Polkadot, a popular blockchain protocol, recently announced it would allocate over $20 million in DOT to further develop its ecosystem and the highly anticipated Web3.
Polkadot allocates $21 million to the development of ecosystems
The Polkadot Pioneers Prize, as Polkadot describes it, is a set of challenges carefully crafted to encourage technical innovation throughout its network. Research and development on zero-knowledge and Polkadot infrastructure are included in the first two challenges to be announced later this year.
Over $21 million has already been allocated by the blockchain project in DOT, its native coin, to the first two challenge categories and subsequent categories.
Taking advantage of Polkadot’s On-Chain Treasury
The Pioneers Prize initiative will be funded by Poloniex’s on-chain treasury, which would be managed by the network’s token holders through governance on-chain. DOT tokens are currently held in the Polkadot Treasury, which is intended to fund projects benefiting the Polkadot ecosystem, such as the Pioneers Prize incentive program.
Considering that there is little to no ambitious idea on what to do with Polkadot’s treasury on-chain, the Pioneers Prize attempts to draw attention to the underutilization of Polkadot’s treasury.
The idea of this proposal is to demonstrate the community’s ability to direct on-chain treasury funds in new and creative ways to gain greater agency.
Polkadot Pioneers Prize will be overseen by a curator elected by the community and be led by representatives from the on-chain treasury council, Parity Technologies, the Web3 Foundation, and other external ecosystem partners.
Polkadot’s low carbon footprint
Polkadot has been named the blockchain network that uses the least electricity and emits the lowest total carbon emissions per year, according to a recent report by the Crypto Carbon Rankings Institute (CCRI).
In a study by the CCRI, the CCRI measured how much electricity and carbon emissions are emitted by six blockchain networks that use the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The blockchains that were examined were Solana, Polkadot, Tezos, Avalanche, Cardano, and Algorand.
Blockchain energy consumption has long been a controversial topic. Last year, Tesla stopped accepting Bitcoin payments due to issues with energy consumption.
