PolkaWorld Council Report 1
Currently, 25 treasury proposals have been submitted for the Polkadot Treasury and 18 proposals have been passed, 104,054 DOTs have been allocated, each treasury proposal is funded by approximately 5780 DOTs (worth approximately $29,000). There are approximately 9.6M DOTs in the treasury, and currently, only 1% is used.
As one of the Polkadot Council members, PolkaWorld’s main responsibility is not only to review treasury proposals and approve proposals, but also to actively help participants in need of funding to better get the support of the Polkadot Treasury, and also let more people know Polkadot Treasury and know how to use the Polkadot Treasury, thereby helping Polkadot to grow a prosperous ecosystem!
We sorted out all the passed treasury proposals and summarized some application tips to share with you. Community members are also welcome to continue to vote PolkaWorld as a Polkdot Councilor. Guide View here.
Polkadot Treasury
The treasury is a pot of funds collected through transaction fees, slashing, staking inefficiencies, etc. The funds held in the treasury can be spent by making a spending proposal that, if approved by the Council, will get the distribution DOTs。
The role of the treasury is to provide financial support for projects that promote the development of the Polkadot network, thereby promoting the prosperity of the Polkadot ecosystem. Any DOT holder can submit a Treasury Proposal to apply for DOT in the Treasury. But you must reserve a deposit totaling 5% of the proposed spend or 100 DOTs. This deposit will be slashed if the proposal is rejected, and returned if the proposal was accepted.
How to apply for Polkadot Treasury?
After reviewing 25 treasury proposals, PolkaWorld suggests that everyone can apply according to the following process:
- Put forward your detailed proposal on the https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury-proposals
2. Send the link of the above post on the Polkadot Direction channel (https://app.element.io/#/room/#polkadot-direction:matrix.parity.io) for discussion and get the feedback of the council.
3. After obtaining the feedback of Councilors, you can apply the onchain proposal at https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Frpc.polkadot.io#/treasury, and reserve a deposit of DOTs
4. Waiting for the council to turn to a motion.
How to write a treasury proposal？
Among the 18 treasury proposals that have been passed, PolkaWorld prefers to use the following framework to discuss the proposals. For those that have not passed, these questions are often asked:
1. Brief introduction of the proposal: a one-sentence summary of what to apply for treasury
2. Background introduction: it can be the background of the proposal or your personal/team background
3. What problems can be solved by applying for the treasury
4. What is the solution
5. The specific execution plan, should have a clear executable and quantifiable milestone
6. The amount of DOT that needs to be supported by the treasury: propose a reasonable amount of DOT based on your quantifiable milestone
The conclusion is that everything needs to be specific and clear. Vagueness and lack of specific implementation details will reduce the probability of passing the proposal!
What kind of proposals can apply for the Polkadot Treasury？
After sorting out all the approved proposals, we found that the following categories have a higher probability of passing, including but not limited to:
1. Infrastructure deployment and continuous operation: For example, the treasury proposal for operating expenses proposed by Subscan.
2. Non-profit organizations surrounding the Polkadot ecology: For example, the treasury proposal to continue operating as a non-profit organization proposed by the Polkascan Foundation.
3. Network security operations: such as monitoring services, continuous auditing, servers, etc. For example, the treasury application of the server proposed by PolkaStats;
4. Open source tools in Polkadot/Substrate ecology: For example, the treasury proposal for smart contract consortium blockchains based on Polkadot’s technology proposed by Patract Labs.
5. Software development: wallet and wallet integration, client and client upgrade, such as the maintenance and upgrade of the GSRPC client proposed by Centrifuge;
6. The development of Polkadot ecology: such as cooperation with other chains/projects/institutions, such as the integration of Polkadot proposed by LocalCoinSwap and Ramp Network;
7. Community activities and promotion: meetup, hackathon, video production, etc., such as the proposal for funding the Polkadot event in China-proposed by 8btc.
Approved motions
If you want to know which proposal has passed and got the Polkadot Treasury’s support, you can view the detailed introduction below. As of the publication of this article (November 30, 2020), PolkaWorld has sorted out 18 approved Polkadot Treasury proposals.
1、Patract Labs
Description：Develop Redspot v0.
Value：10000 DOT
Patract Labs (patract.network) provides solutions for Polkadot’s parachain smart contract ecosystem, supporting smart contract parachains in Polkadot’s public blockchain network, and smart contract consortium blockchains based on Polkadot’s technology. Patract Labs operates as an offshore company and will not issue any new cryptocurrency. All solutions will focus on the usage and value of DOT.
Patract Labs’ first project is “Redspot”, named after Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which is also the largest DOT in the solar system. Redspot is inspired by Truffle (https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle) in Truffle Suite. Redspot is a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline for pallet-contracts. Redspot is trying to let the development of ink! be projectized and simplify the testing and interacting with contracts.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/0
2、Polkascan Foundation
Description：Social Contract
Value：3431.6505 DOT
Polkascan Foundation Social Contract with the Polkadot Community for operational expenses of running polkascan.io during June 2020 — November 2020.
In general, this proposal covers the Social Contract between the Polkadot Community and Polkascan Foundation and covers operational expenses to run Polkadot related components on https://polkascan.io
The Social Contract is an innovation for coordination between a Blockchain/Treasury/DAO and an external service provider. Polkascan Foundation is a Dutch not-for-profit organization that provides strong guarantees that its platform remains neutral, and does not serve any interests of external parties, investors, advertisers, et cetera.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/2
3、Centrifuge
Description：Maintaining and upgrading go-substrate-rpc-client（GSRPC）
Value：10000 DOT
Many projects interfacing with Substrate based chains is based on Go. An easy to use and well-supported client library to interface with Substrate can help with adoption for those projects. The fast development speed of Substrate requires regular upgrades of GSRPC. Additionally, projects using GSRPC need occasional support, which consumes further attention from us. Being supportive of these users and growing the feature set is key to spreading the adoption of Polkadot and related chains.
Centrifuge put forward a treasury spending proposal for maintenance of and support for GSRPC. This comprises upgrading GSRPC to new releases of Substrate within 4 weeks of such releases and support for other teams using GSRPC through GitHub. Examples of substrate upgrades that need GSRPC upgrades are the introduction of new modules, hashers, extrinsic versions, and parachain functionality.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/7
4、Polkascan Foundation
Description：Social Contract and maintaining Polkadot Ecosystem Python Libraries
Value：10000 DOT
This Social Contract aims to serve as an agreement between Polkascan Foundation on one hand and the Polkadot Network Community on the other hand. The Social Contract should be viewed as an off-chain coordination mechanism to advance the relationship between Polkadot Network Community and Polkascan Foundation in its role as an external service providers.
Polkascan Foundation is a not-for-profit infrastructure service provider and maintainer of Polkadot Ecosystem Python Libraries. These libraries have been developed over the past 2 years and have so far had our Polkascan Block Explorer stack as primary use-case and form its foundational components. The Python libraries are partly funded by Web3 Foundation grants, they have a generalized nature, suitable for adoption by any Python-based project in the broader Polkadot ecosystem.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/8
5、Encointer
Description：Encointer deployment and maintenance
Value：7000 DOT
Encointer is a platfrom for self-sovereign identity and local community currencies with self-issued universal basic income. The fundament of Encointer is its unique-proof-of-personhood protocol which leverages the fact that a human can only be in one place at one time. Employing physical concurrent pseudonym key-signing parties, Encointer aims to bring self-sovereign identity with strong guarantees to Polkadot.
Encointer requests funding from the Polkadot treasury to:
- Integrate testnet Gesell with Rococo as a parachain (local testnet first, then Rococo as soon as it allows new parachains (currently there’s a freeze))
- Demonstrate SSI authentication on a second parachain (i.e. subsocial) through HRMP (the most simple claim being that certain AccountId has attended the last N subsequent ceremonies and therefore can claim this only for one account). Encointer is the ISSUER of that claim, the other parachain is the VERIFYER in need of Sybil-attack prevention, the account holder being the SUBJECT.
- Participate in first Kusama slot auction with a Gesell-style parachain (transparent, pure substrate pallets) and set up a crowdfunding
- Participate in first Polkadot slot auction with a Cantillon-style parachain (SubstraTEE-based, privacy-enhanced and scalable with sharding) and set up a crowdfunding
This proposal also covers the following maintenance expenditures:
- infrastructure: servers for validators and other services
- substrate dependency upgrade to 2.0.0 once released (thereby upgrading substrate-API-client and SubstraTEE at the same time which are currently on alpha.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/9
6、8BTC
Description：Host “Polkadot and the Trust World it Brings“ meetup
Value：1500 DOT
8btc is one of the earliest and biggest crypto media in China. 8btc was founded by Changjia and Jihan Wu in 2011 and translated the very first Chinese version of the bitcoin whitepaper. 8btc is an information and education platform for crypto users and people interested in cryptos in China. In 2016, 8btc English News was founded to act as a bridge between Chinese and foreign communities.
8btc is also a host of Hangzhou Blockchain Week and World Blockchain Conference, which will be held every year. Besides these two conferences, 8btc will host plenty of meetups with different themes every year. Chainge is the name we gave to tech-related meetups, which is also for the Polkadot meetup we are about to host. Chainge has seen the most famous blockchain teams in China joined in, including IRISnet, Nervos and PlatOn.
As a validating node of Polkadot, 8btc appreciates what Polkadot brings to the blockchain world and Web3 development. Though Polkadot is already a well-known project in China, most people know little about the related tech and what Polkadot can bring to the blockchain revolution.
So the meetup named ‘Polkadot and the Trust World it Brings’ will get more people to truly learn about what Polkadot is and will be, instead of pure speculation. Hangzhou is only our first station, there will be more in different cities in China.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/10
7、PolkaStats
Description：PolkaStats block explorer operation and server expenditure
Value：172.84 DOT
PolkaStats is a Substrate block explorer aiming to provide the best staking and economic data for both validators and nominators. It helps both types of users by providing comprehensive metrics, charts, and utilities to improve their knowledge and performance.
PolkaStats is one of the projects that was born in La Colmena, a crypto community-based in Sevilla, southern Spain. The community aims to incentivize content-creation in Spanish for Polkadot, Kusama, and other blockchain projects and, as supporters of open source culture, develop software to contribute to the ecosystem. The organization also acts like an incubator that helped create blockchain business models like DragonStake or Delega Networks validators
PolkaStats aims to submit periodic spending proposals to the Polkadot Treasury, on the following terms:
- A recurrent 3 month period pre-paid funding for operational expenses, which totals to 172,84 DOT.
- DOT base-price will be determined by taking a 30-day average price from major exchanges.
- The funds will be used to pay the servers we rent to Hetzer and Digital Ocean in order to operate PolkaStats for Polkadot and Westend network (shared with Kusama).
More details：https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eJIyyyl2Asr8tX05zpO-sUOa2aSoeIlCGag030t0vrA/edit#heading=h.7uywg8yb96yf
8、Patract Labs
Description：Development of Redspot v0.2
Value：7650 DOT
Redspot’s goal is to standardize the contract development process, hide the underlying compilation details of the contract, and combine the sandbox, library, API, SDK, and other plugins to create a one-stop smooth contract development process. We have finished the first proposal requirements for v0.1, and written a development report.
Summary of Redspot’s future plan:
v0.1: Build core available functions based on Truffle framework.
v0.2: Migrate to the Builder framework to enhance plugin extensibility and add some functions to provide a smoother development workflow.
v0.3: Imitating Builder's plugins, combined with the characteristics of Substrate to add various plugins, such as waffle, and began to integrate multi-language SDK.
v0.4: Following the case of Builder, add appropriate libraries, such as typechain, etc.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/13
9、SubstraTEE
Description：Improve SubstraTEE scalability
Value：8000 DOT
SubstraTEE today provides a framework enabling confidentiality for substrate blockchains by leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). The current version uses indirect invocation: All confidential transactions need to pass through the blockchain as a proxy to substraTEE workers in end-to-end encrypted form. This is necessary to get a consensus on the ordering of transactions.
So now propose to improve scalability by orders of magnitude without compromising on confidentiality. They suggest a direct invocation architecture, such that individual transactions are directly sent to and processed by workers without touching the underlying layer one blockchain. Layer one will only be used as a registry of remote-attested TEEs and to provide finality to 2nd layer blocks.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/14
10、Patract Labs
Description：Patract Labs’ second project, development of Europa v0.1
Value：9450 DOT
Europa is inspired by Ganache, Ethereumjs-VM, and Builder EVM from the Ethereum ecosystem. Europa is a sandbox of Substrate runtime environment, which would be used to simplify the developing, debugging, and integration test when developers develop Substrate runtime applications and test pallet-contracts. The sandbox will remove P2P and consensus functions, just remaining the execution environment and RPC interface. We will wrap the core modules, then provide a local database, a detailed log print function, a concept of workspaces that isolates different developing environments, and interact with different front-end UIs. The sandbox has no time interval between producing blocks, so debugging can be optimized to be very quick.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/15
11、Patract Labs
Description：Development of the third project of Patract Labs, Elara v0.1
Value：8600 DOT
In Polkadot, Kusama, and other parachains, RPC is the interface between DApp and the network. As the Polkadot network continues to expand, more and more parachains will be online, and more and more parachains will support smart contract functions. Faced with more and more parallel chains, developers need to build and maintain multiple blockchain nodes in order to interact with them, which will be a huge development cost for them. Whether it is facing the development and testing needs of developers or users’ online DApp usage requirements, a convenient, fast, and stable network access is one of the necessary conditions, and it is also the infrastructure of the Polkadot ecosystem.
Elara is inspired by Infura from the Ethereum ecosystem, named after Jupiter’s seventh moon. Elara’s goal is to build a similar infrastructure and network public access services to provide developers with a unified access layer based on Substrate multi-chain. In addition, Elara will be used as part of the smart contract development service and will be integrated with other components of the Patract toolchain in the future, in terms of contract development environment support, development tools component, contract deployment, and DApp release. Elara will be Polkadot’s infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on building upper-level applications.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/16
12、Patract Hub
Description：Development of Elara v0.2
Value：7333 DOT
Patract Hub is a community based non-profit organization, developed and maintained by Patract Labs. We develop local open-source toolkits and one-stop cloud smart IDE, dedicated to providing free development toolkits and infrastructure services for the entire smart contract ecosystem.
Patract Labs have finished the development work of Elara v0.1 on time and written a treasury report at https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/139. This proposal focuses on Elara v0.2 and will continue to develop the following features on the basis of v0.1.
- implement the account space features, supporting developers to use Github as a third-party login system to create an account space.
- Support the creating and management of multiple projects under the developer’s account space
- Provide developers with detailed access statistics features on the single project dimension, showing statistical indicators such as daily and weekly requests, calling methods, and source of user groups.
- Officially launch https://elara.patract.io, providing the community with public access services to the Polkadot mainnet
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/18
13、Polkascan Foundation
Description：Development of the second phase of Social contract
Value：1011.14206 DOT
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/19
14、LocalCoinSwap
Description：Python Substrate library upgrade and Polkadot integration
Value：1500 DOT
LocalCoinSwap is a P2P cryptocurrency exchange that focuses on providing trustless fiat on-ramp solutions, enabling global accessibility for cryptocurrencies. We bridge the gap between users and crypto where centralized exchanges fail, in particular across developing regions of the world where access to mainstream finance is limited.
After a successful proof of concept with Kusama, we are now looking to extend the underlying infrastructure that we have developed to make a single package that is generically useful for any arbitrary number of parachains and tokens. We will then use this package to develop an open-source non-custodial trading integration for Polkadot. This will allow a trustless non-custodial fiat on/off ramp for DOT.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/20
15、Ramp Network
Description：A Plug'n'Play solution for seamless onboarding to DOT from fiat currencies
Value：4000 DOT
We see the Polkadot ecosystem developing, but for using numbers to come, easy access for new users must be ensured. Currently, the first-time user willing to enter the ecosystem must enter either via centralized exchange. These steps are bearable for the current users of the network and crypto-natives but will be a huge obstacle to new participants. To significantly improve the process for the end-user, networks need on-ramps for easy, streamlined access using fiat money.
With Ramp the purchase process takes place in just one interface, it is directly correlated to the wallet user is using for the purchase and, usually, takes much less time and requires fewer data than centralized exchanges need. Ramp offers a powerful SDK that allows developers to offer DOT purchases with cards, bank transfers, and open banking within their apps.
Details of the proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u0h1CRrK-a-a83mecWSzNfvlBxUCurFf6Z6cME_HHCA/edit?usp=sharing
16、Subscan
Description：Operation and maintenance of Subscan
Value：1000 DOT
SUBSCAN has already borne the operation and maintenance costs for more than one year. Our project currently lacks sources of income, in order to continue to operate, they need to apply for financial support.
Operation and maintenance costs include:
Compute Engine
Cloud SQL
Stackdriver Logging
Cloud Storage
…
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/22
17、Patract Hub
Description：Development of Redspot v0.3
Value：7975 DOT
Patract Hub has finished the second proposal requirements for v0.2 and wrote a development report. This proposal will explain in detail the design details of Redspot v0.3. After ink! v3 was released last month, many developers began to pay attention to the development of the WASM contract. After the refactoring of v0.2, Redspot also has more powerful functions. Patract Hub thinks now is the time to get help from Parity and W3F, and promote Redspot to the community. Patract Hub hopes to serve more developers and get their feedback to help us fix bugs and optimize Redspot.
Plan of v0.3：Promote Redspot and allow more contract developers to participate. Combine the features of Substrate to add various plug-ins, such as Waffle, Jupiter, Gas report.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/23
18、Patract Hub
Description：Patract Hub’s treasury proposal for Megaclite (ZKP support) v0.1
Value：5431 DOT
Among the current Layer 2 solutions to the privacy and throughput problems of blockchains, the zero-knowledge proof is considered the most powerful solution. Compared with Channels, Mixers, and Ring Signature, the zero-knowledge proof is the most difficult to implement, but the effect is the best, and it can be applied to almost all scenarios on the blockchain.
With the development of some technologies around the Ethereum community in recent years, the efficiency of zero-knowledge generation and verification has been greatly improved, and the upper layer abstract has become more and more mature, and the development difficulty has been greatly reduced. Recently, some related projects have appeared in the Polkadot community, such as Matter Labs, Starks Network, etc., but for WASM smart contract and Runtime development, the Substrate framework still lacks some underlying technical support.
More details：https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/24
About PolkaWorld
Polkadot’s largest Chinese community
The PolkaWorld community has gathered more than 30,000 Polkadot fans. It is the world’s largest Polkadot Chinese community and the only community that has received the Web3 Foundation Community Grant.
PolkaWorld is committed to popularizing Polkadot technical knowledge, training Substrate developers, and supporting Polkadot ecological entrepreneurs, thereby promoting the development of China’s Web3.0 ecology.
Twitter：@polkaworld_org
