As far as I’m aware, there is currently no system in place to verify or limit spending within the treasury. This means that anyone can create new proposals—even if they exceed the total funds currently available in the treasury.
This situation leads to a recurring waste of time and resources, and introduces the risk that—even if proposals are approved—there may not be sufficient funds to pay them out. This could result in the proposal being canceled, rejected, or encountering some form of error.
To address this, I believe we should implement a minimum reserve threshold—10% of each asset—as an emergency fund. After that, treasury funds should be “locked” based on the amounts requested by each submitted proposal.
We could apply an “optimistic approach”, meaning we assume that every proposal created in OpenGov will eventually be approved at the end of its voting and confirmation periods. Therefore, the requested budget would be reserved immediately upon submission, preventing overcommitment of funds.
Proposal 3 requests: 250,000 → Error message to proposer: “Sorry, you must wait for the outcome of pending proposals before submitting a new request via OpenGov.”
The emergency reserve should be unlockable via a dedicated “Emergency Track” (or similar). In cases where urgent use of funds is needed, proposals should be submitted through this special track, bypassing the reserve constraint.
I hope the concept is clear, and I look forward to your feedback.
Thank you for your attention.
I do like this idea and I think it is a great way of anticipating potential issues with the execution of approved proposals, as well as being aware of total available funds versus total potential funds approved via ongoing proposals.
I fully agree with setting a reserve threshold/emergency fund, whether that is 10% or another number.
The problem I anticipate with the example you gave is: what if a proposal requests the entire 900,000 available? That means that until there is an outcome to that proposal there is no possibility of anyone submitting any other proposal, and depending on which track, etc, this could mean weeks without the possibility of submitting proposals… some which might be important for the network and might be time sensitive. I know you mentioned to use an “Emergency Track” in those cases but that would be limited to the 10% (100,000 in your example), which might not be enough. It could even be a malicious actor doing it to block the governance of the network…
For awareness of total funds, an idea could be to have a “simulation”, maybe visual (with graphs?), or an “interactive simulation” (like what Jonas proposed earlier this week for Coretime https://jonas-coretime.jedda.eu/) with different scenarios… of what the total treasury funds are without the current ongoing proposals requests, what it would look like if the requests are approved, etc.
Update: I just saw “Alice und Bob” is presenting the 2025 Q1 Treasury Report, https://x.com/alice_und_bob/status/1917606000103719404, that’s what I meant by visual with graphs… but instead of retroactive of actual facts, doing it as a simulation accessible by all members of the community.
About the malicious actor, we have the Referenda Killer track that can avoid this kind of situations
Currently, if you analyze the total amount of requested funds and compare it to the treasury balance (especially USDT), you’ll see that the active proposals exceed the available USDT. This could lead to a situation where, even if the proposals pass, some of them may still fail due to insufficient funds.
A simple popup message on Polkassembly or Subsquare could be enough to warn proposers about the low availability of funds and that their proposal might fail regardless. However, some sort of mechanism to prevent or handle potential overspending should be implemented.
Regarding this topic, there is currently a DCA mechanism in place, so the treasury accumulates USDT/USDC daily while the DOT balance gradually decreases. However, it seems that proposers do not check the treasury’s financial availability before submitting new proposals.
Thank you for mentioning the existing Referenda Killer track, I’m still learning in the ecosystem and this is so helpful to know.
I hope you did not misunderstand where I stand on this, I definitely agree with you on the concept, since it will anticipate potential issues.
To create awareness of total funds (both for proposers and voters) and build on your idea of the popup message, I was thinking maybe something visual, such as displaying a percentage of the funds requested over the current total available funds could be an awareness indicator.
Going back to your example:
In a simplified way it could look something like this:
Proposal 1 requests 400,000 (~44% of current available funds)
Proposal 2 requests 300,000 (~33% of current available funds, if Proposal 1 fails)
and/or: (Warning: only ~67% of requested funds available if Proposal 1 passes)
…
This visual percentage could potentially, either deter people from requesting more funds than the current availability, or be a quick visual guideline for anyone analyzing all current proposals, before voting, of the percentage each one represents and the scenarios if other proposals pass or fail.