Note: The public discussion that led to the creation of this WFC can be found in the Polkadot Forum.
All DOT-denominated proceeds the DOT DAO receives from JAMKB — whether from an outright sale, a lease, a metered rental, or the decayed portion of a refundable deposit — are burned in full, automatically and at protocol level, with no discretionary step in between.
Correspondingly, the DOT DAO does not distribute JAMKB, or footprint bonded on a team's behalf, as a grant, a gift, or an interest-free or below-market loan. Every allocation of JAM state footprint, to any recipient, for any purpose, is paid for at the prevailing market price, in DOT, with that DOT burned and taken out of circulation permanently.
Gavin Wood's case for JAMKB is sound, and this WFC does not contest it. JAM state footprint is a real, inelastic resource, and pricing it in DOT directly would force the base-layer token to track two unrelated scarcity curves at once — DOT's monetary and governance demand, and the RAM demand of active services — which would distort both. A dedicated, fixed-supply token is the right way to keep that soundness guarantee: footprint can never exceed what the token supply permits, which is a stronger commitment than any administrative rule could give.
Needing a separate token, though, is a different question from how to organise its distribution and what happens to resulting proceeds – and this is where this wish goes beyond the original framing. A fixed supply gives JAMKB a hard cap; it says nothing about whether JAMKB's price moves with DOT, or whether the DOT DAO's initial sale of it benefits DOT holders at all. Both of those are choices, not consequences of the fixed-supply design. This WFC makes them explicit: JAMKB's price should be linked to DOT, settled in it, and every unit of value the DAO's initial JAMKB supply generates should accrue into DOT's value through a burn.
DOT holders financed years of JAM development and over the same period only saw DOT price trading down. Development costs paid in DOT, including the DOT-denominated JAM prize, were ultimately financed by people holding DOT, not by a treasury acting on its own. That gives DOT holders a legitimate claim on JAM's scarcest resource, once it starts generating revenue from footprint sales, and the most direct form that claim can take is a rising DOT price. A burn delivers exactly that: it converts JAMKB revenue into reduced DOT supply, automatically and in proportion to real usage, with no intermediary deciding whether holders actually see the benefit.
A growing treasury balance sheet and a rising DOT price is not the same thing, and the two should not be conflated. Treasury funds can sit idle, fund grants, or go to whoever is best positioned to make the case for spending in any given cycle — all of that can be perfectly legitimate, but none of it puts upward pressure on DOT itself. A DOT holder does not benefit from the DAO being richer; they benefit from DOT being worth more. Anchoring JAMKB's value capture in treasury accumulation, even well-intentioned accumulation, quietly substitutes the DAO's interest for the token holder's and calls it the same thing. A full burn is the one mechanism that cannot make that substitution: there is no balance to grow, only supply that shrinks.
Leaving this to a future vote is not a neutral choice — it is a cost. It leaves the value of JAMKB to DOT holders undefined until a referendum settles it, and leaves that outcome revisable every time the question comes up again. Fixing it now, as a protocol rule rather than a treasury policy, also has a direct benefit beyond the mechanism itself: "Every byte of JAM state occupied takes DOT out of circulation" is a simple, verifiable commitment that a discretionary policy can never make with the same credibility. That kind of durable scarcity story is the sort of thing markets price in ahead of usage actually materializing — a positive marketing effect that a deferred, revisable policy forfeits entirely.
Teams building public goods on JAM are not shut out by this. The route for them is the one that already exists and is already scrutinised: apply to the DOT Treasury for a grant in DOT, as any public-goods project does today, and use that DOT to acquire JAMKB at the going rate like anyone else.
The DOT DAO owns 100% of initial JAMKB supply and has the tools for providing grants, when appropriate. There is no need to create a parallel “JAMKB grants” program, which would add unnecessary complexity, and will always be politically contentious. The existing treasury spends are a perfectly suitable instrument for providing footprint in JAM to deserving teams. It is well-understood, public and transparent, and voted on by all DOT holders.
This WFC builds on: Gavin Wood, "DOT DAO and the need for $JAMKB" and "DOT DAOism under JAM: An Island Story"; Gehrlein and Valkanova, "Dynamically priced JAMKB via decaying deposits" (forum.polkadot.network/t/17971), whose proposed decayed-deposit revenue currently has no fixed destination; "A request for clarity before JAM: the people who funded this deserve a straight answer" (forum.polkadot.network/t/17969), including its co-sponsored DOT-settlement WFC 1927 (Batbayar, BizaRre); and Harbour Industrial Capital, "JAMKB and the Need for Value Capture back into DOT" (Medium).
As with any Wish for Change, this is a signal of community sentiment, not a protocol change in itself; if approved by ballot, a future technical implementation is bound by it.
JAM is a new part of Polkadot. This idea says JAM's special resource (called JAMKB) must be sold for DOT, and that DOT must be burned forever. Burning means the DOT is destroyed, not kept.
Note: The public discussion that led to the creation of this WFC can be found in the Polkadot Forum.
All DOT-denominated proceeds the DOT DAO receives from JAMKB — whether from an outright sale, a lease, a metered rental, or the decayed portion of a refundable deposit — are burned in full, automatically and at protocol level, with no discretionary step in between.
Correspondingly, the DOT DAO does not distribute JAMKB, or footprint bonded on a team's behalf, as a grant, a gift, or an interest-free or below-market loan. Every allocation of JAM state footprint, to any recipient, for any purpose, is paid for at the prevailing market price, in DOT, with that DOT burned and taken out of circulation permanently.
Gavin Wood's case for JAMKB is sound, and this WFC does not contest it. JAM state footprint is a real, inelastic resource, and pricing it in DOT directly would force the base-layer token to track two unrelated scarcity curves at once — DOT's monetary and governance demand, and the RAM demand of active services — which would distort both. A dedicated, fixed-supply token is the right way to keep that soundness guarantee: footprint can never exceed what the token supply permits, which is a stronger commitment than any administrative rule could give.
Needing a separate token, though, is a different question from how to organise its distribution and what happens to resulting proceeds – and this is where this wish goes beyond the original framing. A fixed supply gives JAMKB a hard cap; it says nothing about whether JAMKB's price moves with DOT, or whether the DOT DAO's initial sale of it benefits DOT holders at all. Both of those are choices, not consequences of the fixed-supply design. This WFC makes them explicit: JAMKB's price should be linked to DOT, settled in it, and every unit of value the DAO's initial JAMKB supply generates should accrue into DOT's value through a burn.
DOT holders financed years of JAM development and over the same period only saw DOT price trading down. Development costs paid in DOT, including the DOT-denominated JAM prize, were ultimately financed by people holding DOT, not by a treasury acting on its own. That gives DOT holders a legitimate claim on JAM's scarcest resource, once it starts generating revenue from footprint sales, and the most direct form that claim can take is a rising DOT price. A burn delivers exactly that: it converts JAMKB revenue into reduced DOT supply, automatically and in proportion to real usage, with no intermediary deciding whether holders actually see the benefit.
A growing treasury balance sheet and a rising DOT price is not the same thing, and the two should not be conflated. Treasury funds can sit idle, fund grants, or go to whoever is best positioned to make the case for spending in any given cycle — all of that can be perfectly legitimate, but none of it puts upward pressure on DOT itself. A DOT holder does not benefit from the DAO being richer; they benefit from DOT being worth more. Anchoring JAMKB's value capture in treasury accumulation, even well-intentioned accumulation, quietly substitutes the DAO's interest for the token holder's and calls it the same thing. A full burn is the one mechanism that cannot make that substitution: there is no balance to grow, only supply that shrinks.
Leaving this to a future vote is not a neutral choice — it is a cost. It leaves the value of JAMKB to DOT holders undefined until a referendum settles it, and leaves that outcome revisable every time the question comes up again. Fixing it now, as a protocol rule rather than a treasury policy, also has a direct benefit beyond the mechanism itself: "Every byte of JAM state occupied takes DOT out of circulation" is a simple, verifiable commitment that a discretionary policy can never make with the same credibility. That kind of durable scarcity story is the sort of thing markets price in ahead of usage actually materializing — a positive marketing effect that a deferred, revisable policy forfeits entirely.
Teams building public goods on JAM are not shut out by this. The route for them is the one that already exists and is already scrutinised: apply to the DOT Treasury for a grant in DOT, as any public-goods project does today, and use that DOT to acquire JAMKB at the going rate like anyone else.
The DOT DAO owns 100% of initial JAMKB supply and has the tools for providing grants, when appropriate. There is no need to create a parallel “JAMKB grants” program, which would add unnecessary complexity, and will always be politically contentious. The existing treasury spends are a perfectly suitable instrument for providing footprint in JAM to deserving teams. It is well-understood, public and transparent, and voted on by all DOT holders.
This WFC builds on: Gavin Wood, "DOT DAO and the need for $JAMKB" and "DOT DAOism under JAM: An Island Story"; Gehrlein and Valkanova, "Dynamically priced JAMKB via decaying deposits" (forum.polkadot.network/t/17971), whose proposed decayed-deposit revenue currently has no fixed destination; "A request for clarity before JAM: the people who funded this deserve a straight answer" (forum.polkadot.network/t/17969), including its co-sponsored DOT-settlement WFC 1927 (Batbayar, BizaRre); and Harbour Industrial Capital, "JAMKB and the Need for Value Capture back into DOT" (Medium).
As with any Wish for Change, this is a signal of community sentiment, not a protocol change in itself; if approved by ballot, a future technical implementation is bound by it.