some more context on why polkadot losing its relevance, becoming fully isolated today, and losing the market was not mainly caused by treasury spend unlike people think so
when polkadot started funding everything, the leadership was already decreasing in the eco
some early OGs left, migrated, or flopped, it was already dropping out of the top 20, and its token value shrank
since the treasury fully correlated to the value of DOT at that time, it went from high 9 digits to mid-low 9 digits
parity/w3f then positioned and announced that since they don’t want to lead or couldn’t steer the ship on marcom and BD, they were inviting the community to figure it out by using the treasury and finding the best deals by cutting each other’s margins through competition, using its highly sophisticated onchain governance tool: OpenGov, arguably polkadot’s best niche user-end product
so the argument that persuaded the majority of stakeholders at that time was:
either DOT is on the trajectory of a death spiral, and being passive or doing nothing will depreciate the token value anyway so the treasury will be worth nothing regardless,
so you at least spend it, and it became the FAFO way to have a chance: renting some attention, at least on the existing working products (parachains/apps), and getting some mindshare among normies in case one day they want to buy some coins
things didn’t go as expected
in the same way that persistent fragmentation hurts the modular/rollup chain the most, this also led to a lack of coherence across all efforts and introduced a game of thrones in the social layer, with everyone fighting each other for funding and people building their social brand around the dramas
since the treasury is now closed to such funding, which showed w3f’s hand of control over decision-making, today you can slowly observe the attacks directed toward w3f/parity, because there is no one else left to scapegoat or to explain what went wrong