Nomination pools will be live on Polkadot within the next 10 days, and I want to suggest using a small amount of treasury funds to incentivize the creation of the initial pools. Moreover, the early pools ought to be high quality, have clear name, purpose and description, giving DOT holders who wish to join pools a good number of options to join from.

This is to signal to the community my intention to repeat the process of incentivizing the creation of high quality nomination pools, by proposing council tips for them, exactly as done for Kusama. You can find the full description here.

Please note that tipping is an entirely permissionless process. I intend to open tip for a number of pools that I see fit as I did for Kusama, but I want to emphasize that anyone can do this. So, if the council shows signs of support here, anyone could propose a tip for the pools that are exceptionally good in the first days and weeks.

To recap, main criteria that I (merely) suggest are as follows:

• A pool should use its metadata to clearly determine its nomination strategy.
• The pool roles should be set accordingly. For example, if a pool is claiming that its nomination strategy is determined by a party of X accounts, a multisig of this parity should be set as the pool nominator account.
• If a pool is claiming that it will never destroy or block itself, it should set its root and state_toggler roles to inaccessible accounts. If a pool is claiming that it will have a constant nomination strategy, it should also destroy its nominator role.
• Similar to validators, having identities increases the trust between pool operators and members.
• A pool should have a clear strategy about if and when it might put its state into “Blocked” or “Destroying”.