The state of the Kusama treasury

• Try, fail, try again, fail better?

• Is 'The Great Experiment' faltering?

I've dug into every Kusama treasury proposal 1:1.
Curious about what happened with all these funds and where we stand now?

Welcome for treasury audit.

Kusama Treasury Snapshot:

• 654K KSM has been spent since the launch of the network.
• 314K KSM≈ $10.6M is left at the moment.
• 136K KSM is burnt.

Kusama's treasury has a burn mechanism, encouraging the spending of Treasury funds. Unspent funds are burnt and 0.2% of the burn goes to Kappa Sigma Mu Society since 2020.

How much KSM are we talking about here?

Currently, 124K KSM resides in Kappa Sigma Mu's account, amounting to 28% of Kusama's total treasury value. [1]

Retrospective

It all began with AirProtocol and LocalCoinSwap_ receiving grants of ~$80K and ~$36K, respectively.

One appears dead, the other unheard of—likely our first treasury failures.

Looking back, proposals tend to follow trends.

2023 trends:

• Edu contents?

• WASM?

Wallets:

~$1.8M was granted for wallet development. (%10 of the total KSM treasury spending.)

• Which are the ones you have never heard before?

• Which one is your go-to choice now?

Art-Experimental:

Roughly $200k (1% of total KSM proposals) has been granted in avant-garde initiatives.

I'm curious about the impact and outcome of Voxel Bridge, which received nearly $60k.

How many people might have engaged with this VR experience?

[Update: Project is still active and they will release a comprehensive report at the end of the year]

Educational Content-Media-Marketing:

With the addition of bounties, 15% of the total treasury expenditure went toward education content spending.

Hard to evaluate the outcome of this spending.

Let me highlight few of them:

Learn2Earn platform:

Secured ~$40k in funding.

But their progress $ delivery remain elusive.

Can anyone shed light on their status?

• Only one off-chain quest, no frontend

• Website down

• Twitter activity ceased post-Aug 2022 (only RTs)

• Discord inactive since Dec

Hypercube_Videomade "Kusama Explainer Video Series".

It received ~$75K. Successfully executed and garnered substantial views on Twitter. The products are good but questions arise about the cost.

Recently, there was a new proposal by Hypercube. But it was rejected.

nibble_bits' Music Visualisation Project:

A team with a great background, tried to visualise how the protocol works in an integrated way. Found test results & reports, but the end results or updates seem elusive. Project received ~$175K grant.

Someone knows something?

The DotSama Experience project:

An interactive virtual museum for guided education. Proposed by prominent ecosystem pioneers, received ~$280k grant and product delivered. Anyone experienced the VR part? 15 videos released, with recent 10 averaging a mere 142 views per video.

I have encountered a Spanish content creator who previously secured ~$90K in granted proposals. Also a major tip recipient from the $455K Spanish Content Bounty. His latest proposal is ~$130K.

Another one. Treasury granted ~$50k for dubbing Polkadot Decoded videos in Spanish.

• The videos received between 1-10 views each.

• Yes. Several videos had only 1 view. Because of I, now 2.

• Question is, would adding only subtitles to original videos have gotten fewer views?

And more?

describedot:

• Production of 45 Dotsama ecosystem tutorial videos in Hindi, granted ~$50k.

• The series was scheduled for completion by end of January.

• There is an extreme delay with the delivery and a lack of communication about what's going on.

Due to delays, the latest uploaded videos still primarily focus on Polkadot JS. (So far, ~90% of the series is about Polkadot JS) Meanwhile, including the official Polkadot webpage, everyone is trying to put Polkadot JS away from laypeople, even changing its name.

It's April 2023, and still, there's not a single video released about NovaWalletApp ( provides you to vote in your bed) while the proposer's 4 out of 8 problem statements revolve around the 'complexity of gov participation.'

One of issues with video content creators: Despite charging mid-to-top tier prices for production, there's a lack of investment in improving their product quality.

Content quality is crucial, but delivery quality is everything: editing, graphics, lighting, camera, perspective, background, sound, music. The current pay-in-advance model doesn't incentivize them to be better. DMed to some before about these as a pro DoP, but no progress.

In January, educational content platform PolkadotInsider received ~$83k grant. Its low view counts inspired me to experiment with a project.

I created full AI-driven YouTuber PolkaParker. Minimal effort, yet achieved similar view counts as some funded creators.

[Disclose: Polkadot Insider team was pretty angry at me after this thread, claiming that I refer their funding only on Youtube side and damaging their product because they do a lot of work other than Youtube. So let me emphasize once again that my point with this experimentation is how projects, creators are under-utilizing the Youtube.]

Events Spending:

~$1.1M was granted in total.

Making up %5.65 of the Total Treasury Expenditure.

Liquidity:

Apart from issues, educational content initiatives and funding make up just 15% of total spending.

Let's get into big boys.

Did u know that there were 2 subsidy proposals for bootstrapping liquidity received ~$4.7M?

That's 25% of all treasury spending.

June 2022: BifrostFinance received 50K KSM for initial liquidity subsidy. Silver lining for our treasury—it's a borrow!

In a few months, Bifrost should be returning 54,750 KSM (including staking interest) to the treasury.

Before the aUSD hack, AcalaNetwork also received 22K KSM (~$2M) as a subsidy for Stableswap.

The bad news is, that wasn't borrowed.

2K KSM was used to generate aUSD and deployed into the 3-pool. Treasury owns the LP shares and fees earned in it.

Can anyone track this?

Development:

Here's a generalized category—feel free to play with and create sub-categories.

• Overall, 38% of all treasury spending went to development.

• Many major funded projects delivered quality products.

But, several projects seem to have gone quiet or failed.

• cryptolocally (~$20K) - dead

• Extrinsics . io (~$46K) - dead

• PatractLabs (~$300K) - inactive?

• EverdreamSoft's PolkadotAssetJs (~$63K) - ?

• LucasYoda2's PolkadotSpace (~$120K) - passed deadline, no updates since the funding.

Kusamaverse? Started with a great expectations and delivered a fine product, granted ~$540K.

I hope, some people are still using it.

Among many failed and undelivered projects, there is at least one team accepting its failure and returned the grants back to the treasury--wallety/My Wallet. A rare example of accountability in the crypto space? or some may argue that the value of KSM they received at the time is a lot different than today’s value.

• Where do these findings leave us?

• Any hope for the Kusama treasury?

• Worried about Polkadot's treasury after openGov?

A range of opinions and solutions have been shared recently—some conservative, some pessimistic, others worried, yet few remain hopeful.

More insight is at the Kusamarian’s AAG channel.

And for more in-depth discussions and potential solutions, head to the Polkadot Forum.

Don't miss Adam's well-articulated analysis—it's worth a read.

TL;DR: We must face the hard truth that the only way to curb Treasury spending is by implementing strict limits on expenditure.

It's evident that numerous funded projects have negative ROI, with no consequences or tracking/review systems in place.

• We need milestone-based treasury funding-- pay as you go bounties.

• Retroactive Public Goods Funding? Perhaps.

• Utopic to have a reputation-based voting?

Feel free to edit, add comments, update about a project, put a flag and contribute to this google doc data sheet. While there may be minor mathematical inaccuracies or missing proposals, this overview should offer a comprehensive retrospective.