Dear Polkadot Community,

My name is Graeme Fox - Co-Founder & CEO of Societal. Societal has decided to explore the idea of our project becoming a common good and provide on-chain governance infrastructure to all parachains. Our platform will allow parachains to run their community governance without needing to implement it themselves. We believe that this will increase the speed at which parachains can deploy their product and also prevent governance based attacks in the ecosystem.

Societal will provide parachains with different types of governance systems, allowing them to select the system that best suits their community. By providing these governance systems for free to any parachain, teams will be able to deploy faster and have better engagement with their communities. They can use the platform to manage their community grants, ecosystem rewards, bounty programs and more.

Societal is seeking $170,372.79 USD in treasury funding to become common good on-chain infrastructure for Polkadot parachains. Our system will allow teams to focus on their core product and leave the building, managing and deployment of governance systems to us.

As it stands today, there have been a number of governance based attacks in the ecosystem. Here is an informative thread on the governance hacks that have transpired in the ecosystem. Mangata Finance also had a similar governance based attack, where someone elected multiple wallets into council positions, ultimately controlling the entire council and chain. Information on it can be found here and here. Darwinia Network has also experienced a governance based attack where the attackers took control of the council and extracted large quantities of tokens. ChaosDAO has also performed a governance based attack for educational purposes on Avail, where they were in control of 99.995% of the token supply. This demonstrates that there are many types of attack vectors that teams need to be aware of when launching a parachain. This creates a hurdle for new teams building with the Polkadot SDK. It distracts them from building and deploying their core product and can have fatal consequences to their project and community. Societal’s platform can prevent these attacks from taking place.

Societal has already completed most of the work required to become a common good on-chain governance infrastructure for Polkadot parachains. The development done to date would be given to the Polkadot community. We are seeking funding to complete some final features of the product, testing, deployment on Rococo and to start onboarding users. This will allow new and existing parachains to have access to a full suite of governance systems which are currently an uplift for teams to manage properly.

Please find the proposal here. It would be great to hear your input and questions about our proposal. Societal is committed to building in the Polkadot ecosystem and hope that the community sees the value in what we are building.

Societal’s Track Record/Accomplishments below:

• Attended Inaugural Polkadot Blockchain Academy
• Inaugural Polkadot Relayers Secured
• Three Web 3 Foundation Grants — Grant 1, Grant 2, Grant 3
• Accepted to Substrate Builders Program and Completed Milestone 2
• Multiple Polkadot Panel Discussions - Academy Alumni, ETHDenver
• Rococo Testnet Deployment
• Product Walkthrough Videos
• Scytale Academy Graduate
• Accepted to Berkley Blockchain Accelerator 2023
• Cross Ecosystem Engagement Initiatives

More information about Societal can be found here:

• Societal Website
• Societal Whitepaper
• Societal Docs
• Societal Product Demos