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2025 November Polkadot OpenGov Report

Two important things left a mark on OpenGov in November: Web3 Foundation started voting already, and debates around marketing spending and on-chain investigations ran into locked threads on the forum.

Web3 Foundation Started Voting​

After announcing in August that they would be more active in governance, the Web3 Foundation (W3F) is now voting actively in OpenGov and has published an open voting policy to clarify voting requirements for proposers.

W3F controls a substantial voting position and is currently voting with around one hundred million DOT. Their first month of visible voting has already touched several proposals. Large strategic spends like the Polkadot People Initiative incentive package. Developer requests, such as the ReactiveDOT work. And infrastructure funding like RegionX Hub. In parallel, W3F also submitted a proposal to close the Marketing Bounty after recent public debate.

Treasury funds are treated as community capital. They are finite, and proposals are expected to respect that. W3F says it will look at three things for every spend request. Cost effectiveness, expertise, and accountability.

Cost effectiveness means detailed budgets instead of round numbers. Proposers are asked to present itemised costs, vendor quotes, and clear justification for each significant part of the proposal. The W3F also encourages teams to reach out early instead of dropping a fully formed referendum on chain. Expertise means that proposers need a real track record in the area they are asking funds for, with some prior evidence that they can deliver the type of outcome they promise. Accountability is the strictest. W3F wants on-chain accountability through milestone-based payments and periodic reviews instead of large upfront transfers. This will help the community end a project before the next milestone payment if the delivery is insufficient.

These three concepts are mirrored in the W3F's minimum standards for proposals. These include on-chain verified scope and budget locked through IPFS or git tags, concrete and measurable deliverables instead of vague promises, and at least two weeks of public discussion on the forum before a referendum is submitted. Significant changes in scope or budget are expected to trigger a fresh round of discussion. Open source licensing and planned security audits are strongly recommended where they make sense.

It is becoming harder to justify loose budgeting, unclear scope, or weak accountability on any request from the treasury.

As these standards settle in, the practical impact will also show up inside the W3F. More teams will try to contact W3F early for guidance, and the number of requests waiting for review before they even reach the chain is likely to grow. The clearest example this month was the Reactive DOT proposal. The first version requested a single lump sum in advance. W3F voted against that structure. After some communication with the W3F, a second version was submitted with monthly milestones and streamed payments, which matched the new guidelines and passed within a week, with W3F this time voting in favor.

Crane Maneuvers​

After we published a deep dive research into Marketing Bounty spending last month, W3F submitted a proposal to close the bounty and return the remaining funds to the treasury. Shortly after, an on-chain investigation thread on the Polkadot Forum raised questions about a large payment route between Novasama and Marketing Bounty director Crane, and the debate escalated across several critical threads that were later locked by moderators.

The forum thread was about tracing a payment route from Novasama to a wallet that had already been identified as belonging to Crane, based on earlier salary payments from Kusamarian. It showed that a Novasama controlled account received the Blast campaign funding from the bounty, bridged more than half a million USDC to Ethereum some days later, and some of that amount landed in Crane's personal wallet.

The reply was that this was a pass-through payment to cover costs for multiple Novasama vendors. No receipts, contracts, or other documentation were presented publicly. Neither Novasama nor the other Marketing Bounty curators joined the thread to confirm his explanation. Even if his account of the payment route is entirely correct, routing treasury-funded campaign money through a personal account is a serious professional mistake. In most work environments, especially at a senior manager pay level, this would automatically trigger a formal investigation and likely lead to people stepping down from their roles.

Once that post landed, long-running tensions around the ecosystem came back to the surface. Older criticisms about conflicts of interest, media roles, and weak ethics practices now had a concrete example to attach to, and more people stepped in to ask broader accountability questions. The debate quickly turned into a snowball of overlapping threads and defensive reactions, and later into a censorship dispute when several of those threads were locked.

Policing the Forum​

A censorship debate is taking place on the Polkadot Forum.

The forum, which is operated by Parity Technologies, saw several threads closed in a short time frame. The threads investigating OpenGov spending and department performance were affected. Our Marketing Bounty Deep Dive thread, discussions around the Anti Scam and Legal bounties, and the thread about the on-chain activity of the Marketing Bounty director were all locked by moderators.

The official justification came through a new set of quality enforcement rules and a later post on Parity's position on moderation, both of which are also currently locked. The message was that “many posts gain traction which are not aligned with the sense of community forum is trying to foster”, and that there is not enough capacity to handle long and contentious debates. In practice, most of the threads that were locked were precisely the ones trying to follow up on treasury-funded work and raise concrete accountability questions.

After the main moderation post from Parity, the situation quickly escalated. The discussion moved from the original questions about spending into a long and messy argument about tone, rules, and who gets to decide what is acceptable. As a result, the original open questions got buried while the threads that raised them stayed locked.

This is clearly a form of censorship, because the decision cut off accountability discussions in one of the few places where a working line of questioning and response was visible. The forum has a category called ‘Governance’, but a serious governance debate about spending and conflicts of interest was shut down. Taken together, this move is directly opposite to the new agenda from W3F to foster accountability, measurable deliverables, and careful use of community capital. It is hard to insist on cost effectiveness and periodical reviews while the main public venue for asking uncomfortable questions about past spending is being gated by vague moderation criteria. Especially when the moderators and people who are under scrutiny are all senior members of the same DAO.

Departmental updates​

Pioneers Prize Closure​

The Pioneers Prize bounty is getting closed. A referendum was submitted to close bounty and return the remaining funds to the treasury. The program had been inactive for some time, and the closure is effectively a delayed cleanup of an older initiative. Support in the vote so far has been near unanimous, and there has been no push to keep it alive in its current shape.

Paseo Early Top-up​

The Paseo developer testnet bounty requested an early top-up. The proposal asks for another six months of funding to continue runtime upgrades, validator operations, and developer support around the test network. We previously reported on this early top-up in our bounty runways research.

Notable mentions​

  • Stellaswap requested a very large incentive package on the Big Spender track to subsidise liquidity and trading activity. The referendum was rejected. This fits the broader trend of the community becoming less willing to approve large incentive spends for a single protocol.
  • The ink! Alliance story continued across several referenda. The first attempt was a bounty ask that would have funded a broad ink! focused alliance. That was rejected. A second proposal with a still wide scope also failed to pass. A third, narrower request with 360k ask is currently on vote but failing with W3F votes on the Nay side.
  • The Ensuring Accountability referendum was an interesting case. Although it timed out because no one posted the decision deposit, it highlighted that OpenGov requires thirty-five days to cancel a scheduler, which is longer than the monthly payment pattern now being rolled out. This might start a new discussion about creating a dedicated governance track with a shorter decision period to cancel already approved schedulers that would let voters stop future milestone payments quickly if delivery goes off track.