of the starfish vs spider analogy. There is much greater resilience in distributed intelligence than in central control. The PBA graduates bring a lot of diverse knowledge and perspectives, but we can do better at creating a safe space for them to explore, experiment, and stay motivated with the right incentives.

Curious how your experience was post PBA? Did you feel there was enough support to stay involved in the ecosystem? What could have made it better?

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Awesome Initiative !
I complained multiple times in the past that PBA was awesome but that people were thrown into the ecosystem without help afterwards.
This portal and the pilot are a great way to start giving more things to look out for for our alumni !
I have some plans on my end also but it wont be ready anytime soon.

Let me know if you need any help !

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I’m a PBA alumnus and I completely relate to this.
After the academy, it’s not easy to keep contributing without a clear path to follow. I believe many of us would like to stay active in the ecosystem and work as freelancers, keeping flexibility in time and task choice, but it’s difficult without a structured route from “graduate” to “contributor.”

An initiative like this could really help bring more PBA devs into consistent ecosystem work. I’d definitely join and contribute :slight_smile:

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Clearly a much needed initiative and would love to join !

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Thank you so much for this initiative! I spoke with some of those students and they were really excited to be part of this pilot.

I agree there’s a huge gap between all of the students that graduate the PBA and the actual contributions the ecosystem gets from them. That’s sad given that most alumni want to contribute, they just don’t know how.

I was very happy when I saw https://www.morekudos.com/. I think it was made by some PBA alumni who encountered the same problem. I thought of it as a great platform to solve this problem. You could find new issues to contribute to and who were the available mentors. They even run campaigns to make it more fun with points at the end of it. Sadly looks like it has fallen in disuse.

I’m all up for this new initiative, hopefully this one sticks. I like the portal. Even though we need to improve our open-source culture in general, I think it was a good idea to make it purely for PBA alumni. We should start somewhere. We know they have the knowledge and we want to see how much they can contribute. I’ll be glad to become a mentor.

An idea for the future: include repos other than polkadot-sdk. Everything under polkadot-api, chopsticks, and other open source tools should be good candidates for this. That way we can also fit the dApps track students

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Great initiative!

I agree with the points that @francisco.aguirre has added, especially about morekudos.com

Seeing the Contribution Portal reminded me of talentprotocol.com. There are multiple chains part of that and use it to identify talent. Perhaps, Polkadot could also be a part for the larger ecosystem to benefit and making it easier for us to identify folks.

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I appreciate your kind response.

It was a bit shocking for me too to see how economically centralised Polkadot is currently, even compared to other chains that we often criticise. Why do you think that is? Is this just a symptom of fewer successful businesses being built on Polkadot that can drive the economic decentralisation?

This is a question I’ve spent considerable time exploring, which has led me to multiple hypotheses.

In complex economic systems, there are a few certainties—such as employment and inflation management at the national level. Traditionally, the primary instruments for this management have been fiat enforcement, monopolisation of money issuance, and interest rates. Employment, of course, involves a more nuanced analysis, depending on the broader development and competitive advantage of an economy.

Blockchains have opened the way for the competition of money—and that decentralisation of monetary issuance is, in my view, the core ethos that sparked excitement in this space. However, coming from a historical context of monetary monopoly, it’s not surprising that many participants still carry the mindset that centralisation is the path to success.

This is the very idea I’ve been working to challenge. I argue that maintaining a monopoly mindset in a landscape of competitive DLTs is self-contradictory and unsustainable. Monopolisation strategies—whether explicit or implicit—are not conducive to growth when you’re in an open ecosystem competing for talent, capital, and usage.

Did you mean Robert Habermeier?

Yes, Rob. Who’s Ben? :sweat_smile: LOL

Rob helped me—along with Shawn Tabrizi—when I was attempting to port risc0 into a pallet. It turned out to be quite difficult due to crate dependencies and versioning. Still, Rob’s availability and willingness to help were incredibly valuable, and I’m deeply thankful for that experience. It was one of those unstructured but meaningful conversations that PBA enabled, and in my opinion, that exemplifies what education should be about—intentional availability from the mentors, not just a fixed curriculum.

Curious how your experience was post-PBA? Did you feel there was enough support to stay involved in the ecosystem? What could have made it better?

Honestly, without a space for continued technical discussion, I would define my post-PBA experience as awful.

I openly proposed the idea of an Alumni DAO to allow us to pursue deeper knowledge and discussion independently—without relying on the PBA directives, which frankly showed little interest in maintaining that momentum. There were some follow-up activities from our cohort (shoutout to Sophia and Facundo), but they stalled over time.

When I tried to gather online material and re-ignite discussion, the director of the PBA sent me a DM asking me to “participate less.” That moment was especially frustrating, given how enriching the original experience had been. After that, the structure became clearer: a very hierarchical organization focused mostly on recruitment and Polkadot marketing.

Feeling boxed in, I started to express myself in more experimental and even surreal ways in the Discord—trying anything to spark critical mass. Eventually, I was expelled for this “nonsense.” I carried some of that spirit here into the forum, and while it might have seemed a bit out there, I’ve finally found a bit more critical mass here—enough to have productive and meaningful interactions like this one.

So thank you again for taking the time.