Burn Rate: At the very least, Polkadot can be appreciated for its transparency. On Tuesday, the blockchain project published a lengthy report detailing its spending over the past six months, including copies of spreadsheets and invoices. But good deeds always pay off, and Twitter users criticized the project’s multimillion-dollar spending on marketing, advertising, sponsorships, events, influencers, and other activities. At the highest level, the project is spending $87 million of its own DOT tokens on various activities in the first half of 2024, and at this pace, it will burn through its current $245 million fund in about two years, according to CoinDesk’s Shaurya Malwa. But it was the green eyeshade detail that surprised readers of the report.$4.9 million for influencers, $1.9 million to sponsor race car driver Conor Daly, $1 million for digital advertising on CoinMarketCap, $490,000 for press release website Chainwire, $180,000 for “branding private jets,” and $6.8 million for what the report calls “signatures with prestigious soccer clubs.” (Lionel Messi’s team, Inter Miami?) Sarcastic posters on X commented that influencers were strangely inactive given the amount spent, while others joked that the report had finally given Polkadot the publicity it so desperately needed. Polkadot officials noted that spending was higher than expected thanks to the cryptocurrency market’s mostly upward momentum this year, and the report states, “Recently, more ambitious proposals and requests have led to a significant increase in spending.” “The good news is that the average price of DOT has increased over the last six months, increasing DOT profits. This is illustrated by the fact that DOT spending has increased 2.4 times, while its USD value has increased 3.2 times over the same period.”
