Since its inception in mid-2024, the Decentralized Voices (DV) program’s goal has been to ensure that Polkadot and Kusama governance amplifies the voices of not just the token holders but also the people who actually show up, think through the hard questions, and are willing to be held accountable.
Over time, DV evolved past being a simple delegation program and went through multiple phases of experimentation, iteration, guardrails, and a real cultural shift toward more explicit reasoning and better norms that were challenging yet authentic. People voted. They disagreed. They challenged each other’s reasoning. Sometimes it was awkward. Sometimes it was uncomfortable. Most of the time, it was exactly what governance should look like.
Today, we’re sharing that we will not be running a new cohort of Decentralized Voices after cohort 5 concludes.
It is important to highlight that our decision is not made because of a problem with the DV program. It is definitely not a reflection on the people involved. Instead, our decision reflects a choice about where we focus next. Polkadot is entering a new phase; more product-driven, more execution-heavy, and increasingly centred around primitives like Proof of Personhood and real-world usability. That’s why W3F will be narrowing its focus and reallocating time and operational capacity toward the initiatives we believe are most critical right now.
It’s possible that the DV program could return in the future, but no matter what, its impact will not disappear. … The ecosystem learned from this program, and evolved. That knowledge and evolution will not disappear just because the program ends.
To everyone who participated, applied, debated, and pushed back — thank you. You made this experience matter even more, and that made all the difference. You asked the hard questions. You pushed governance to be sharper, more honest, more real. You showed up when you didn’t have to.
We’re carrying this forward. The spirit of it, the lessons from it & the expectation that governance should be something people actually engage with rather than something that happens to them, that stays. That becomes how we think about the next thing.
Decentralized Voices: Closing This Chapter & Carrying the Lessons Forward was originally published in Web3 Foundation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
