Status: The bounty is funded and technically live, but curators cannot yet advance any proposal. Our hands are bound by an unresolved technical limitation and open questions on liability and compliance.
We owe the community a clear account of where this bounty stands. Parts of it are uncomfortable to publish. We are publishing them anyway, because a bounty built around transparency should practice it, especially when the news is inconvenient.
This is not the first time we have had to pause. In our April 2026 transparency report we announced that verdicts on active proposals were on hold while we waited for the bounty to be established on-chain with curators set and initial funding injected. That funding has since arrived. The pause, for different reasons, has not lifted.
We put the novel multi-asset bounty pallet through a full end-to-end test: we created a child bounty and successfully awarded it. The mechanism works.
We also found a bug in the setup that caps bounty spending at just 1 DOT. A fix has been proposed: polkadot-sdk PR #12409, which adds an increase_value call to the multi-asset-bounties pallet. It still requires Fellowship review and deployment via a runtime upgrade before it takes effect. The PR is awaiting further review, and no timeline has been provided. Until that upgrade ships, meaningful payouts are impossible, and the schedule is not in our hands. The initial funding, roughly 76,000 DOT transferred to the bounty via XCM, sits in the bounty's pot right now and is effectively unspendable. We can see it. We cannot deploy it.
Curator compensation has been well below any reasonable level since the beginning. This is not a sound long-term setup for a bounty expected to allocate serious funds with specialized expertise, and it is currently being renegotiated with the Web3 Foundation.
We want to be clear that this is not what is holding the bounty back. Curators are willing to keep working under the current compensation for the time being. We did not take this role for the money, and we won't let the pay question stall the mission while it's being sorted out. It is a matter to fix properly, not an ultimatum.
We also won't relitigate the numbers here, because we don't need to. Past per-curator compensation is logged transparently on-chain for every Kusama Vision bounty. We invite readers to do their own research and draw their own conclusions about whether the current arrangement is sustainable.
A great deal of our effort this month has gone into putting this bounty on a defensible compliance footing. This matters: curators approving payouts are exposed to sanctions and AML obligations personally.
The Web3 Foundation has declined to take on any of this liability and has repeatedly declined to help with legal matters or KYC processes. We are, in practice, on our own. We have been evaluating different scenarios for how curators can comply with sanctions and AML requirements without the institutional support one would normally expect from the entity that appointed us. That work is ongoing, and it is the responsible thing to do.
The Web3 Foundation has not provided a Kusama Vision coordinator with the authority inside W3F needed to give us guidance and enable smooth operation. In the absence of that role, the three bounties are now self-coordinating.
We are making it work, but the three bounties run in very different operating modes, and reconciling them adds real friction: precisely the friction an empowered coordinator would exist to remove.
Submissions to our bounty have risen to seven. There is genuine interest and genuine work being put forward.
Unfortunately, we cannot move ahead with these proposals. Our hands are currently tied: the bounty setup is unhealthy while the spending cap, curator liability limitation, and compliance procedures all remain open issues. Approving a proposal today would mean doing so on a technical foundation that can't pay it out properly and a legal foundation we've been left to build ourselves.
None of the above should be read as resignation. It isn't.
We resume active curation once the two blocking issues are addressed: the runtime upgrade lands and lifts the 1 DOT cap, and curator liability and compliance have a workable answer. Both are moving. The fix is written and under review. And on the harder problem of operating in a compliant way on sanctions and AML without institutional cover, we have been evaluating concrete scenarios and can see viable paths to a setup we'd be comfortable standing behind. Compensation is being renegotiated in parallel, without holding any of this up.
The honest summary is that these things simply take time, and we would rather get them right than rush a bounty of this significance onto a foundation we don't trust. The initial funding is in place. The technical machinery has been proven end to end. Interest from proposers is growing. The pieces are on the table. What remains is assembling them properly.
So: please keep submitting. Proposals will be queued and reviewed the moment we can act, and we intend for that moment to come. The mission of this bounty has not changed, and neither has our commitment to it. That commitment is exactly why we're taking the time to build it on something solid.
— The PoP Bounty Team