It’s Goku. This is my second litmus test to see how my contributions over the last 7 months are valued and recognized, and whether the requested tip amount matches the significance of my impact, by Polkadot stakeholders.

Aside from memeposting and my ecosystem agent activities—calling out nonsense attacks on Polkadot—my content typically involves extensive cross-ecosystem research and narrative-building.

Therefore, I don’t post very frequently, but when I do, it’s usually highly effective—engaged.

As for the tone, I generally target an audience outside of Polkadot, making it easily digestible, penetrating through the noise, avoiding preaching or didactic tones, and adding a bit of entertainment along with insights into Polkadot-focused key topics: OpenGov, economics, and marketing.

In the last 7 months, my content has been viewed over 2.4M, and I have doubled my follower count in an organic, slow, and steady way—not by FUD engagement, speculation, or farming OpenGov drama.

Many of these pieces of content have been leveraged by KOLs, crypto media, Polkadot and its ecosystem projects, the community, and other content creators. They’ve engaged or attracted new followers beyond the Polkadot circle, including respected KOLs, builders, popular L2 rollup teams, their heads of BD, community leads, and founders.

Hence, it’s more important to see what kind of content received these engagements and who the people engaging with it are, beyond just the numbers.

Here are the top highlights from this period:
• Polkadot’s blockspace—most affordable, with graphics
• Blockspace. Cores. Coretime. Agile Coretime. Elastic Scaling
• What is JAM
• Why Ethereum co founder left—Gavin
• WebSummit: Digital individuality
• Polkadot’s inflation
• 7x increase in transactions
• Fireside chat between Gavin and Vitalik
• AWS x Polkadot
• My first JAM take
• Polkadot’s endgame

Since March, I have also continued to play with visuals to explain concepts and ideas behind Polkadot, inspired by the minimalism of VV.
• OpenGov
• Integrated. Modular. Polkadot
• Agile Coretime

Memes?
• Polkadot x Cardano
• Fireside chat between Gavin and Vitalik
• On-chain governance
• On-chain governance-2
• Possibly first memecoin—deployed by Gavin

Lastly, the other side of ecosystem agenting—being the reply guy, on time, on point. If you see someone spreading FUD about Polkadot or sharing a misconception, you will probably see me debunking those myths. Sometimes gently. Sometimes neutrally. And sometimes burying it completely.
• Response to nonsense about the relay chain’s TPS metric
• Response to marketing nitpicking
• Blockchain comparisons, misconception on Polkadot
• Snowbridge
• Atom vs DOT
• Responding to weekly Polkadot FUDders, including existing parachain founders
• Another one
• Correcting crypto media

In that sense, on X arena, I can poke the bears as well. An example. (not Polkadot content)

And many more that I can’t put all here, plus engaging in the Reddit community as much as I could spare time with posts and comments.

Potential FAQ:

Have I ever been compensated for any of my content, sponsored, or even applied somewhere for compensation?
No.

Why USDT?
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Some might argue that asking for a retroactive tip in DOT when its value is arguably low seems opportunistic. Others could say that asking for stablecoins eliminates skin in the game. I chose USDT this time as the most neutral way, as it’s currently favored by today’s community social consensus. And after all, this is retroactive compensation, not for future. Ideally, I believe a better approach will be partial vested DOT for initiatives like this (when it’s available), aligning the proposer’s future actions with the network.

Why $15K?
There’s no one concrete way to assess outreach contributions in crypto. It’s a mix of subjective judgment, some metrics—most of which can be gameable—and a sense of indispensability.

Content creators similar to me, in terms of quality and genuine engagement, can be typically rewarded between $20K to $50K from newly emerging projects through airdrops or from existing ones via retroactive rewards.

But, this is not standardized and varies. Therefore, from my perspective, the best option is to do a heat check—request the amount and see the response.

Previously in March, I was tipped through OpenGov, receiving close to $10K. This time, I based my retroactive request on a monthly compensation range of $2K to $2.5K. Surely, this range reflects my self-assessment of the impact I believe I’ve made here.