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Tip for an account used for Referendum Deposit Clean-up and Validator Payout Bot
Dear community,
I would like your support to fund an account used for common good activities with 333 KSM, near the upper limit of this track. Based on current projections this should fund said activities for beyond 12 months. I hope that the community trust that I would use the funds responsibly should they become in-excess.
The account is used in-part for activities such as:
- Paying out staking rewards for several validators and their nominators
- Refunding submission and decision deposits for several referenda on Kusama and the Collective chain
- The account was previously funded by the Treasury 5-6 months ago. There are now many more payouts per era as more validators are active and there is a higher drain on funds.
It is worthwhile noting that the account has no outbound transfers and most (if not all) expenses on the account are transactional in nature; this means that 80% of the fees are returned to the treasury.
The account balance graph is shown below.
Regards,
Will | Paradox | ParaNodes.io
Comments (3)
Requested
Proposal Passed
The centralized payout service model presents inherent reliability issues. Historical uptime has forced most validators to implement their own backup scripts, reducing your bot to a cost-optimization tool rather than a critical service.
The lack of proactive monitoring is concerning - relying on manual user reports for outage detection doesn't meet basic operational standards for infrastructure handling treasury funds.
This service doesn't even provide cost efficiency through transaction batching - validators pay the same fees whether using your bot or running their own scripts. There's literally no economic advantage to centralizing this function.
Consider implementing a participant-funded model where validators deposit funds proportional to their payout costs. This would:
The current treasury-funded approach creates misaligned incentives. Professional validators need reliable infrastructure and would pay for guaranteed service levels. We'd gladly pay a premium for defined SLAs rather than rely on best-effort services funded through governance proposals.
Kusama's core problem is lack of onchain economic activity. Treasury funds should attract economic actors to the network, not subsidize services that could be self-sustaining businesses. Every KSM spent on replacing natural market activity is KSM not spent on growth initiatives that bring real usage onchain.
With staking functions and smart contracts coming to Asset Hub in the next few months, building a participant-funded payout contract becomes trivial. Transform this into a proper service business - let market dynamics drive quality instead of subsidizing unreliability with public funds.
Hey Kusamaxi,
The bot was setup many years ago and was not marketed as a the de-facto solution for validator payouts. It offers some economic relief to those who don't want to manage validator payouts themselves. Validators can also use this as a backup to their own systems.
I think your points related to downtime are overstated and perhaps if you took an empirical approach you may find downtime is not as bad as you're making it out to be. In any case, if you're unsatisfied, you can just operate your own bot/script.
Regards,