Summary:
Requesting reimbursement of the submission deposits for the first OpenGov referenda on Kusama, submitted at a time when the deposit was set at 100 KSM. These referenda proposed by RTTI-5220, VALLETECH, and ENCOINTER were all rejected or timed out, resulting in deposits that remain permanently locked on-chain.

Context:
During the early OpenGov rollout, the submission deposit was disproportionately high compared to today’s 0.0333 KSM. This proposal seeks to refund those early deposits, minus the current standard submission fee, as a fair recognition of the experimental conditions under which they were made.

The affected referenda are:

• Referendum 0
• Referendum 1
• Referendum 2
• Referendum 9

Rationale:
While the refundSubmissionDeposit function exists and can be initiated on the Root track, it cannot be used to recover these funds in practice. The call ultimately fails due to BadOrigin, and attempting the same via a signed extrinsic also fails, since rejected and timed-out referenda are not in a valid state for deposit recovery.

As Gavin explained:

“In general, the submission deposit should not be returned until the proposal is no longer in state. Unfortunately, due to how the voting/locking/delegation mechanism works, this information may need to remain in state for up to the maximum conviction period, and it’s non-trivial to determine when it’s safe to release it.”

Given that these deposits are technically unrecoverable through the refund function, the only fair and technically sound path without changing the underlying logic is to compensate them through the treasury.

Note: Cross-checking past treasury payouts confirms that none of the affected proposers ever received reimbursement for their original submission deposits.