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Closing Bounty 62. Polkadot Legal Bounty.
At the moment no child bounties have been granted.
https://polkadot.subsquare.io/treasury/bounties/62
However it is expected to have the following payments: the bounty members have done Administrative Work, a Sample Case of a Crypto Foundation, a 14 page document outlining the PCF work and interactions “Polkadot Community Foundation” and a IP Strategy Pack. This should total of ca. CHF 26k (ca. USD $33k) or 10’904 DOT, plus 2’548 DOT vested over 6 months (total 13’452 DOT).
https://forum.polkadot.network/t/polkadot-legal-bounty-update/15944
At the moment that our discussion began
https://polkadot.subsquare.io/posts/425
no activity was recorded. According to the discussion and private communications it was expected that the bounty would ramp up activity or wind down the bounty. No further replies from the bounty have been published after that.
It remains to be seen if significant activity can be achieved with the remainder of funds with the current approach.
As far as we can tell, onboarded teams cannot be verified due to privacy, confidentiality concerns as well as light research about people and teams who might use the bounty.
As we originally argued, teams seem to seek their own legal support independently and the Legal Bounty doesn’t seem to have found a niche to justify its continuation.
For those reasons we believe it is better to close the bounty and to return the funds to the treasury.
Comments (2)
We are happy to respond to your statements and clarify the status of the Legal Bounty.
As set out in our recent update here, the Legal Bounty was not inactive. In total, a three-digit number of hours has been invested so far. This includes mostly legal advice and template drafting, with minor amounts of IT costs as well as curator time. To date, 61 hours have been invoiced specifically for legal work. A double-digit number of people have been onboarded to the Legal Bounty's Discord channel.
The Legal Wiki can be accessed, via the Discord server after onboarding, from tomorrow (10 December) evening onwards. Please note that it is still in its early stages. So far, we have focused more on individual requests. We are now building out the Legal Wiki, especially with what we hope will be practically useful templates and checklists for projects and the ecosystem. We have published several legal templates, and a short introduction and outlines for each chapter. Behind these outlines, not all content is fully developed yet. We are actively building these out ongoingly. We welcome feedback, wishes, comments and suggestions, and we will gladly take them into account to further extend and leverage the benefit of the Legal Wiki for the ecosystem.
Please note that the Legal Wiki cannot and will not be able to provide a final answer for every situation. It is designed to cover two main use cases:
Concrete Example:
If someone needs to share confidential information, the Legal Wiki already contains NDA templates (unilateral and mutual).
We see attorney–client privilege as a major advantage. Communication with the Legal Bounty is privileged and will not be disclosed without the consent of those concerned. At the same time, our work remains traceable, and we report transparently on what we do and how the time is used, enabling our contribution to be checked at ecosystem level.
Please bear in mind that anyone who has not been onboarded via the Discord channel will not be able to access any content of the Legal Wiki. This is necessary to ensure that only participants from the Polkadot ecosystem receive free access.
In addition to the legal guidance mentioned, we also provide strong support in IP matters, particularly in relation to company names/structures and brand/trademark protection. We encourage everyone to try it.
The Legal Bounty is active and covers an area that is essential for our ecosystem. Legal must not be neglected and that is meant to take some weight off your shoulders, so that you can focus on building your projects while we help with practical tools (Wiki, templates, checklists, 1:1 guidance) to strengthen the Polkadot ecosystem and make it more attractive for teams and contributors.
For these reasons, we believe that closing the Legal Bounty at this stage would be premature. Instead, we invite the community to continue engaging with us. By using the service, giving feedback, and helping us prioritize what is most valuable for Polkadot.
Polkadot Legal Bounty Discord: https://discord.gg/sYw7WkZVzV
@Amforc
As set out in our recent update here, the Legal Bounty was not inactive. In total, a three-digit number of hours has been invested so far.
To reiterate: At the moment that our discussion began right here
https://polkadot.subsquare.io/posts/425
no activity was recorded. All activity now publicly shared started after that point in time.
From the second paragraph (However it is expected to have the following payments) we also link the update that was shared on the forum now locked. The same questions were redirected to the governance forums without reply.
Behind these outlines, not all content is fully developed yet.
It is one of the concerns as the original bounty had to develop these documents early on and how they will continue to be locked behind onboarding making it hard to assess progress and content (legal wiki). No further efforts from the bounty to have others check this work was ever made.
We see attorney–client privilege as a major advantage. Communication with the Legal Bounty is privileged and will not be disclosed without the consent of those concerned. At the same time, our work remains traceable, and we report transparently on what we do and how the time is used, enabling our contribution to be checked at ecosystem level.
We publicly asked about the number of onboarded teams to assess the impact of this bounty something that went either unanswered or deflected so this privilege is not used well for public reporting purposes unfortunately. Based on the onboarding date, the public answer could have been easily given.
For these reasons, we believe that closing the Legal Bounty at this stage would be premature.
All inactive bounties have been given around 1 year to prove activation and this is no exception (Activation Dec 19th 2024). Bounties that became active happened before this point, those candidates for closure happened at this point in time. For now we have already seen proof that this bounty doesn't do a good job with the "social contract" previously approved via wish for change (1254) regarding compliance (something bounties still don't comply with and still cannot be enforced directly), activation as there has been no promising activity or demand for a full year or and issues about simple communication so it only makes sense to close this bounty.
There are other minor issues like Discord use for privileged communication, alleged saved expenses for other teams, etc. but those were agreed upon during the approval of the bounty which have not been considered for now but were discussed during the approval time.
Dear Proposer,
Thank you for your proposal. Our first vote on this proposal is AYE. Below is the evaluation of our voting policy v0.3 on this referendum:
Below is a summary of our members' comments:
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
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@PERMANENCE DAO/GOV-PROXY Thanks for your feedback. We checked your full internal discussions in the provided link, which were however surprisingly brief (shorter than the summary).
We encourage your DAO members to have a cursory read through our forum post, and/or to check out our comments here and here as well as the LegalWiki that went live for everyone in Polkadot this week.