US$104M a year of Bolivian mining revenue, settled on Polkadot — 10M+ transactions a year

[Decidimos]

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Hello,

We are preparing a Medium Spender proposal and want the community’s input on the technical route before we post a preimage.

What Polkadot would get

At full scale, about US$104 million a year of stablecoin settlement on Polkadot, and US$4.4 billion over the life of the project. More than ten million transactions a year.

All of it, not a share of it. A lithium project at the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia contractually ring-fences 15% of the private partner’s profits for the Department of Potosí, and the entire amount moves through the platform: the per-capita payments to the department’s 861,292 residents, and the community works the assemblies vote for — contractors, suppliers and materials paid against milestones from the same rail and recorded in the same public ledger. Splitting the flow would break the audit trail, which is the whole point of the system.

Resting balances are one month of per-capita payments plus works budgets held between milestone disbursements — on the order of US$15 million on chain at any given time.

That volume is not yield-seeking. It exists because a mine produced lithium and a contract obliges the operator to hand a share to the department. It does not rotate to whichever chain is paying incentives this quarter and it does not disappear in a drawdown, because it was never chasing a rate.

What we have built

Decidimos is the platform through which the department of Potosí decides how that money is spent — every community, per capita, down to the neighbourhood councils of Potosí city and Uyuni. It is live in closed beta with the 53 indigenous communities of the TIOC Nor Lípez, in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara.

Identity is verified once against the national cédula with only an irreversible hash retained. Votes are blind-signed and secret. Every event enters a public hash chain with a daily signed digest, and each voter gets a receipt they can check against the count without revealing how they voted. The project is sponsored by ACI Systems Alemania, with German government backing through Euler Hermes / UFK export credit cover.

What does not exist yet is the payment rail. Most villages in Nor Lípez are hours from the nearest bank branch. You cannot pay hundreds of thousands of people monthly in cash, and that is precisely where mining benefit-sharing has failed everywhere it has been tried.

Why Polkadot

Two reasons.

The technical one: Polkadot Hub runs Solidity through REVM with standard tooling, and Asset Hub gives a low-fee settlement layer with dollar infrastructure being built out around it. The payout engine and wallet become ordinary contract engineering with a mature auditor pool behind them.

The other one: OpenGov already does what this app does. DOT holders decide collectively how a shared pot is spent, in public, with the record open. That is the same exercise the comunarios carry out over mining rent — except the voters are subsistence farmers and the money buys water systems and school roofs. Polkadot funding it is not charity; it is the governance argument this network makes, running somewhere it visibly matters.

The proposal

US$190,000 on the Medium Spender track, over six months, payable in stablecoins on Asset Hub or the DOT equivalent:

• gasless smart-account wallet on Polkadot Hub, paymaster funded by us so a resident never holds DOT — we validate the account-abstraction path on Hub first and publish what we find, since it is newer here than on long-established EVM chains
• batched payout engine driven by the assembly-ratified community rolls
• cédula-based recovery with the community assembly as guardian
• cash-out corridor into bolivianos: agreements with Bolivian exchanges and cooperatives, and merchant acceptance across the department, so a resident can redeem or spend within reach of their community
• contracts audited before mainnet
• everything open source, so the next extractive project inherits a rail rather than a debate

Each phase closes with a public update here: what shipped, the contract addresses, and what failed. Treasury money should be answerable to the people who voted for it.

Phasing, so nobody has to ask

The plant runs a pilot from year 3 and the main plant from year 6, so the figures above are the steady state. The Río Grande pilot is funded and runs inside the grant period, and the governance platform is generating real activity now.

What we would like from this forum

1. Is REVM on Polkadot Hub the right target for a payout system of this shape, or would you route it differently?
2. Anything in the proposal you would want changed before it goes on chain?

Happy to give anyone here tester access — the app is on TestFlight and the Google Play testing track.

Decidimos × Polkadot — OpenGov treasury proposal

Heitaria Swiss AG, Buochs, Switzerland

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[florentina57]

A bit difficult for me to take your project seriously when your forum account was created with a typo on the name of the project.

[dandan]

Are these project beneficiaries and commercial partners straight-up beggars? Why is the Polkadot Treasury picking up the tab for their initial payment infrastructure?

[dandan]

So Polkadot is basically a zero-capital startup platform now?

[Decidimos]

We have had emails about this proposal off the forum. We would rather answer here. The money is public, so the questions and the answers should be public too — ask in the thread and it gets answered in the thread.

What does the treasury spend its marketing budget on? Users. That is what advertising, events and content are for — getting real people onto the chain. Roughly US$6.8 million over the last four quarters, against about 80,300 monthly active addresses. Call it US$85 per active address per year.

This proposal asks US$190,000 and brings 861,292 people. Twenty-two cents each.

There is no adoption funnel. A per-capita payment lands in each resident’s own self-custodied account every month and they spend it. Receiving is a transaction, spending is several more. Active addresses equal the enrolled population by construction. The only variable is the rollout: [ENROLLED] enrolled today across the 53 communities of the TIOC Nor Lípez in closed beta, scaling with the plant to the whole department. And they do not churn — a user bought with advertising leaves when the campaign stops; these are people receiving money they live on, under a contract, for forty-five years.

The balance sheet says the same. There is US$67.46m of stablecoin on Polkadot in total. This holds about US$15m resting, roughly 22% of that, and settles around US$104m a year at steady state — US$4.4 billion over the 45-year life of the project. It is not yield-seeking capital: it exists because a mine produced lithium and a contract obliges the operator to pay Potosí. It does not leave in a drawdown.

Why the treasury and not the operator — the fair question above. The mine is capitalised; the rail is not. An operator buys the cheapest thing that discharges its obligation, closed, on whatever chain is cheapest. Open source, and on Polkadot, are worth nothing to them. That is the only reason this is here.

The account name was a typo at registration; it is fixed.

What I want from this forum, and why this went up before any preimage: is REVM on Polkadot Hub the right target for a payout system of this shape, or would you route it differently?

Heitaria Swiss AG, Buochs

[dandan]

The proposal says the residents will use a “gasless smart-account wallet” and that the paymaster will be funded so residents never need to hold DOT.

Who pays for that paymaster at full scale?

The proposal projects 861,292 users and more than 10 million transactions per year, but I do not see a quantified estimate of the annual gas/paymaster cost or a clear commitment for who will fund it after the six-month Treasury-funded development period.

If residents do not pay gas, then the transactions are not actually costless — the cost is simply being transferred to the paymaster.

Please provide the expected annual paymaster cost at full scale, the assumptions used to calculate it, and who is contractually responsible for funding it after the grant ends.

[dandan]

I suggest you clearly write down all your proposal before submitting it.Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a good use of everyone’s time

[Decidimos]

Fair question, and “we’ll cover it” is not an answer without a number, so here is the number, the assumptions behind it, and who signs for it.

You are right that gasless is not costless. The cost moves to the paymaster, and the paymaster is Heitaria. Once the project is in production, Heitaria’s operation of the platform, paymaster included, is funded by ACI, which operates the extraction plant for the 43–45-year life of the project and holds the contractual obligation to pay the 15% to Potosí. The paymaster is a cost of discharging that obligation, so its funding runs as long as the obligation does.

The model, with the assumptions exposed so you can attack them rather than guess at them:861,292 residents at full scale, twelve per-capita payouts a year each, is 10.34m sponsored payout transactions. Residents never hold DOT, so their outbound spending has to be sponsored too — assume three outbound transactions per resident per month, another 31m. Call it 41m sponsored operations a year. Payouts will be batched, so pricing each as a standalone operation is conservative.

Unit cost is where I will not pretend to precision. REVM on Hub is new and we have not measured it. So, bracketed, at DOT ≈ US$1.11:

• 0.001 DOT per operation → 41,000 DOT/yr (~US$45,500)
• 0.002 DOT → 82,000 DOT/yr (~US$91,000)
• 0.005 DOT → 205,000 DOT/yr (~US$228,000)
• 0.01 DOT → 410,000 DOT/yr (~US$455,000)

Measuring the real figure on Hub is a phase-one deliverable and we publish it here whatever it turns out to be.

Two things follow from it. Even the top of that range is 0.44% of the US$104m a year it carries; the mid case is 0.09%. Card networks take 1.5–3%. Benefit-sharing schemes fail on distribution cost, and this is the arithmetic that decides whether this one does.

And the part that answers your objection directly. Polkadot’s entire network fee income in H1 2024 was 39,444 DOT — roughly 79,000 DOT annualised, across every user of the chain. At the mid case this paymaster alone pays 82,000 DOT a year, buying DOT continuously, at rising volume, for forty-five years, into fees that flow back into the network.

So yes: the cost is transferred to the paymaster, exactly as you say. The paymaster is a permanent net buyer of DOT spending on the order of the chain’s entire current annual fee income, paid for by the mine operator for the life of the mine.

On your other post — agreed, and that is the right order. The full written proposal, with the line-by-line budget separating Polkadot-specific engineering from the rest, goes up here before any preimage.