Months following the launch of its mainnet, Polkadot has established a new decentralized platform to fund projects. Called the Polkadot Treasury, it will be run by Council members elected by the community. The Treasury represents a pot of funds collected through transaction fees, slashing, and staking inefficiencies.
In a press release shared with CryptoPotato, the DLT company enabling interoperability and scalability for all networks employing its blockchain announced that some teams are already submitting proposals to the Polkadot Treasury.
It will essentially allow participants wanting to take advantage of the funding to submit spending proposals, which can be initiated by any holder of the native cryptocurrency – DOT. The Council, responsible in this case for guarding and administering the funds, has the power to approve the funding of members for the “development of projects that give traction to the network.”
The proposals submitted for approval will not contain any contextual information to minimize on-chain storage. Instead, participants need to “find an off-chain way to explain what it is about.” One such way is to initiate a topic on the Polkassembly discussion forum and share the details with the Council members.
Once the Council provides enough feedback for the particular project, the proposers can deposit 5% of the total submission or 100 DOT as an anti-spam measure. This amount will be returned if the proposal is accepted.
The Polkadot Treasury also plans to allow the funds to be used for tipping community members for their work. That includes translating documents, writing Polkadot-related articles and various posts, supporting the Polkadot Telegram community, and producing educational videos.
The announced indicated that several firms have already submitted their proposals. They fell into the following categories: infrastructure development, continued operations projects, and software development.
The Polkadot Treasury hasn’t disclosed the teams that may receive fundings. However, the statement highlighted that the Treasury “attempts to fund as many proposals in the queue as it can without running out of funds.”
If the Treasury ends a budget period without spending all funds, a percentage is burned. It’s currently set at 1%. Essentially, this means that “a percentage of the Treasury funds are taken out of circulation every 24 days unless they are used.”
Future plans include the introduction of The Treasury Bounty mechanism, which aims to delegate the curation activity of spending proposals to an expert called “curator.” It will take off some of the Council’s responsibilities for monitoring and executing payments.
