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

Governance
1

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.

Heitaria Swiss AG, Buochs, Switzerland

2

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.

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

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

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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

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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.

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

9

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.

10

Update: Decidimos wallet now running on Polkadot testnet

We’ve added the wallet to Decidimos on Polkadot testnet.

Manuals (English and Spanish):

Important: We built this testnet wallet only for testing with the indigenous communities. We will not build the production wallet on Polkadot mainnet ourselves.

Test the app: Decidimos is on Apple TestFlight and Google Play testing. If you’d like to try it, send your email to info@heitaria.ch and we’ll add you as a tester. Please say whether you use iOS or Android.

Paul Schmidt
Heitaria Swiss AG

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Update: our own wallet on mainnet, and the first real USDT payments in Río Grande

In post 10 we wrote that the testnet wallet was only for testing with the communities and that we would not build the production wallet ourselves. That has changed, and here is why: the payouts run for the 43–45-year life of the plant, and the project sponsor needs the wallet to be maintained for that whole period. We can only promise that for software we build and maintain ourselves. So Decidimos keeps its own wallet. It’s self-custodial (the keys stay on the resident’s phone), the code is open source, and it goes through the same external security audit as the payout contracts before payouts scale up.

It’s already running on Polkadot Asset Hub mainnet. Mini Market Lithium in Río Grande, Nor Lípez, has the Decidimos sticker on its door: “Aceptamos pagos con Decidimos. Paga con tu celular, en USDT, desde la app. Pagos sobre la red Polkadot.”

Two Decidimos users have paid the shop in real USDT:

You can also see the 0.05 DOT that activated the wallet, the step described in our proposal.

Small amounts, in one shop, in a village at 3,700 metres. That’s where it starts. The treasury proposal is about taking this from one shop to the whole department.

Paul Schmidt
Heitaria Swiss AG

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Videos from Río Grande: paying with USDT at Mini Market Lithium

Here are the two payments from post 12, filmed in the shop.

  1. The payment: the customer scans the shop’s QR code with the Decidimos app and pays in USDT.
    https://youtube.com/shorts/i6qPcBWznwk
  2. The shop receives it: the payment arrives on the shopkeeper’s phone a few seconds later.
    https://youtube.com/shorts/Aw5ewRIo3Ec
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  1. The balance: 7.00 USDT in the shop’s wallet, the two payments of 5 and 2 USDT.
    https://youtube.com/shorts/iG7jrXJhD3c

The same payments on chain:

Everyone in the videos agreed to appear online.

Paul Schmidt
Heitaria Swiss AG

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A note on connectivity: mobile internet in rural Potosí is still weak, and that’s part of why each payment takes a few seconds. It is improving. Starlink has been available in Bolivia since February 2026, and the government’s “Aula Conectada” programme is bringing it to state schools: more than 5,000 antennas installed by the state company Entel, with 24 months of free service per school. The pilot runs in 2026 and 2027, with full rollout from 2027 to 2030. On 20 October 2026 the government signed agreements with all 85 municipalities of La Paz department. Schools in rural Potosí should follow.

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The proposal is now on chain for voting: Decidimos: payout rail for Potosí’s lithium revenue on Polkadot Hub (190,000 USDT, six months)

As promised in post 9, it includes the line-by-line budget: 190,000 USDT over six months, in five milestones. Fees and long-term maintenance are not part of the ask. Heitaria pays the fees for the monthly payouts; residents pay the fee for their own payments in USDT, deducted from their wallet, so no resident ever has to buy DOT. Each new wallet is activated on chain with 0.05 DOT from Heitaria: about 43,000 DOT for around 860,000 residents, once.

Questions are welcome here or on Subsquare. We answer all of them.

Paul Schmidt
Heitaria Swiss AG

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Thanks Samuel, two good questions.

Custody. Heitaria does not hold residents’ balances. Each wallet is self-custodial: the key is created on the resident’s own phone, and only they can move the money. So resting balances sit in residents’ own wallets, not in an account we control. The Decidimos app is already on the App Store. Google Play in the next 9 days

Money on its way out is held in contracts: the monthly payout and the minors’ locked savings. Both contracts answer to three parties: the treasury (Heitaria’s 2-of-3 multisig), a watcher and an independent arbiter. The watcher is CUPCONL, the organisation of the 53 communities, not the Department: the memoranda are signed with the communities, and it is their keys that check the operator.

  • Once a month is published, the money is reserved for the wallets on the list. Nobody, including us, can send it anywhere else.
  • Nobody is paid during the first day. In that time CUPCONL can check the list and veto the month, or freeze both contracts with one call.
  • Replacing any party takes two of the three and 30 days of public notice, so one stolen key can neither take nor block the money.
  • Money left over from a month is only released after 90 days, and only with CUPCONL’s approval.

Batching. Batched. We publish one list per month, as a Merkle root together with the funds in a single transaction, built from the assembly-ratified community rolls. Our relayer then pays everyone in batches. Residents do not claim, and they need no connection to be paid, only when they spend.

Numbers. Post 9 counted every resident of the department as a monthly cash recipient; the US$15M resting balance and the ten million transactions come from that model. The on-chain proposal corrects it. About US$53.9M a year goes through Decidimos, roughly US$2.3 billion over the 43 years of production: about US$6.3M a year as monthly cash for about 14,000 residents of Río Grande and Nor Lípez (about 170,000 payouts a year), and about US$47.6M a year as the works fund the whole department votes on, paid out only through the app. On top of that come the payments residents make themselves with that money (shops, transfers, cash-out: at three a month, about 500,000 more a year), and the Chanchito, the optional savings feature in the wallet: residents lend part of their own USDT in Hydration’s money market and withdraw it whenever they want, and 15% of the minors’ locked savings is lent there too, with the interest added to each child’s account. And the Dividendo Potosí: whenever lithium stays above US$20,000/t for 12 months, a yearly USDT payment goes to every registered wallet in the department, up to 861,292 wallets.

Status. The contracts are written and pass 63 tests after two internal reviews, and an earlier version ran a full month on the Polkadot Hub testnet. The external audit is milestone 3. After milestone 1 we will publish the contract addresses and the measured batch size.

Paul Schmidt
Heitaria Swiss AG

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Why? Grant farming?

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Of course. It’s visible for everyone. And we talked to many others too. We have build at the end on Polkadot. So you guys should be really happy about this

Paul Schmidt
CEO | Heitaria Swiss AG
Rigistrasse 1, 6374 Buochs

schmidt@heitaria.ch
22

Meet the Chanchito :pig_face:, the piggy bank in Decidimos. Families in the Bolivian Andes can now put part of their monthly USDT into @hydration_net ’s money market and earn interest, today 3.02% a year. For many, the first savings they’ve ever had.

Their money, their phone, withdraw anytime. We hold nothing and take no cut.

http://heitaria.ch/decidimos/

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All project information is here. Please read it carefully before commenting: GitHub - Decidimos-Potosi/decidimos-polkadot: Decidimos on Polkadot: payout rail for Potosí's lithium revenue · GitHub