PoP Bounty – February 2026 Transparency Report

February was focused on laying strong foundations for the Proof of Personhood (PoP) bounty on Kusama.

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1. Governance & Direction

• Defined our Mission, Vision, and Charter
• Designed the initial governance structure and contributor expectations

Mission

To fund, test and advance highly sybil-resilient, public good, privacy-preserving, decentralized, open and inclusive Proof of Personhood concepts and solutions on Kusama.

Vision

A future where every human can credibly prove their unique personhood online, without surveillance, without revealing their identity or behavior; unlocking fair access, legitimate coordination, and personal freedom.

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2. Infrastructure & Public Presence

We created the following information and contact methods, based on Kusama's Web3 values, including privacy and decentralization:

• Launched the initial website on IPFS:
  PoP Bounty landing page

• Deployed the proposal submission form on formstr:
  https://formstr.app/i/kusama-pop

• Created an encrypted public discussion room on matrix:
  Kusama PoP Bounty (Public)

• Built out the proposal pipeline for structured intake, review, and evaluation

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3. Internal Tooling

To align operations with PoP bounty values, we evaluated decentralized tools and prefer them over more common centralized options:

Priorities:

1. Avoid dependency on a single curator's resources for critical tools (admin account, infrastructure, keypairs)

   • If co-ownership of all curators is possible, that's a plus

   • Better give admin rights to all curators than to just one

   • If no other option, share common credentials securely (password or secret key)

2. Avoid centralized services (e.g. google forms, google docs, notion, atlassian, github)

3. Prefer open source tools, but not if that conflicts with 1. (e.g. self hosting)

4. Prefer tools which can be used anonymously or at least pseudonymously (nostr, wallet login, etc)

A few tools we settled on:

• radicle for private internal documentation
• formstr and fileverse ddocs for proposal submission
• matrix for communication and coordination
• jitsy for meetings
• IPFS & IPNS for publishing our static landingpage
• CoReVo (Commit-Reveal Voting) for voting on proposals (customized tool, built by two of our curators)

To learn more about the tool evaluation and choice process you can read our blog post: Replacing Every SaaS With Decentralized Tools: What Actually Works

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4. Ecosystem Engagement

• Initiated exchange with George from Parity Technologies regarding their PoP-related initiatives
• Reached out to teams actively building in the Proof of Personhood space across the broader Polkadot / Kusama ecosystem

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5. Bounty Strategy Development

• Started formulating a focused bounty strategy
• Began defining priority areas and desired PoP primitives
• Started designing an execution plan to attract high-quality builders

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6. Proposals

• Received our first proposal, currently under review

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Summary

February was about building the foundations — governance clarity, decentralized tooling, and ecosystem alignment.

With the first proposal now under assessment, we are moving from setup into active evaluation and execution.

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- The PoP Bounty Team