A New Kusama Vision - 10 Million DOT from W3F & Transition Away From Being A Canary Network

Track: Wish-for-change

Short description: Request 10 million DOT from Web3 Foundation to fulfill the commitment of allocating 1% of genesis DOT to Kusama, provide support for bleeding-edge building including ZK innovation, and transition Kusama away from being purely Polkadot’s canary network.

Overview

This referendum seeks community approval for a new vision for Kusama, consisting of three key points

Deploy 10 million DOT from Web3 Foundation for the sole benefit of Kusama, in order to boost the utility and broad value proposition of the Kusama network
Direct the W3F to use some of this 10 million DOT in support of advanced technology for Kusama, such as ZK technologies, to build Kusama into a major ZK experimentation bed
Recognise that Kusama is no longer merely a canary network and instead should be treated as an experiment-centric peer network of Polkadot

At the launch of Kusama, one percent of genesis DOT tokens (10 million DOT) were promised for use by the Kusama network. With the Polkadot-Kusama bridge now operational, Web3 Foundation seeks to fulfill this commitment and use ten million of its DOT for the support of Kusama.

Kusama was initially conceived and used as a canary network for Polkadot - a network with real economic value that could host new features, runtime upgrades, parameter changes, etc. before they were implemented on Polkadot. As Polkadot has become more mature, this has become less necessary, and it is time for Kusama to evolve.

If this Referendum passes, Web3 Foundation will take it as community approval to move forward with its plan, outlined below.

Gavin Wood presentation at DOTCon 0.5

Gavin Wood Interview with The Kus (Space Monkeys 121)

Polkadot OpenDev Fellowship Call - May 2024

Vision

Kusama was conceived as Web3’s “chaotic” testing ground, a “canary network” to push technological boundaries without the constraints of Polkadot’s stability requirements. This proposal seeks to reignite Kusama’s experimental ethos while leveraging its maturity to establish it as an experimental testbed for zero-knowledge (ZK) innovation and other cutting-edge use cases.

We seek to reignite Kusama’s original spirit as Web3’s boldest experimentation platform to empower builders and accelerate technical innovation. We want to revive its foundational ethos as an unshackled Web3 experimental hub. We want to encourage bold building on the bleeding edge.

Therefore, Web3 Foundation seeks to use 10 million DOT to incentivize and remove barriers for builders on Kusama. The exact mechanisms will vary, but will all share a common goal - make Kusama the place for developers who want to push forward into the future.

tl;dr: We would like to return Kusama to its origins, while simultaneously providing the foundation for it to evolve towards the future. No promises. Expect chaos.

Proposal

Web3 Foundation proposes to use 10 million DOT tokens from its own Treasury (not the on-chain Polkadot Treasury, Kusama Treasury, or other sources) for the express benefit of the Kusama ecosystem, including the relay chain, system parachains, other parachains, and projects focused on Kusama.

This would not be a one-time transfer of DOT to Kusama but would take place over the course of at least two years.

The DOT may be used for initiatives such as the following. Note that this is meant to be a representative sampling of possible initiatives, and W3F is not limited to the below, nor is this meant to indicate that these specific types of initiatives will occur.

Direct transfer of DOT to the on-chain Kusama Treasury
Funding of Kusama-based Bounty programs, collectives, DAOs, and other collective decision-making on Kusama
Support for Kusama-focused projects, events, conferences, workshops, etc.
Prizes for hackathons, competitions, etc. for projects building on Kusama
Grants for projects building on Kusama
Subsidized or free parathread reservation, runtime storage, and other costs for running parachains or other projects on Kusama

Among the projects we are interested in supporting is providing support for various ZK projects on Kusama. Some possible examples include:

Establishing grants for projects building zk-focused dApps, scalable ZK rollups, and cross-chain ZK proofs, especially for the Kusama Hub
Funding ZK-focused parachains, runtime modules, and developer tooling
Partnering with academic institutions and others to host ZK hackathons and workshops on Kusama

Other ideas include, but are not limited to, support for generative and other types of on-chain art, proof of personhood, and social experiments.

All projects, both ZK and otherwise, being built on Kusama using these DOT must be used strictly for legal purposes and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

Approving this Referendum acknowledges that the Kusama community would like to see Kusama on the path towards being an experiment-centric network in its own right.

Finally, this proposal should not be seen as detailed instructions or steps to be taken, but rather as a vision to be worked toward and a confirmation by the Kusama community that it shares this vision. If it is approved, Web3 Foundation will seek more feedback from the community and provide more details on explicit steps to be taken.

A good idea if the implementations get to be applicable in the short / medium term and it's spread among different researchers and teams thus igniting research and development interest in the network. Hopefully with heavy inclusion of new blood looking to experiment in the network.
A bad idea if it's used for a small group to pursue research for the sake of funding or if it's used as testing grounds for competing technologies. So what Zcash did. Zcash holders, miners and investors were the ones that paid for research and development of competing technologies and competing products.

Given that approval could lead to both scenarios we will ABSTAIN for now and leave the decision to KSM tokenholders. But we are leaning towards support under the right conditions.