Polkadot’s Treasury Spending Doubles in Less Than One Year

• Polkadot treasury spent 3.9 million DOTs, equivalent to $21 million, as of October 18, 2023.
• The project spent only 1.7 million DOTs, worth $13 million last year.
• Development spending accounted for half of the total amount spent by the Polkadot treasury this year.

According to reports, the Polkadot treasury had spent 3.9 million DOTs, equivalent to $21 million, as of October 18, 2023. That is a significant increase from the 1.7 million DOTs, worth $13 million it spent last year.

Referencing a report posted on the Polkadot network’s forum, Colin Wu, a Chinese crypto-focused reporter, noted that development spending accounted for half of the total amount spent by the Polkadot treasury this year. Wu also observed that outreach spending gulped 38% of the budget while operating expenses consumed 9% of the total budget.

Although Polkadot-related organizations are reportedly undergoing notable layoffs, Wu noted that research and other expenses were responsible for 2% of the budget released by the Polkadot treasury.

One of the authors, Alice and Bob, noted that the report showed spending to a granularity that has never been seen on the Polkadot network. According to Alice, the latest report added a new highlight, which she described as subcategories.

The figures released showed that spending for Development and Operation on the Polkadot network doubled from last year’s value. Outreach increased by less than 10%, while the budget for research had seen an increase of 65%.

From the author’s analysis, there is a high level of stability in the Polkadot network, considering that there is a rough comparison of the relative importance of the categories between 2022 and 2023. Alice also introduced the subcategories, which include substrate, bridge, smart contract, Multisig, and governance, among several others. According to her, costs are now categorized along the major targets of each proposal via the subcategories.

Alice submitted the treasury report to the project’s official forum, where members of the Polkadot community can discuss issues surrounding Polkadot and Kusama. Alice told forum members that the report’s authors scraped awarded spends from DoTreasury and manually categorized them to obtain data used in the report.