This is our last report. The Kusama Vision programme is consolidating its three bounties into one, and this bounty closes at the end of September.
The spending cap we reported in June was lifted. After that the only thing standing between a proposal and a payout was compliance, and the period since went almost entirely on it. We solved it, but we did not get to spend anything.
We received seven proposals over the life of the bounty. None was funded.
Every one was reviewed properly: each curator wrote an independent assessment before any discussion, proposers were sent questions and given the chance to revise, and two did so substantially. One proposal was rejected and one withdrawn.
To the teams who applied: because nothing was funded, nobody is left part-way through a project. A single Kusama Vision bounty replaces the three. To those who revised, answered our questions and waited through a process that never reached a vote: thank you, and we are sorry it ended this way.
Compliance was the bulk of our work, and the gate every proposal waited behind.
We would rather have taken longer and been able to explain exactly what each check did and did not establish, than moved quickly on a process we could not stand behind. That was our position throughout and it is why the compliance work took as long as it did.
The most significant ecosystem development this period was individuality landing in the Polkadot runtime with the 2.5.0 release, enacted on 10 September 2026 and live on People Polkadot.
We discussed it with the PoP team at Parity. The building blocks are open source, and the design lets another chain consume Polkadot's people set, which would have made bringing individuality to Kusama a concrete piece of work rather than an aspiration.
We reported in June that the Web3 Foundation had declined to take on curator liability and declined to assist with legal matters or KYC. That did not change. The compliance foundation this bounty needed was built by its curators, unaided.
We drafted a legal defence fund to cover legal advice arising from curator work. With the bounty closing, we did not take it forward.
Curator compensation was set below any reasonable level from the start and a renegotiation remained unsatisfactory.
Kusama Vision itself was never really discussed. There was no consistent coordinator, so the three bounties ran on their own, with no shared plan behind them.
The decision to consolidate the programme was taken without consulting the curators appointed to run it.
This period was about compliance: the work that stood between a proposal being approved and funds actually moving. We chose to finish it properly rather than route around it, and we did. Every blocker we named in our June report was cleared.
A lot of what we worked on was not specific to proof of personhood. We set up decentralised infrastructure, with our own Radicle seed and IPFS pinning, to host both our internal work and our public-facing material. We wrote guides so others can use what we learned and follow best practices for running a bounty on that infrastructure. We experimented with operating a multi-asset bounty and wrote up how to do it. We built a commit-reveal voting program for internal proposal votes. We researched compliance and KYC, then documented and put in place the right process, with a jurisdiction denylist sourced to primary law. Finally, we built the tooling and a landing page for proposers to go through that process. All of it applies to any bounty paying anyone anywhere.
We wish the new consolidated bounty more success than we have been able to present and hope some of our work can be useful to the new set of curators which some of us may end up being part of.
Everything this bounty published is here:
Transparency reports
The bounty
Tools we built
Written along the way
-The PoP Bounty Team