Few questions:

1. What is the current usage of ZKShield in terms of transaction volume, can you please make this public in a simple dashboard (see [Bloque](https://_metabase.bloque.app/public/dashboard/89df3271-0adb-4e83-a919-bc7c1dcd4d31?tab=4-main-metrics)) that can be easily referenced and also demonstrate progress of the product?
2. Does this usage (0.4-0.6% swap fees?) demonstrate a path towards sustainability of operations and development beyond grants?
3. What form would that income take (stablecoin fees etc)?
4. Who bears the cost of this income? Users / integrators / etc
5. Are new features a necessity? Feature creep has been a hallmark of most of the development done in the ecosystem - what is the absolute MVP to get to sustainability?  

The costs requested need to be balanced by the ability for ZK shield product to recoup upfront funding by the network. 

The below pool fees are set to 0.0% - is there reasoning behind this?

![Screenshot 2026-01-23 at 12.07.28.png](https://subsquare.infura-ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXfZbQWHQea32TSAkWuoDV2XAKvdzHNiQo3F51UhYaqML)


The treasury is a common resource, therefore it should be understood that those requesting funds have an implicit responsibility to iterate towards value creation that can fund those that follow. 

 We need to marry idealism and pragmatism. 

[@mrb](Eatpizuo2crqCx89PF6FKX3smSHpaqi9vANH3kr8wV3a332-kusama) 
**What is the current usage of ZKShield in terms of transaction volume, can you please make this public in a simple dashboard (see Bloque) that can be easily referenced and also demonstrate progress of the product?**     
Sure, Can share some product images on how the product has evolved as a subcomment. 

**Does this usage (0.4-0.6% swap fees?) demonstrate a path towards sustainability of operations and development beyond grants?**     
Yes! There is a path to the sustainability for Kusama Shield as a product There is two fee's here that might be confusing:      

- 1 - Swap fee's - This is to cover slippage by a third party swap provider. The Kusama Shield as a project does not earn a sustainable income for swap fee's until user numbers go up. You can view a demo of these swaps here: https://forum.polkadot.network/t/swap-60-different-tokens-straight-into-dot-on-the-hub/15988 . This enables the web app to enable user to easily come in from third party ecosystems. As Kusama Shield is one of the few products in the world that utilize the Polkadot AH dex  to enable users to convert DOT to KSM, we are enabling a powerful onramp into KSM with low fee's. Part of the goal has been to enable users that use USDT on tron and assets in other ecosystem to bridge over and utilize Kusama Shield to get privacy at a low cost. Aiming to be a true web3 product

- 2 - Pool fee's the fee that you see in the image - This is the fee for inserting tokens into the pool - Because first iteration Kusama Shield was developed as public good - Extra fee's for depositing to the pool was not been added. This will be changed in order to make the product stand on its own feet. For example privacy pools charges the users when they deposit. Adding a small fee that will cover withdrawal transactions is a priority but we also want to keep fee's as long as possible in order to compete with other shielded pools that have raised million in funding. 


**What form would that income take (stablecoin fees etc)?**   
The future income streams for the shielded pool would be to charge a small 0.2-0.1% of incoming transactions and redistributing this to contributors.  As of today if users use Kusama Shield the fee's are only transactions fee's by the Kusama AH network, making Kusama AH the winner. 


**Are new features a necessity? Feature creep has been a hallmark of most of the development done in the ecosystem - what is the absolute MVP to get to sustainability?**   
The new features as well as a future audit is absolutely needed. In order to provide a stable product that runs on PolkaVM, a lot of man hours needs to be spent in order to ship a stable product that can scale to a large chunk of users and also provide a great user experience. The project is not able to be self sustainable until a stable version and an Audit has been made since this very sensitive systems dealing with REAL tokens.Also keep in mind that several features have been shipped after V1 proposal was launched without asking for retro active funding. This v2 version is meant to take the product into a stable version where it can live autonomously on-chain forever. 



**The treasury is a common resource, therefore it should be understood that those requesting funds have an implicit responsibility to iterate towards value creation that can fund those that follow.**   
The Kusama Shield is constantly checking in with the community and 2 months ago ish a survey on the forum was posted: https://forum.polkadot.network/t/kusama-shield-v2-user-feature-survey/15435 this resulted in adding a privacy dashboard into one of the milestones




Thank you for the comments!

[@Rust Syndicate](J93EoDa5dpL1EiF4pKj3Q7gFmcSYL7kwTKuECemKDLVQohQ-kusama) 

one other thought - you could setup the project as a DAO on https://copilot.bloque.app/ and then manage any future funds via their treasury structures including payouts etc

this way people begin to dogfood each others apps and learn from this - helps drive initial feedback loops. 

Could you kindly share the number of transactions, or alternatively how many users have interacted with Kusama Shield? Statistics from the landing page would also be perfectly fine.

[@The White Rabbit](FPznjjQJpHieoy3TUruw9YT6DDRETkBxWv3yFEVUMCgn8q8-kusama) 

From Kusama Shield [documentation](https://kusamashield.codeberg.page/networks.html) these are the deployed contracts. 

Paseo deployed contract address:

https://assethub-paseo.subscan.io/account/0xa1Ab66CB2634007a5450643F0a240f8E8062178C

Asset Hub deployed contracts address:

ZK Verifier
https://assethub-kusama.subscan.io/account/0xc81D878518791fE261841a1eF7Eb7cc565598Ae4

Poseidon Hasher
https://assethub-kusama.subscan.io/account/0x02bB94D5eeEAc7C102D90e661BB925d0BE98E639

Shielded Pool
https://assethub-kusama.subscan.io/account/0xDC80565357D63eCa67F3f020b6DD1CE1fD0E1Ed8

There don't appear to be any transactions from the live contracts? Maybe I'm being dumb?


[@mrb](Eatpizuo2crqCx89PF6FKX3smSHpaqi9vANH3kr8wV3a332-kusama) 
If nobody uses it, or very few people use it, there is no point in subsidizing it.

[@The White Rabbit](FPznjjQJpHieoy3TUruw9YT6DDRETkBxWv3yFEVUMCgn8q8-kusama) 

this assumes rational economic decisionmaking ;) 

financial gravity does exist - kusama shield curators will need to use this funding to figure out both adoption + revenue, that's the real test.

DOT + KSM have always had finite runways despite the marketing noise.

This is also true of W3F/Parity/Fellowship since the basic business model is selling down tokens to fund R&D and that has a natural shelf life.  

We're approaching the end of the beginning. 



Dear Proposer,

Thank you for your proposal. Our **first** vote on this proposal is **NAY**. Below is the evaluation of our [voting policy v0.3](https://docs.permanence.io/voting_policy/voting_policy_v0.3.html) on this referendum:

```
BIG SPENDER
-----------
6 available members
🟢 0 • 🔴 2 • ⚪️ 1
✓ ≥50.0% required participation met
✘ Ayes <60.0% of all votes
▶ Aye/abstain conditions not met
🔴 NAY
```

Below is a summary of our members' comments:

> One voter abstained and raised questions about the scope and user base of the application. Two voters cast negative votes. One noted that the project was not considered a high priority given the market conditions at the time. The other highlighted that the shield application was non-functional, pointing to observable errors such as issues with reading 'getSigner' from the browser console. That voter also expressed concerns over a lack of transparency regarding previous milestones, which had received a combined funding of $42.6K, and suggested that the funds might be better allocated under the Kusama Vision program.

The full discussion can be found in our [internal voting](https://voting.opensquare.io/space/permanence/proposal/QmcD7TKiz2mxumnkahFEJJ3f2awo7uDUnNseiiKVBhkr9x).

Please feel free to contact us through the links below for further discussion.

Kind regards, Permanence DAO 💬 [Public Telegram](https://t.me/permanencedao) 🌐️ [Web](https://permanence.io) 🐦 [Twitter](https://twitter.com/permanencedao) 🗳️ [Delegate](https://kusama.subsquare.io/user/EicAs5s99x17qZcQzJMiBCfada9rGyEC6njfiBX3j2EPr9W/votes)

[@PERMANENCE DAO/GOV-PROXY](Fa6mLSY4Z6Uo3FakzLN6zZSdSuZYnd2zEESPikbgiSzwiBr-kusama) 

> The other highlighted that the shield application was non-functional, pointing to observable errors such as issues with reading 'getSigner' from the browser console   

This seems like the user is trying to connect the talisman browser wallet without having the browser wallet installed and the browser is not able to find the EVM wallet signer. We have upgraded the wallet connection part to be both better and support a lot more wallets(will come in the next release). Could you ask this user that made theses claims to file an issue with the information: Which network, version, error message and which browser the user was using here:
https://codeberg.org/KusamaShield/Interface/issues


> That voter also expressed concerns over a lack of transparency regarding previous milestones   

Lack of transparency? In the proposal is a spreadsheet attached with links to all payments done by the bounty as well as features shipped with each payment. Plus also keep in mind that we have done a cost comparison, that you can find in the proposal. We have also not asked for any retro active funding for covering the gap months of extra features shipped as well as not paid out the finders fee that v1 proposal originally described(not to even mention the market volatility the developers had to experience when KSM goes from 15 > 7 usd).  As well as both sourcing and haggling down the price for a ZK audit by a very talented ZK expert. We have gone far and beyond to give the treasury the best deal.    


>  Suggested that the funds might be better allocated under the Kusama Vision program      

This has been addressed several times and let me say this again, we want to push things forward in order to be one of the First shielded pools that integrates with the ethereum toolkit Kohaku and in order to do so we want to push the development forward asap and not get stuck waiting.


Thanks for your questions 


![](https://codeberg.org/avatars/23bc778e53deaf6798ee2e6986aef4ffa6d3b47cee4c276fc3ba3628372f40ac?size=200)


**Summary:**       
Kusama Shield is a Zero Knowledge powered Shielded Pool, deployed as a sovereign smart contract on Kusama Assethub. Created as the first RFP on Kusama, live on the Attemps at Governance show. The first MVP version of Kusama Shield has been delivered and we now want to bring a stable version live, utilizing the power of PolkaVM to power the future of shielded tokens. Our goal is now to make the stable version of Kusama Shield the best option for EVM dapp developers that want to utilize shielded transfer into their smart contracts, by integrating Kusama Shield into the Ethereum toolkit Kohaku. 


**Bounty Curators:**           
-  Erin(byteboro)   
- Flipchan  
- James Slusser   

The Bounty curators review and moderate all milestone deliveries. 

**Previous referendum:**    
https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referenda/509 

**Funding:**    
We are requesting 75129 USD to cover ~7 months of development.                   
KSM EMA7 Price ( USD ): 7.022300 

## Links:
**Landing page:** https://shield.markets/    

Codeberg code repo: https://codeberg.org/KusamaShield            

**Full proposal Link:** https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LHzU0STBlRfKOXIn0bzpda11rmg59tbMoGzmXl-OUs/edit?usp=sharing 

**Noticeable v1 features shipped:**          
-  Swap 40+ l1 assets, enabled 40+ non ecosystem asset to swap directly into dot with low fee’s (0.4-0.6%)    
-  DOT > KSM one click swaps   
-  First ZK Poseidon hashing function optimized for polkaVM: https://codeberg.org/KusamaShield/PoseidonPolkaVM
-  Halo2 and Groth 16 ZK circuits for Kusama Assethub   


- Kusama Shield is a special tool that keeps your money private on the Kusama network.
- It's like a secret pool where you can swap over 40 different types of digital money.
- You can swap one type of money for another with very small fees.
- It uses advanced math called Zero Knowledge to keep everything safe and private.
- The team wants to make it even better and easier for other developers to use.
- They are asking for funding to work on it for about 7 months.
- You can see their work and code online.

Kusamas Shield v2, Bounty 32 top up

Links: