Polkadot is not a castle in the sky. It builds upon, and uses other countless open source projects developed and maintained by other open source developers. Those upstream open source projects make Polkadot possible, and as a result, it is important that we support them.

This proposal is a set of bounties and treasury spending proposals aiming at using Polkadot treasury for upstream projects. It includes:

* Treasury proposing fee bounty for upstream
* Direct dependency maintenance bounty
* Upstream toolchain sponsorship proposals
* Upstream ecosystem project sponsorship proposals

This includes Polkadot codebase's direct dependencies (not managed by the core team), the toolchain that builds Polkadot (Rust, LLVM, GNU toolchain, Linux), and ecosystem projects that Polkadot users usually depend on (Firefox, Matrix chat, GNUPG). It's currently for discussions and other projects may be added. The current estimation for this proposal amounts to around 1 million USD equivalent annually. All numbers are of course subject to change.

You can read the full proposal here: [https://that.world/~wei/polkadot/council/upstream/](https://that.world/~wei/polkadot/council/upstream/)

- Polkadot is a project that uses other open source projects to work.
- They want to support and help the projects they use.
- They have a proposal to give money to these projects.
- The proposal includes bounties and spending money from the Polkadot treasury.
- The estimated amount of money is around 1 million USD per year.

#806 Treasury proposal: funding upstream open source projects that make Polkadot possible