Threshold
Dear Proposer,
Thank you for your proposal. Our first vote on this proposal is NAY.
The Treasurer track requires 60% quorum according to our voting policy. This proposal has received zero aye and six nay votes from ten members. Below is a summary of our members' comments:
The voters expressed strong opposition to the referendum, citing concerns about the proposal's ambitious scope and high execution costs. They emphasized the lack of a proven track record and suggested that the treasury would bear excessive risk without sufficient accountability or shared investment from esports organizations. Many voters advocated for a more cautious approach, recommending smaller projects to build credibility and refine the strategy before pursuing larger initiatives. Overall, the sentiment reflected a desire for clearer goals, defined timelines, and a focus on tangible value creation.
The full discussion can be found in our internal voting.
Please feel free to contact us through the links below for further discussion.
Kind regards,
Permanence DAO
Decentralized Voices Cohort IV Delegate
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🗳️ Delegate
Hello Dear Proposers!
I am Vikk and casting this comment on behalf of the 🌶️ Hungarian Polkadot DAO 🌶️.
It's great to see that different members of the ecosystem have come together to create a proposal. This is indeed the first proposal that has mobilized so many teams and individuals to come together for something new and large-scale. While the collaboration is commendable and it's inspiring to see the effort put into cross-collaboration and joint coordination, our DAO is nevertheless voting Nay.
A few word on the proposal' structure:
Why we have voted Nay?
If you look back at our DV application submitted in September 2024 for the third cohort of the Decentralized Voices program, you'll see that we already expressed our disapproval of large-budget marketing proposals at that time. We continue to hold the same position in the fourth cohort' DV application as well. Below you can see the relevant paragraph highlighted from our DV application:
"We advocate for a more sustainable and strategic approach to network growth. We disagree with the current marketing spending happening on Polkadot. We believe in funding sustainable and growth business models instead of sporting club sponsorships which have questionable results for network growth. These one-off marketing payments are crucial and should be evaluated on a case to case basis. But doing multiple sport partnerships at the same time in this early growth phase is not aligning with sustainable growth. Those can come later after a regular builder and user base is achieved."
To put our rationale into context we are providing the followings:
The requested amount is not that much compared to other sponsorship deals that have taken place in the crypto space. Check this basic article on crypto sponsorship metrics. While we know that several other crypto industry entities (mainly CEXs rather than protocols) have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on sports and other sponsorships, we personally question the effectiveness of these efforts.
We believe that until the mission of blockchain protocols becomes more widely recognized, there is no need for large-scale sponsorship spending. If the brand and its mission are not yet known - because proper brand building hasn’t happened - then it’s pointless to try to support the brand with high-budget sponsorships. The brand must be able to sell itself first, and only after that should prestige sponsorships come into play.
So, we believe that these kinds of marketing efforts simply aren’t reaching the right audience that the ecosystem currently needs. What the ecosystem needs is more developers and entrepreneurs, people who will launch their projects as dApps on AssetHub (with PVM), or as rollups/parachains connected to Polkadot. Right now, not many projects are being built on Polkadot. There are around 50 parachains, but only a few have achieved real impact, and we don’t see a strong developer community eager to build on Polkadot at the moment. We need more developer talents and passionate entrepreneurs, and we think e-sport sponsorships won’t funnel these personas into the ecosystem!
To provide more context for your e-sports sponsorship proposal, we’ve outlined a brief research comparison between the landscape of major tech companies in the early ’90s and 2000s and the current state of Web3 protocols, specifically in terms of sports sponsorship spending. Our rationale with this research is to demonstrate that Polkadot does not currently need to spend millions of dollars on e-sports sponsorships. Moreover, if Polkadot had a CEO, ideas like what you proposed in your referenda, likely wouldn’t even exist.
Here you can see some information regarding the costs associated with sports sponsorships involving Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and the Linux community in the 1990s and 2000s:
1. Sponsorship spendings of Microsoft:
NASCAR Sponsorship (2008): In 2008, Microsoft's logo appeared on the rear-quarter panel of Michael Waltrip Racing's #00 car in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. The market value of this sponsorship spot was estimated at $1 million. However, Microsoft did not pay this amount directly; instead, approximately $165,000 was contributed by 40 small businesses and resellers that used Microsoft's software. These partners funded the sponsorship in exchange for promotional benefits, such as the right to display images of the car featuring their logos on their websites. (Source)
NFL Fever 2000 (in 1999): Microsoft released the video game NFL Fever 2000, which featured full NFL licensing, including teams, players, and stadiums. While the exact cost of acquiring the NFL license for this game is not publicly disclosed, licensing agreements for major sports leagues typically involve substantial fees, often reaching into the millions of dollars.
2. Sponsorship spendings of Apple:
3. Sponsorship spendings of Linux Community
4. Sponsorship spendings of IBM in the 1990s:
IBM sponsored the Olympic Games:
IBM served as the official worldwide technology sponsor for the Olympic Games, providing computing equipment, systems integration, and technological support. Thats costs to IBM over $100 million to sponsor the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. The company decided to end its Olympic sponsorship after the 2000 Sydney Games due to escalating costs and disagreements over internet rights. (Source)
IBM sponsored the U.S. Open Tennis Championships:
IBM created, produced, and hosted the official U.S. Open website and managed the real-time scoreboard. The sponsorship showcased IBM's web-hosting capabilities and technological services. The exact figures for this sponsorship are not publicly available, but it estimated around 15M dollars.
Based on a short AI research and calculation, we found that IBM spent only a very small percentage of its revenue on sponsorships in the 1990s. (Please note that these figures are generated by AI (ChatGPT) and may contain inaccuracies.) ->
So even in a peak year like 1998, IBM spent only about 0.13% of its revenue on major sponsorships. Most years, sponsorship spending was well below 0.01% of revenue.
Our conclusion:
Conclusion is that the Web3 world in general, in its current state, should not be spending huge amounts of money on sports sponsorships in its developing form. In the early days of the internet in the 90s, neither Apple nor the Linux community spent money on sponsorships. Microsoft, on rare occasions, spent very small amounts on sponsorships. Only IBM spent a significant amount ($100M USD) to provide IT infrastructure FOR FREE for the Olympic Games, NBA, and the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, in exchange to showcase IBM’s real-time TV casting capabilities.
However, after the 1998 Olympic Games, IBM did not renew its sponsorship, citing the following reasons:
“IBM decided not to renew its relationship with the International Olympic Committee because the two sides could not agree on financial terms and Internet-related issues. IBM said the International Olympic Committee was demanding many times what other sponsors were paying, given the value of the donations of products and services it was making. Another killer for IBM's sponsorship was the IOC's demand that Internet rights be negotiated separately. IBM has featured its Olympic efforts prominently on its Web site. IBM refused to disclose its total Olympics-related costs, but it spent more than $100 million to sponsor the 1998 Winter Games. In a statement, the company said it 'could not justify the investment based on the marketing return we could reasonably expect.”
Our final thoughts and suggestion for the Polkadot Community:
Based on the patterns above, it appears that even the largest players in the IT industry during the 1990s either did not spend or ceased spending large amounts on sports sponsorships. IBM, however, was an exception, allocating significant funds to sponsorships, although this only represented between 0.005% and 0.1% of its revenue. Microsoft's strategy at the time focused on licensing the Windows OS to virtually any hardware manufacturer, and they spent only a very small portion of their revenue on sports sponsorships. During this period, Apple concentrated on education by bringing Apple computers to schools and creative software development, alongside with emotional branding campaigns (such as "Think Different").
In summary, these companies did not spend significant sums on sports sponsorships during the early days of the internet. Instead, they focused on education, brand building, and IT development. Based on these patterns, we recommend that Polkadot should not spend roughly 5% of its treasury on questionable marketing efforts such as e-sports sponsorships. This amount should be more wisely spent on building a targeted presence in universities, especially in fields like economics, political science, sociology, law, and, of course, IT. Additionally, it should be used to educate mid-sized companies on blockchain topics and prioritize Polkadot and Substrate’s unique features.
You can see how the Hungarian Polkadot DAO evaluated proposal 1533 on our public Notion page.
Polkadot doesn’t need this kind of messy marketing and promotion — we’re not here for short-term gains. Our funds should be focused on infrastructure development, JAM, and application growth. Polkadot itself is not a user-facing platform; the user-facing entities are the applications — the HUB, DeFi projects, and so on.