#198·JUST Retroactive Compensation 3.0

Beneficiary: 15KwuFdsnXCU9RFutSxgVDqmC9uf6Wdivv9xjNioWJS4t5C6 (2/3 multisig).

Date: 15 August 2025

Requested: 149,908.38 USD 

Short description: This proposal seeks retroactive compensation from the Polkadot Treasury for our contributions between January and June 2025. Over this period, we worked across governance, technical support, and ecosystem coordination, helping to keep operations running smoothly and strengthening OpenGov processes. Beyond reimbursement, its approval signals the community’s intent for us to continue supporting these critical functions under the established retroactive funding model.

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We, JUST Ventures GmbH, are submitting this third retroactive compensation proposal to the Polkadot Treasury, covering our contributions to the ecosystem from 01.01.2025 to 30.06.2025. This follows our first (01.12.2022–31.03.2024) and second proposal (01.04.2024–31.12.2024), which were approved by the community and supported our work during that period.

Our efforts have encompassed a wide range of activities critical to the growth and maintenance of the Polkadot network. These include, but are not limited to, supporting and executing runtime upgrades, coordinating technical proposals and configuration changes, guiding treasury proposals from ideation through to on-chain submission and payout, and assisting ecosystem stakeholders across a variety of operational and governance matters. 

Beyond technical and governance support, we’ve been consistently engaged in fostering community collaboration: participating in calls, participating in ecosystem events, mentoring new contributors, and helping shape initiatives that strengthen Polkadot’s long-term sustainability. We’ve also played an active role in the operations of the Polkadot Technical Fellowship, supervised and improved bounty processes, and contributed to new tooling and governance mechanisms, among other things.

As with previous proposals, the requested funding reflects the actual work completed over the six months and excludes any tasks that were separately compensated. The requested funding will allow us to continue our work within the Polkadot ecosystem, focusing on governance, technical support, and community initiatives. 

Approval of this proposal not only reimburses us for completed work but also signals the community’s intent to maintain this retroactive model for governance, advisory, and ecosystem operations: areas where outcomes aren’t easily pre-scoped or tied to milestone-based deliverables. This approach keeps us accountable while ensuring that funding is tied to results rather than promises.

To further simplify financial planning, minimise volatility, align with community standards, and comply with German regulations, we are requesting the payout in USDC.

List of Contributions (01.01.2025–30.06.2025):

Governance and Ecosystem Support

1. During this period, we continued to support and guide treasury operations, ensuring proposals moved smoothly from approval to payout. With the increasing adoption of stablecoins for treasury funding, we identified and monitored proposals seeking multi-asset and worked closely with teams to coordinate their claims. This included clarifying payout periods, understanding delays in treasury replenishment, and helping teams avoid overlapping claims that could block larger approved proposals from being fulfilled. We are also exploring an improved mechanism to avoid similar situations in the future. This idea aimed to ensure that approved referenda could be claimed in the order they passed: reducing friction and ensuring fair access to treasury funds. Furthermore, we proposed a structured approach for the Polkadot Treasury to obtain native USDT and USDC, for the purpose of diversification and enabling it to pay out expenses in a stable asset. 
2. Our work around bounties remained substantial. Besides the creation and supervision of bounties, we provided extensive advisory and operational support for Multi-Asset and Cross-Chain Child-/Bounties, helped remove unused bounties, and assisted in recovering inactive curators to ensure more effective operations. Furthermore, we have also served as curators ourselves on several key bounties, including the Polkadot Pioneers Prize bounty, Fast-Grants Bounty, the Open Source Developers Grants Bounty, and the Infrastructure Builders Program (IBP) Bounty. 
3. Another key initiative we have been working on is the Polkadot Ecosystem Map: a community-driven directory designed to provide an up-to-date, structured database of projects within the Polkadot ecosystem. The current version organises projects into categorised tables, some of which update automatically while others require manual input. Looking ahead, we are exploring ways to join efforts with other ecosystem teams to improve this further and create a more robust, collaborative solution. More information on these plans will be shared in due course.

Technical Support and Collaboration with Key Ecosystem Teams

1. We continued our regular collaboration with key stakeholders such as W3F, Snowbridge, parachain teams, and Parity Technologies to keep operations across the ecosystem running smoothly. This has included providing technical assistance, coordinating relay chain and system chain upgrades, helping resolve issues quickly, and stepping in during emergencies when urgent intervention was required. 
2. During this period, we were involved in technical support, operational improvements, and strategic advisory across multiple Polkadot initiatives. Among these efforts, we helped facilitate 19 whitelisted proposals on Polkadot, 16 on Kusama, and 6 root track referenda across both networks, ensuring critical updates and changes progressed without friction.
3. We also provide advisory support for the Asset Hub Migration, working to ensure a seamless transition by offering feedback and coordination. In parallel, we contributed to Coretime coordination, helping align community discussions and technical planning around the architecture.
4. We’ve been following the UX bounty proposal for Enhancing the Referenda Feedback Loop-Section-Based Voting and Feedback Mechanism as an important step toward improving how feedback is gathered and acted upon during referenda. While we didn’t contribute directly to drafting the proposal, we are now engaging with ecosystem teams to help define the roadmap and support its implementation. Our goal is to ensure the initiative aligns with the needs of both proposers and voters, making OpenGov processes more structured, transparent, and user-friendly.
5. We also engaged in discussions around KSM Society improvements and advisory on the future directions of Kappa Sigma Mu. 
6. Our support for the Polkadot Technical Fellowship remains ongoing. We’ve been involved in coordinating technical proposals, providing logistical assistance, in-person interview assistance during fellowship gatherings and preparing documents and guides to onboard new members and contributors effectively.

Community Engagement and Education

1. Polkadot and Kusama community channels remain a central part of the ecosystem, and we’ve continued helping moderate these and maintaining productive discussions ongoing. This includes governance-focused channels, validator lounges, watercooler chats, and more. 
2. In addition, we actively contributed to community education and ecosystem discussions. We participated as mentors and judges at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA) in Lucerne, supporting alumni as they navigated treasury processes and hosting dedicated sessions. Beyond PBA, we joined various ecosystem calls, workshops, and presentations, including a session with Polkadot Legal where we discussed governance structures and the potential for a Polkadot DAO.

 

We have been actively involved in supporting various teams across different domains within the Polkadot ecosystem. The following list includes some of the teams we've collaborated with, though it's not exhaustive: 

Lastly, as promised, we’ve put together a simple, public tracker that shows all the tasks we’ve been working on over the past six months. It pulls data directly from our internal Asana board and updates automatically every six hours. You’ll find tasks grouped by status (“Not Started”, “In Progress”, “On Hold”, “Recurring”, “Done”) along with info like due dates, effort, priority, and category. It’s meant to give anyone a quick overview of what’s been done and what’s still ongoing: JUST <> Polkadot Tracker (External)

Budget Request:
The proposed budget will cover the period of our active involvement in the aforementioned activities, wherein Raul dedicated 20 hours per week to Polkadot and Kusama governance-related tasks while Otar worked 30 hours per week. This allocation is duly reflected in the budget outlined below:

Why Retroactive Funding?

We acknowledge the community’s concerns about large retroactive requests becoming the norm. However, governance and ecosystem coordination are unique, they are dynamic, not easily pre-scoped, and often require real-time responsiveness. This retroactive model ensures we take on the risk first and only seek compensation once results are visible and documented.
We’re also mindful of suggestions for smaller, more frequent proposals. By limiting this request to 6 months, we’re aligning with that feedback while maintaining continuity in supporting critical governance and technical functions.

To conclude, we have generated a SHA-256 hash of the submitted document for verifiability. Anyone can confirm that the document has not been altered by downloading it and running a hash check. The expected hash value is: 0x6bea4a81cbf9f6bc55597b223f9e7c725e44e670bf2a035f17172c890de65e3f

For inquiries, please contact either Otar (@otar:matrix.org) or Raul (@rtti-5220:matrix.org) on Element.