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2025 December Polkadot OpenGov Report

Our Final Report: The Snowplow

Snow is calm. It softens the city, absorbs noise, and covers imperfections with a white coat.

But appearances might be deceiving. While snow is falling, it hides what is underneath. When it stops falling, it compacts, mixes with dirt, and the ice shows up in patches.

What comes next is the clean-up crew. The snowplow. It might be slow, loud, inconvenient, and messy. It might block the streets for a time, push snow into places you do not want it, and force people to deal with the remaining mess directly. But if you want the city to come to life again, it has to be done.

OpenGov felt similar at times. When funding was flowing, many initiatives looked orderly from the outside. Once the precipitation of money slowed, weaknesses started to show. Conflicts of interest, mismanagement, and incentives that were never properly named became harder to dismiss.

Our question is: After 2.5 years and nearly $250 million spent, what did the network actually build?

What did we fail to notice until it was too late? What is worth keeping and what is not? And what standards will we apply in the future? While the new stewards of the network work through those questions, projects in the ecosystem should at least do one thing consistently: be accountable for their actions and act honorably.

Our Watch is Ending​

We started our watch on a snowy day with two shovels and a mission statement: Helping OpenGov grow up!

Today, as the snowplow has arrived, we announce that our Watch is ending.

OpenGov.Watch was funded by the Web3 Foundation to act as an external and independent accountability layer for OpenGov. Now that the Web3 Foundation is becoming an active voter itself as a large stakeholder, our project in its current form is not needed anymore.

So, before we wrap it up, we have to ask: Did we succeed in our mission?

Our own assessment is: We have won a few significant battles, but we have lost the overall war. The voice of reason is nothing without the support of hard power. And sadly, reasonable voters with size have been absent for most of the time. This situation has now changed, as the Web3 Foundation has decided to become an active voter.

Long-term, the goal should be to institutionalize accountability within the broader governance community. Maybe in the future, that objective can be picked up by the next generation of the watch. Because the watch should never depend on individuals or specific institutions. It should depend on an ideal. To make the world a better place, bit by bit.

What did we do?​

We focused on three key areas: Reporting, Moderation, and Thought Leadership. Our goal was to reduce the information asymmetry, give everyone a chance to debate, and spearhead new initiatives.

We believe this work mattered, not just for Polkadot, but for the broader idea of giving power back to people through decentralized governance and liquid democracy. We are proud to have contributed to this phase of the social and political evolution of how humans organize.

What is next for Polkadot and OpenGov​

On the OpenGov side, Web3 Foundation is taking a more active role directly in the governance process. It is moving away from the old open grants model and toward targeted strategic funding aligned with Polkadot's product focused direction. W3F also says it will contribute technical review capacity inside OpenGov and track milestone delivery more closely, in coordination with groups like the Technical Fellowship and Parity.

On the network and product side, Parity is leaning harder into platform and product work, after years of heavy lifting on core protocol and scaling. Gavin Wood's Polkadot Roundup 2025 says the core stack is now mature enough to support sophisticated applications, so the priority shifts from building primitives to shipping products people can actually use. Polkadot Hub is pointed out as central to that direction, with native smart contracts and faster blocks positioned as key foundations for product work.

A renewed Kusama vision is starting with three new bounties under Web3 Foundation oversight. As previously announced, the focus areas are privacy-focused zero-knowledge work, human-centered proof of personhood, and continued support for art and culture-led experimentation in the network.

A hybrid model seems likely for OpenGov bounties. Some bounties might continue under much stricter oversight and clearer expectations. Others are likely to be consolidated, paused, or closed as the network tightens its operational standards.

As we leave, we are coordinating a new structure for community calls to keep key discussions accessible and predictable. We have already initiated a community discussion on how different calls should be planned and organized going forward.

Notable Mentions​

Although OpenGov was quiet this month with few proposals and even fewer approvals, the items that did surface were still important in shaping the next phase of Polkadot governance.

  • The Legal Bounty was closed, almost exactly one year after it was approved. So far, it has not produced meaningful public deliverables. That is partly structural, since legal work often depends on confidentiality. A recent forum thread also questioned the timing and rationale of payments made shortly before the shutdown. Earlier, the bounty posted its first community update in mid-November.
  • The UX Bounty was also discussed on the forum and was soon followed by a closure proposal that will soon pass. The bounty managers published a statement and returned the remaining funds to the treasury ahead of execution.
  • The Meetups Bounty is another one heading toward closure this winter. A proposal was submitted in December, but it was later withdrawn, apparently after discussions between the curators and Web3 Foundation.
  • Web3 Foundation announced the discontinuation of the Decentralized Voices program as ecosystem focus shifts toward a more product and execution driven phase. While ending the initiative, W3F emphasized that the program helped strengthen governance culture through clearer reasoning, accountability, and more active participation.
  • Another major proposal was submitted on the Wish For Change track, outlining Phase 1 of the Dynamic Allocation Pool roadmap, which changes Polkadot staking and fund flows. The idea is to introduce a DAP account to collect DOT from fees, coretime sales, and slashes, and it would remove the treasury burn. It also proposes changes on staking system, including a 10k DOT minimum self-stake, a 10% minimum validator commission, slash protection for nominators, and faster unbonding. The implementation is planned for mid-March 2026.
  • A Polkadot runtime upgrade to version 2.0.5 was also submitted on the Root track. It is a major release that introduces capped issuance, adds support for Solidity smart contracts, and improves block times on the Hub to two seconds.

Auf Wiedersehen!​

OpenGov.Watch might be ending as a project, but our ideals of building a decentralized future are not going anywhere. Now it is time to study these years of hard-earned experience in decentralized governance, iterate on what is needed, and prepare for the next chapter.