Statistically speaking, IndyCar racing has very limited viewership and engagement compared to major sports or entertainment industries.

While it's notable that 'half of the 2023 races drew over 1 million viewers—the same as 2022, marking the series’ best numbers since 2008'—these figures are modest at best.* Keep in mind, these are the most favorable statistics available. The actual audience actively watching is often much smaller than what companies boast, as many viewers may simply have the channel on in the background.

Even if Conor were featured prominently by IndyCar and achieved unparalleled success, the reality is it would have minimal impact on Polkadot’s visibility or adoption. By contrast, grassroots efforts from passionate X accounts promoting Polkadot organically are already achieving greater reach and engagement—all without requiring compensation. This highlights the inefficiency of associating with low-impact channels when other avenues offer better ROI.

*Source: https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2023/09/18/motorsports

Dear @ConorDaly22,

Thank you for your proposal. Our vote on this proposal is NAY.

The Big Spender track requires a 60% quorum according to our voting policy. This proposal has received zero aye and seven nay votes from ten members. Below is a summary of our members' comments:

The referendum received unanimous opposition from DAO members, who raised concerns about the lack of clear value and return on investment from motorsport sponsorship. While Conor Daly's efforts as a community champion were acknowledged, members criticized the initiative as misaligned with Polkadot's technological foundations and current priorities. Many questioned the tangible benefits beyond temporary awareness and highlighted the need for better fan engagement through technology and side businesses. Additionally, the timing was deemed unsuitable, with suggestions to prioritize more impactful initiatives or revisit the proposal under more favourable conditions.

The full discussion, along with individual members' votes and comments, can be found in our internal voting.

Kind regards,

Permanence DAO

All,

Paul Sparta here, CEO of Vbrick Systems. Sorry for the delay in getting setup here in Polkassembly, but been travelling all over for a few weeks. This is a new thing for me.

We are the company building a large scale video content authenticity framework with the Polkadot tech stack in collaboration with Blockdeep Labs. While the motorsport platform may seem a little removed from the needs of the Polkadot community, that is not the case for applications built using Polkadot, especially those with global adoption agendas such as Vbrick's content authenticity framework.

Vbrick plans to add it's own referendum proposal in January, but our efforts work collaboratively with Conor Daly's work as an ambassador. To be clear, the purpose for us is not to create developer awareness for Polkadot. As many have pointed out here, there are many more effective routes for that. However, the motorsports paddock is a fantastic global vehicle for driving enterprise level adoption of technology. In our case, that technology just happens to be built using Polkadot. We need to engage C-Level and VP level enterprises, along with our other partner AWS, to drive adoption, which in turn will drive what I believe will be massive transactional volume on Polkadot. Some of the largest tech companies in the world invest millions in motorsport, from F1 to IndyCar to GT racing. Most of these companies have very little need for broadband awareness, but they do have need for strategic engagement with corporate executives that build business relationships to drive adoption at a large scale. That's what this is about.

So, when you are thinking about voting Yay or Nay for Conor's referendum, think about the people like me who will be engaged, and in turn look to Polkadot as an enabling platform for big solutions. Please be patient about learning more about Vbrick's project, but you won't have to wait too long. We think it is a game changer.

The more I have learned in the last few months about Polkadot, the bigger a fan I have become. We at Vbrick are really looking forward to changing the way the world thinks about certain content. We think a public blockchain and Polkadot specifically are key to achieving that.

I'll try to respond as I can to any further comments.

Thanks all!

Paul

I do not understand how @The Phunky One and Lucky Friday can in good conscience vote AYE here with their DV Delegation. As the main proponent of this sponsorship and a member of the multisig you are clearly conflicted! It is a flagrant violation of the DV terms to vote on your own proposals, as I would believe you know. I urge you to change your vote to abstain, or I will personally make sure this gets to the attention of the W3F so they can revoke the DV delegation.

Am I bringing this up now because you voted NAY on my proposal which would have had a way better ROI than throwing money after fast cars? Maybe, but that does not change the fact that you have an obvious Conflict of Interest here.

@The Phunky One thanks, appreciate the quick response. Didn't mean to chase you during the holidays season, but it still begs the question why LF voted AYE on this in the first place (almost two weeks ago) and only changed to ABSTAIN after White Rabbit and I called you out on it. You have had a COI on this Ref since the very beginning. Anyways, glad this is resolved now, and we can move on. Happy holidays!

Thank you for the proposal and the continuous engagement with Polkadot’s development. Based on our cohort 3 application, referenda in this range will also depend on the price of DOT and the impact on the treasury. The reason we do this is because with the passing of the inflation reduction and readjustment of treasury income referendum (1139), the expected scenario for the price of DOT was meant to be price increase. For such reason we have decided to wait until the referendum approval gets closer to its end to make a final decision so we get a better sense of what the price of DOT and value of stables are at that point in time. This depends also on other external factors such as amount of requested funds from other referenda, It is difficult to predict which referenda will pass but we certainly can have an estimate of the funds that are about to be spent measured in DOT, USD, funds currently requested as well of the funds that are already spent and in which category.

We should work around the estimated budget for the specific category at a specific DOT price and stables availability. The rationale for this is to not exceed the treasury income into a heavily negative outflow like what happened on 2024-Q2

In this particular case, we follow the Opengov watch categories:

https://www.opengov.watch/reports/treasury-reports/04_2024-treasury-report-q3

Outreach (Marketing, BD, Community Development):
• Marketing: media production, PR, advertising
• Business development: consulting, solution architecture
• Community development: conference hosting, conference attendance, local outreach, events, community building, ambassador program
as a mix of community building, marketing and business development referendum 1357 needs to be included and compared with the other expenses and prospected expenditures of the category.

As of today, the large referenda with significant expenditures within this category are the Marketing Bounty, The Dot Play Bounty (Officially known as Games Bounty). The events bounty is excluded as they shouldn’t come for a refill during this or the next quarter. The Marketing Bounty explicitly excludes the outreach referenda that occupy a large amount of their resources so this referendum cannot be redirected towards bounty 33.
Bounty 33 already occupies over 10% of yearly treasury income, The Dot Play bounty should come for a refill for another +10% of the income. However a smaller percentage of the “Content and Experiences” budget should go into outreach (67% of content and experiences and outreach should be a smaller part of this). Combined with the additional outreach events, independent content creation and events an additional 4% to 5% for this referendum should fit into the 36% outreach budget from the previous quarter that was balanced. We hold the belief that the percentage for outreach should be contained, as it’s the easiest one to overspend on but for now, limiting to balancing the budget is good enough and an effective strategy. As for the stablecoin expenditure, USDC impact would be moderate as it corresponds to 22% of the current USDC and 18% of USDT treasury holdings and 17% of total stable holdings. We applaud this approach to sensitiveness to stablecoin impact. Replenishing these reserves is a strenuous job so we are thankful for this approach as it removes impact on certain stables. It’s something other referenda should copy and start tracking.

Remarks
As requested to other large outreach referenda, and what White Rabbit has also mentioned, B2B activities, Business Development and the effective use of hospitality packages towards those efforts is crucial. We have seen that there is a submission for interested parties looking to engage with Polkadot and the 2025 Polkadot Motorsports Program could help with that but we would still like to see who it’s lined up and ready to engage in these events on Polakdot's side. The Inter Miami brand integration has lagged the technical integrations only being considered during the referendum and as an afterthought and with pressure from many parties, ourselves included. Which unfortunately, is now a reactive effort waiting for integrations and their people willing to come forward and start building. We don’t want to see this approach to be repeated again. In addition, the use of hospitality packages, hopefully are assigned to the BD parties proactively who hopefully get published by the end of the referendum and preferably before the end of the referendum. Without these factors, we could end up seeing the ineffective and wasteful use of hospitality packages and less than optimal reach, which for these large brand and events integrations should be completely allocated and used to the max. For those reasons we would like to see a more or less concrete lineup of the parties willing to get involved and what their plans are for the integration of the Polkadot technology into their activities.

As published on our X account, we’ll maintain our ABSTAIN vote until January 2025 so we can see the trajectory of the price of DOT and better ascertain the impact on treasury holdings and more importantly in observe the effect of the strategy of cutting inflation.

@ConorDaly22 In response to your question: I did not come here to discuss the content of the proposal, but to point out @The Phunky One 's Conflict of Interest. By LF's move to abstain this has now been resolved.

I personally also happen to be of the opinion that Polkadot should not continue with this particular sponsorship. This is by no means supposed to be a criticism of you personally! In fact I very much appreciate your work. But I do think that a consumer facing brand like Coca Cola or McDonald's would be a better fit as a sponsor for you and create move value for both sides. US motorsport fans are not Polkadot's core target audience.

Greetings,

I find the the potential for brand visibility and community engagement through motorsports vast and great opportunity for Polkadot. At the same time this potential needs to be leveraged at the right time and synchronized with marketing efforts in the community. We can see top ecosystems work with known/big brands - not like it is mandatory to succeed, but because of the possibility to engage with mass of people.

While the financial breakdown is stated, further transparency in how funds will drive social media campaigns and engagements would add extra confidence. It's not just about the immediate return, but how this program can grow Polkadot’s community for the long term.

Overall, I think these initiatives can bring positive changes to Polkadot, push it towards its past top position - if managed well and with business in mind.