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Please Vote Nay
2 days ago
Deciding
Following the recent AssetHub migration, this Proposal was affected by the one time XCM compatibility issue that caused certain treasury spend preimages to fail at execution.
A corrected version of this proposal will be re-submitted to ensure it executes properly under the updated AssetHub requirements.
We kindly request the community to vote Nay on this proposal, as it cannot be executed in its current form.
Thank you for your understanding and continued support. A new proposal will follow shortly.
Comments (4)
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We have answered some frequently asked questions along with a cost benefit analysis for each segment in the proposal here : FAQ
For any further feedback or questions , drop a comment or drop a message on Telegram
Saxemberg has voted NAY on the Polkadot referendum 1806 Polkassembly: Shared AI Governance Layer, Treasury Analytics & Infra Upgrade. We believe that A) Many of proposed costs are included in the passed referendum and B) the AI efforts are not worth being the recipients of funds.
For A) we don't think that Technical Upgrades should be billed as a separate retroactive referendum when it seemingly were included in the yearly referendum. Including the already planned upgrades like the AssetHub migration.
B) AI results have been underwhelming and they shouldn't be presented as worth funding. We have already presented this issue in the past. Without going into the details of why the use of a certain wrapper or options over others our criticism is purely aimed at the lack of quality in results whatever the method, options or training were.
Here are some examples of softballs thrown at Klara:
This helps us segue to comments left on the DV chat where the main message about governance forums was to try to focus more on the tools that the users now need like analytics tools like Dottreasury or the Governance Analytics, a deeper integration with reporting and results of past referenda as well as holes left by discontinued tools like Polkadot.js so that these sites are capable of performing token transactions, viewing token balances across chains (like what sub.id did / what debank does) and performing raw extrinsics something that will be needed after the discontinuation of Polkadot JS among many other things.
@SAXEMBERG
Thank you for the feedback. We want to respond to both points directly and give more context on why these items were included and how the work fits into the long term stack.
1. On the concern that Technical Upgrades were already covered under the yearly maintenance referendum
We understand why this question came up. The key distinction is:
The yearly referendum covers platform maintenance and minor improvements.
The work billed here is multi-chain restructuring and infra rebuild that was not part of that scope.
Specifically:
The Asset Hub migration required a fundamental rewrite of our indexer, schema, cache layers and chain-aware routing.
The GCP migration, PAPI integration, and the re-architecture around multi-chain governance were not included in the yearly maintenance contract and were not planned at the time of Ref. 1463.
These were completed at our own cost because they were urgent and ecosystem-critical. We are only requesting retroactive coverage now that they are delivered and stable.
This is also why the budget is kept strictly retroactive and narrow. We did not include any of the future-facing features to avoid speculations till the roadmap for future is cleared out by the Foundation and Parity.
2. On the utility and current state of Klara
We understand the skepticism, and it is valid to ask whether current AI performance justifies investment. Two clarifications are important:
A) Klara today is intentionally limited, because it is not a wrapper
The early release only exposes a small, curated query surface, which is stated clearly in the articles 1 & 2.
This is by design:
We are actively building this layer.
The current version available is only an MVP to evaluate need , assess queries and get feedback on sources needed.
Despite that :
As each new knowledge asset is added, the range of valid queries will expand.
Klara v2 (which the proposal references) includes the richer context, full provenance and the decentralised backend layer.
B) Klara is infrastructure for future Polkadot apps, not just a chatbot
As Polkadot moves into the product era, hundreds of parachain apps will need:
Klara’s shared vector index, the DKG provenance layer, and plugin architecture are designed for these use cases.This avoids each team spending 50–150k to build their own AI pipeline from scratch.This is why the Treasury ROI is high even if you only measure avoided duplication.
We understand how Klara today invites questions and we have tried to answer all those here : FAQ on Klara vs Others , Klara as an AI Layer
3. On “users need analytics, integrations, and missing features from JS”
We agree these are important, and most are already delivered or in progress:
The AI request in this referendum is only one part of the proposal.
The majority of the budget is tied to exactly the kind of features you mention: analytics, identity, multi-chain infra, and a stable governance layer the ecosystem can continue to depend on.
On the tooling gap left by Polkadot JS:
We have already started discussion work on raw extrinsics, transaction review surfaces and others but we intentionally did not include them in the ask because we restricted the scope to shipped work till further clarity on direction is provided by the Foundation
TL;DR
We remain fully open to answering any more concerns and to have a continued discussion
Thanks again for the comment and feedback.
Team Polkassembly