Background and Motivation:

The Polkadot Marketing Bounty was launched to accelerate ecosystem growth by funding community-led outreach initiatives. In late 2024, a revamped “Marketing Bounty 2.0” was approved with a committed set of curators who worked with good faith and a 200,000 DOT monthly budget. Its mission was to drive awareness for Polkadot in a transparent, accountable manner. The curator’s work and alignment with Polkadot’s mission are appreciated.

Over the past year, various community discussions and governance reflections have raised the need to reassess how the network approaches marketing, as part of a broader effort to uphold the integrity and sustainability of treasury spending. Like many decentralized experiments, it’s natural for initiatives to evolve as we learn together. Within this context, the Web3 Foundation and its Funding Committee, in alignment with OpenGov’s values, have committed to protecting the treasury by ensuring all ongoing programs align with strong, outcome-driven frameworks.

The current moment offers a chance to reflect. While some initiatives under the bounty have shown promise, the overall structure presents challenges in measuring return on investment at scale. Continuing to allocate substantial treasury resources without a clearer strategic and evaluating framework is increasingly difficult to justify in light of our shared responsibility for prudent treasury management.

Rationale:

Closing the Marketing Bounty now is a prudent step to safeguard Polkadot’s treasury and refocus on effective strategies. This proposal, initiated under the guidance of the W3F’s Funding Committee, aims to immediately terminate Bounty #33 (Marketing) before further funds are expended.

We acknowledge the efforts of the current bounty team and long-term contributions and attempts to promote Polkadot. Our proposal is to close the Marketing Bounty in order to better align resource use with the community’s current goals.

Given the bounty’s significant burn rate with outcomes that remain difficult to quantify, the most responsible course is to halt this spending until a better path is defined. This pause will prevent further depletion of the treasury.

Crucially, closing the bounty does not mean abandoning marketing or growth efforts for Polkadot. It means resetting our approach. It is also in keeping with OpenGov’s ideals of iterative improvement - when something isn’t working, we fix or replace it rather than continuing the status quo.

Path Forward & Encouraging Community Initiatives:

We propose to close the Marketing Bounty and invite the community to pause and reassess the best path for ecosystem growth. This closure would immediately stop all new spending from the bounty and return unspent allocated funds to the treasury for other uses. No further budget refills or new campaigns would be initiated. The Funding Committee and W3F will work to ensure an orderly wind-down in accordance with on-chain governance processes.

Going forward, the Funding Committee and the Web3 Foundation will collaborate with the community to review the structure and performance of other long-running bounties as well, ensuring that treasury-funded initiatives remain effective, measurable, and aligned with OpenGov’s evolving priorities.

Moreover, this action is not a rejection of marketing as a whole, but a call to improve how we fund and execute it. We remain optimistic that Polkadot’s community can develop more effective, accountable frameworks for spreading awareness of the network.

We welcome community input on how we should approach ecosystem growth and marketing accountability going forward.