Polkadot Referendum Roundup Week 42: Signal

Introduction

Greetings Polkadot OpenGov enthusiasts! 👋

We've got another jam-packed edition of Referendum Roundup for you this week. Get ready for the latest updates, insights, and happenings around our evolving on-chain governance system.

In this issue, we'll cover executed spends, rejected proposals, spotlight AAG presentations, feature governance-in-action tweets, and more. But first, let's dive into the treasury update...

Treasury Update

The current treasury balance of 44.65M DOT represents an increase of approximately 0.31% from last week's balance of 44.51M DOT.

Executed proposals

Medium spender

• Referenda #177: Polkadot Unity SDK proposal to become a Verified Solution (Part 1) | 42,685 DOT | Approved on 20th Oct '23.

• Referenda #162: Polkadot Live: Proposal for funding community-driven development to initial release | 24,937 DOT | Approved on 17th Oct '23.

• Referenda #165: Polkadot Nominator Insight Hub. Spreading the Best Nominator Strategies through TOP Nomination Leaderboards by MOTIF.NETWORK | Requested: 32,480 DOT | Approved on 22th Oct '23.

Big spender

• Referenda #161: Apillon Platform Milestone 1 Proposal by Matjaz ⧓ | Requested: 171,454 DOT | Approved on 22th Oct '23.

Rejected Proposals

• Referenda #157 Big Spender: Increase DOT media visibility through media buying and airdrop campaign by Tobias Airdrop.com | Requested: 247,058 DOT |

• Referenda #154 Medium Spender: Retroactive and future maintenance/development of Parachains.info by PARACHAINS.INFO | Requested: 22,400 DOT | Status: Rejected.

Current Proposals

Medium Spender Queue

• Referenda #209: Dotinsights - A Research Hub & Data Platform for Polkadot | 42,650 DOT | 19 hours ago.

• Referenda #202: Operating cost for the research organization Polkadot Ecology | 28,010 DOT | 4 days ago.

• Referenda #200: Polkadot Relayers 2023 Milestone 2 | 26,281 DOT | 4 days ago.

• Referenda #188: ELLIPAL Self-custody Cold Wallet 1 Proposal: DOT/KSM Tokens, Staking, ASTR & GLMR | 33,943 DOT | 10th Oct '23.

• Referenda #187: EncodeClub's latest tranche request | 12,091 DOT | 9th Oct '23.

• Referenda #185: Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Winter in HongKong | 90,540 DOT | 8th Oct '23.

• Referenda #183: Polkassembly Social Contract | Maintenance proposal Q3 & Q4’23 | 43,154 DOT | 7th Oct '23.

• Referenda #181: Valletech's Polkawatch, Decentralization Analytics, Continued Operation and Development | 12,115 DOT | 5th Oct '23.

• Referenda #180: Polkascan Foundation's proposal on transforming Subsquid Aggregates | 16,955 DOT | 5th Oct '23.

• Referenda #178: DotLeap Editor's Dot Leap 2 proposal | 37,851 DOT | 4th Oct '23.

• Referenda #175: Day7's SubQuery <> Nova Wallet Common API: Maintenance Cost For Q1-Q2 2023 | 11,183 DOT | 2nd Oct '23.

• Referenda #172: OpenSquare's infrastructure products maintenance for 2023 Q2 and Q3 | 67,438 DOT | 2nd Oct '23.

• Referenda #163: Zhixi Interlay's Polkadot Parachain Assets Onramp Bounty Program | Not specified | 27th Sep '23.

Big Spender Queue

• Referenda #205: Treasury Proposal: Parachain Loan Financing (PLF) Kapex Parachain by Totem Live Accounting/Pledge Account | Requested: 592.57K DOT

• Referenda #201: KAGOME – the C++ implementation of Polkadot Host milestone 2 by kml | Requested: 168.43K DOT

• Referenda #192: Removed (Note: No title given) | Requested: 425.66K DOT

• Referenda #179: Polkadot Blockchain Academy - retroactive funding for wave 3 of the Academy held at UC Berkeley this Summer | Requested: 255.84K DOT.

AAG Spotlight

• The Totem Kapex Parachain Team has proposed a loan request from the Polkadot Treasury, offering a collateral-backed amount of $2,250,000 USD. In exchange for approval, they plan to airdrop their native token to all voters. The team views this method as a decentralized approach to secure funding and has shared further details in their proposal document and pitch deck.  

• Bill Laboon has stepped in to address Referendum 203, identifying it as a potential airdrop scam. He has taken action to cancel this referendum and the associated deposit.

• Valletech's Polkawatch proposal focuses on decentralization analytics. They've updated the Multi-Wallet interface and integrated Polkawatch analytics into the Polkadot Staking Dashboard. As they enhance the system and adjust their GeoLocation strategy, Valletech aims to reduce costs and lessen their dependency on Treasury funds. The key functionality is to allow users to analyze their nomination data's decentralization.

Governance in Action

• Bill Laboon provided a peek into slashing scammers on Polkadot. Referendum 204 proposed killing an obvious scam referendum (203), burning the scammer's submission deposit in the process. Exciting to see malicious actors get thwarted!

• Great community twitter spaces on evolving OpenGov landscape and the $40M W3F ecosystem fund. No time? Read the summary thread.

• Fancy a little whale watching?

Closing Thoughts

This week's governance updates highlighted the evolving nature of Polkadot's on-chain governance system. From executed proposals to rejected referenda, we're seeing the community put OpenGov into action.

It's exciting to see active participation, whether it be AAG members analyzing proposals, Bill Laboon thwarting scams, or the Twitter Spaces crowd sharing thoughtful perspectives. Engaged community members truly make governance come alive.

The name of the game is incremental improvement - constantly refining OpenGov to be more decentralized, effective, and inclusive. Thanks for joining us on this journey! Until next week of Polkadot Referendum Roundup.

Would you like to go deeper into Polkadot beyond just OpenGov? Check out We3kly Web3 R3cap to stay up to date on all things Polkadot.