General Finances

As of today, the Web3 Foundation has substantially more than $45m split between fiat and BTC. While a portion of this needs to be set aside for mundane expenses such as accounting and legal, it still leaves a vast sum of funds to be used, first and foremost, for the creation of Polkadot. We are in no doubt that this level of funding will be more than sufficient to build and deliver Polkadot to the original technical vision outlined. As of today, there is no reason to expect any delays or alterations regarding Polkadot development and deployment. Proof-of-concept work began months ago and we expect it to ramp up over the coming weeks.

Furthermore, we are confident that the funds will allow us to not merely develop and deploy Polkadot but to also build out the community and ecosystem using a variety of methods including meet-up events, conferences, hackathons and general publications.

Outside of Polkadot, discretionary spending on the wider Web3 and crypto ecosystem is certainly still possible, but inevitably to a lesser degree than before, since it was here that much of the largesse of our funds was to be deployed. We do consider this spending to be an important part of Web3’s mission and overall useful for Polkadot, but it does not feature within the main ‘product offering’ of Polkadot, and so will inevitably take a secondary place until such a time that we believe the Web3 can afford it.

Should the blocked funds be freed for use, this spending profile would be the primary beneficiary: this includes supporting the R&D of non-core protocols such as Whisper, Swarm and many others in the decentralised ecosystem, peripheral tooling and languages, general academic sponsorship and low-level research of no immediate relevance to Polkadot. We sincerely hope that a change in status of the blocked funds will allow us to support of these projects and directions to the benefit the wider ecosystem.