Polkadot founder proposes $777M network development fund

Gavin Wood’s announcement comes weeks before the launch of parachain auctions, set for 11 November

Polkadot founder Gavin Wood has announced that the blockchain platform’s treasury has over $777 million in DOT tokens, a significant amount of money he says developers can use to build and improve the project.

In a tweet posted on 17 October, Wood noted that the Polkadot treasury holds over 18.9 million DOT, or roughly $777 million at the token’s current price. According to him, the money can form part of a development fund to be used to build and improve the network’s ecosystem.

He also suggested that the money could be used to educate the community about Polkadot and the crypto ecosystem.

The @Polkadot treasury currently has 18,936,300 DOT (DOT, not USD – do the math) in it ready to spend on *your* ideas for building, improving, educating and indeed, anything else that the Polkadot governance believes valuable.

— Gavin Wood (@gavofyork) October 17, 2021

According to Wood, who also founded Kusama and is a co-founder of Ethereum, the amount of DOT held in the treasury is accumulated from the network protocol, with DOT received into the contract via “fees, slashes and suboptimal staking configurations”.

He added that it is best if the DOT is put to good use, noting:

“If it goes unused, it slowly gets burned. It currently burns 239,988 DOT every month.”

Polkadot parachain auctions

DOT is one of the cryptocurrencies to post stellar performances over the past few weeks, with the DOT/USD seeing an upside of more than 21% in the past seven days.

The optimism around the cryptocurrency is largely driven by the upcoming parachain launch, a highly anticipated event set to see an explosion in Polkadot network growth.

Parachains are basically side-chains upon which developers can build decentralised applications, with the technology making interoperability between protocols and the “Relay Chain” easier, cheaper and secure.

Wood’s proposal could see millions of dollars made available to decentralised finance (DeFi) developers, and herald a new era for the eighth-largest cryptocurrency project by market cap.

The proposal, however, needs the approval of the Polkadot governance council, with community participation key to unlocking the treasury funds.