The Treasury
Polkadot’s onchain treasury represents a paradigm shift in capital allocation and social organization, with the potential to revolutionize the way people do business and collaborate around shared goals. Now, the financial agency once reserved for corporations and governments belongs to a decentralized, peer-to-peer network.
Get rewarded in DOT for contributing to network resilience
The Polkadot Treasury is a pot of DOT tokens accumulated through transaction fees and normal network operations. Any DOT holder can submit treasury spending proposals to fund projects and activities that benefit the network.
Funded activities
Any activity or project that benefits Polkadot's growth and innovation can be funded by the treasury.
Infrastructure deployment and continued operation
Cross-chain application development
Multichain infrastructure, UX improvements
Network security operations
Monitoring services, continuous auditing
Ecosystem provisions
Collaborations with friendly chains
Marketing activities
Advertising, paid features, collaborations
Community events and outreach
Meetups, hackerspaces
Software development
Wallets and wallet integration, clients and client upgrades
Research
Academic and non-academic
How it works
Treasury funds can be allocated via onchain governance in three ways: proposals, bounties, and tips.
Proposals
General spending proposals are ideal for those with project ideas seeking to earn DOT. Proposers create a detailed plan and budget, gather community feedback, and submit the proposal as an onchain referendum if feedback is positive.
Bounties
The Polkadot community uses the bounty mechanism to delegate project oversight to experts, or curators, due to limited community capacity and expertise. Any DOT holder can propose a bounty, and if approved, curators ensure the project's success, manage the budget, and handle administrative tasks. Successful curators may receive a bounty reward.
Tips
Tips reward completed work and can be proposed by any DOT holder. Tip proposals must be submitted under relevant OpenGov referendum tracks, considering payout caps. Eligible activities include content production, translations, Substrate PR contributions, channel moderation, and community support.
How to submit a treasury proposal
General spending proposals are the best method when a person or team has an idea for a project that they would like to complete, earning DOT in return. Proposers put together a detailed plan for the project and a desired budget, solicit feedback from the community, and submit the proposal as an onchain referendum if community feedback is positive.
Download Element↗, join the Polkadot Direction↗ channel, and ask the community for feedback on your proposal idea. Be prepared to answer questions.
How to create a bounty proposal
The Polkadot community can only oversee so much activity, and oftentimes community members lack the expertise necessary to make a judgment on the successful completion of a project. The bounty mechanism was created for this reason. Bounties delegate project oversight to experts called curators, who work to ensure the successful completion of projects. Curators oversee the project budget and are responsible for making sure it is spent appropriately. Aside from payments, curators also undertake various administrative tasks such as documenting child bounties implementations, preparing quarterly reports, and sharing their progress with the community to evidence progress made. Upon successful completion of their assigned tasks, they can be eligible for a bounty reward.
Download Element↗ if you don’t already have it, join the Polkadot Direction↗ channel, and ask the community for feedback on your proposal idea. Be prepared to answer questions.
How to propose a tip
Tips are a way to reward completed work. Any DOT holder can propose a tip for community contributors. Tip proposals need to be submitted under the relevant OpenGov referenda tracks, and proposers must take into account payout caps. Types of activities that can be awarded by tips include, but are not limited to, content production (video tutorials, news, updates, and tech explainers), translations (of the Polkadot Wiki, blogs, video subtitles), Substrate PR contributions, channel moderation, and community support.
Create an OpenGov referendum under the Small tipper or Big tipper track and provide contextual information about the recipient of the tips, the reason for the tip (including links to the work that was completed if relevant) on Polkassembly↗ or Subsquare↗. There should be a way to verify that the address on-chain belongs to the rightful beneficiary of the tip, such as a verified on-chain identity↗ or some other method.
Funded projects
Here are some examples of projects funded by the treasury. These are selected for educational purposes only and are not endorsements of the teams behind them.
Software, infrastructure & tooling
Explorers
Community & marketing
Network security
The treasury burn
Unused tokens in the treasury are periodically burned (destroyed) if they are not used, creating deflationary pressure and incentivizing the community to spend the funds. Currently the burn rate is set at 1%.
Learn more
