Polkadot People Initiative: Incentives for Mass Polkadot Activation Campaign

Proponent:

Polkadot People System Chain (1rqM48LQVgWAsqgk35WqUVoqwQ7wyBf19Lkh3T4DeMvmmkE)

Requested funds: 

USDT: $1,504,800 + $200 for fees
USDC: $1,504,800 + $200 for fees
Total: $3,009,600 these funds will be swapped to HOLLAR via DCA over 10 days.

Context:

Soon to be unveiled, Parity Technologies has spent 3 years designing and developing a Polkadot-native Proof-of-Personhood system. Project Individuality is autonomous logic which provides strong sybil-resistance worthy of our nascent Agentic Society. Sitting on the Polkadot People chain it is under Polkadot Governance and will be seamlessly integrated into both the upcoming Polkadot mobile application as well as Polkadot Hub. It is based on open standards and APIs and third-party integration is welcomed.

This specific proposal is to fund a massive Polkadot Induction campaign: the Fairest Airdrop ever and giving meaningful amounts to people outside of not only the Polkadot community but also outside of the wider crypto community. No existing tokens, accounts or wallets are needed to take part. The funding includes long-term incentives to ensure that our newcomers are retained within the Polkadot ecosystem as contributors to our wider services and success. Project Individuality, as new technology, can facilitate this campaign in a way unimaginable before.

Polkadot needs a massive, technology-enabled, decentralised and secure incentivised user induction programme. These funds will be used for that incentive. Autonomous, on-chain logic will control and disbursement of these funds. Neither Parity nor any other ecosystem entity has any role or authority in disbursement nor any operational function or privilege. This logic will be in line with what is written here, reviewed and manifested by the standard Polkadot Governance apparatus and audited externally as is standard for system code.

The Spend

The funds will be disbursed under three separate and fully autonomous incentive mechanisms:

Firstly, remuneration for the initial user bootstrapping, seeking to ensure that those individuals who come fastest and commit most to Polkadot People face no economic downside (and in some cases a modest economic upside). Individuals to receive $200, $100 or $50, depending on how early they are.

Secondly, a pot for the continuous funding, paid exclusively and fairly, to Polkadot users who are both active and useful within the new Polkadot Governance apparatus. Individuals to receive no more than around $10/week again depending on contributions as measured through some game-theoretically sound, autonomous and decentralised means.

Finally, the majority of the funds will go to a weekly airdrop system, aiming to randomly disburse small sums of money globally to lucky Polkadot People in a well-promoted airdrop campaign. Prizes of around $250, with special monthly star prizes which are $2,500. We expect to give away around 140 prizes per week, limiting the number to ensure that individuals have no more than a one-tenth chance per weekly draw.

The specific split between the three is not yet certain and will ultimately be left to Polkadot Governance to ratify, but it is expected that no more than one-third will be used for the first two pots.

Individuality

Project Individuality, the technology allowing this user-acquisition and community-expansion initiative, makes no attempt to identify people; no identity documents, phone numbers, email addresses, card details or bank payments are required. We require no Web2 logins. True to Satoshi’s ideal, it is maintained by nobody and everybody.

Project Individuality leverages the latest ZK technology, audited and informed by the Web3 Foundation Cryptographic Research Team and used also by the JAM protocol. This allows us to credibly claim that users can stay anonymous as they use various different applications and services on Polkadot. Every different application which a user uses is done with an unlinkable alias, and their different aliases are known only to the users themselves.

The first two Decentralised Individuality Mechanisms (that is, autonomous logic for ensuring that it is hard and costly for one person to appear as many, abbreviated DIMs) are in the final stages of testing and optimisation and will both launch in quick succession in the coming months. These are called Proof-of-Ink (PoI) and Proof-of-Video-Interaction (PoVI). Under Polkadot People Chain, DIMs are managed by Polkadot Governance and open to anyone to augment. Parity is planning to submit to the community, a third and fourth in the months following in line with the Polkadot People ideals of privacy (no need to give up any personal information), universality (like fungibility, the same for everyone everywhere regardless of social connectivity), transparency (anyone can rationalise anyone else’s status) and resilience (against a rational, well-capitalised but finitely resourced bad actor).

While PoI was already summarised in Gavin Wood’s 2024 Web3 Summit presentation, PoVI has yet to be described. It offers a route to recognition of individuality for those for whom PoI seems like too big of a step. It involves spending 5 minutes per week playing a simple, silent game with 15 other people in a multi-person, globally synchronised, video call. The game is great fun, engaging and very, very easy.

Strategy

In order to maximise the long-term effectiveness of this campaign, it forms part of a wider strategy involving additional initiatives:

Firstly high-quality, mass-market promotional material to draw attention to the giveaway and ensure that people around the world understand the proposition and entry. Parity and Web3 Foundation personnel familiar with the technology and proposition behind Polkadot People will be communicating over the coming days, weeks and months in various places and formats to help community members understand and advocate. There is some potential for professional material and mainstream distribution channels to be used.

Secondly, Polkadot Staking protocol integration to help both increase Polkadot’s security and reduce effective costs of Polkadot. This “Polkadot New Deal” means a path of providing fair economic benefits indefinitely to all those individuals helping Polkadot’s security interests. Polkadot gets much cheaper security and, in turn, is able to limit its overall supply and end inflation. People get free rewards and services in exchange for a few well-chosen taps on a mobile device. This helps make DOT a crypto finally in Satoshi’s vision: Individuals systematically helping maintain the system and getting a fair share of a limited pie.

Thirdly, full integration into the overall Polkadot System. Aside from being used under the redesigned Polkadot Staking protocol, this can also be used to help democratise Polkadot governance. A successful Polkadot People could be served by a separate treasury under a one-person-one-vote scheme or be used to introduce secure quadratic voting. Individuals tending to vote for proposals which are ultimately deemed successful by all could be rewarded with greater voting power in future votes. In due course Polkadot OpenGov can become Polkadot FutaGov.

Fourth, full integration into Polkadot Hub: As Hub takes its place as a compliment to Polkadot Parachains for the decentralised application development it will enable far more people to develop far more prototypes far faster. But Hub developers must be given more than just the usual smart-contract infrastructure if there is a  serious expectation that this strategy will reinstall Polkadot as the recognised leading innovator. The big Web2 firms know that users like free services and free services can only be delivered with sybil resistance. Polkadot should give all Polkadot users zero cost transfers: send $50 to a friend and they receive that $50, not $49.98. Indeed this issue is far more serious when money is involved. Full Individuality integration into Polkadot’s high-capacity Logic Collider which is Polkadot Hub will allow the fruits of this campaign to be leveraged to maximal economic impact.

Fifth, seamless integration into not only the native Polkadot mobile app but also other fully supported gateways. For any service expected to be popular, accessibility is crucial whether it is web, desktop or mobile. To maximise Polkadot’s audience there will be people working hard to ensure a fluid and joyous user experience regardless of the platform.

Comparison and Perspective

However large $3m might seem, two things must be held in mind:

Firstly this is given to people to bring them into daily - and real - use of the Polkadot app. Unlike basically all user-acquisition proposals thus far in OpenGov, not a single dollar goes to middlemen and the users deal only with Polkadot. At the 1 million people level, this amount of funding would provide a scratchcard-like chance for everyone to win $250 per week as well as a few dollars extra per week for some mindful swiping.

Second, after the coming proposal to upgrade the Polkadot Staking protocol, the incentives can increase as funds beyond those used to compensate validators are used to spur validator decentralisation via Polkadot People voting. Even at $50m/year - merely one tenth of the amount Polkadot spent on security in 2024 - Polkadot could, as a hypothetical comparison, afford to give similar incentives to every voter in England.