Jonas

On Thursday, 24 April 2025
Hello
I am jonas from the web3 foundation. I am seeking to open a channel of communication to you. I want to make very clear that I am not here to speak on behalf of W3F, or even being asked by them to speak to you. I am reaching out purely personally  as a community member of Polkadot. I am a bit late to the discussion, as I was off for holidays. I am catching up and understand that you are requesting $150k for the core on Polkadot. I can understand your perspective that this is a reasonable price given the circumstances. From a purely economic perspective, it makes sense, but I am afraid that many people will see this as not correct from the ethical perspective. This might make it more easy for a lot of people that generally sympathize with you to approve the upcoming referendum that fixes the situation in some way. Let's not discuss whether this is the right or wrong direction for Polkadot, because voters will decide that.

What I am reaching out to you is to open a communication in the case that the referendum is winning and your strategy might yield you no payout. It might then be worth for you to lower your price and make a trade before the new cores are allocated.

Thanks
jonas

...

On Thursday, 24 April 2025
Hello Jonas,
Thank you for contacting us. We want to make it clear that the request of USD 150,000 was part of our negotiation strategy after receiving a rather low offer for Polkadot cores that we deem to be far below their fair value.

We are in contact with Bastian regarding this issue. We received a counteroffer of 3,000 DOT per core, which is close to what we believe is a fair price.

During our negotiations with Bastian, we said multiple times that the Polkadot Technical Fellowship can, of course, assign cores to these chains, but that would be a rather bad mistake to make.

We are sad to see that this was the immediate path that was taken as opposed to negotiating the price down, but we are happy to see that it was eventually realized that this, as our name suggests, is a negotiation.