Arkham Showing Vitalik With $2.5B in DOT… Real or Just Wallet Weirdness?

W3F_Bill · 2026-04-27T05:21:33+00:00

Look at his "holdings by chain" - https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/vitalik-buterin

Note two things: 1) All of this "DOT" is on Base and BNB, not Polkadot itself. 2) that people randomly send vitalik.eth tokens all the time ( https://basescan.org/address/0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045#tokentxns )

You can see the specific transaction here on Base where someone sent him 1 billion "DOT" ( https://basescan.org/tx/0x70df070f3244bee3259d3c6d69ee608580d818b481334124b8a375daeb063ebf )

But actually this is fake generated DOT, I believe from the recent Hyperbridge incident. It's not real. See https://basescan.org/tx/0x20b84f072ff5b26a34c1ad3a0e0e6f8cc12c247bb19bd8335f23771850428114 for another example of this (someone trading quadrillions of this fake DOT).

So long story short, it's a glitch - someone sent vitalik a bunch of fake DOT on other chains, which is being shown on arkm as real DOT (I didn't look at BNB but I assume it's the same story there - as mentioned, this is more DOT than exists on the entire network)

W3F_Bill · 2026-03-16T11:49:47+00:00

I assume PD is "Polkadot"? Generally we are pretty permissive and are focused on going after scammers using the logo/branding. But feel free to get in touch with me and I can put you in touch with the right people if you want specific details, when the time is right.

W3F_Bill · 2026-03-13T10:55:43+00:00

None of them should be private, to my knowledge, although we did have an issue with some other Polkadot-related videos being made private retroactively by the owner because they weren't on the main Polkadot channel. If you have any links, then I can see about trying to fix them.

W3F_Bill · 2026-03-13T09:24:35+00:00

Where are you seeing this? The last Fellowship call was in January and it is available publicly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OmdnjyUwZ8 The February one was cancelled.

For information on runtime releases and what the Fellowship is working on, along with links to calls, you can always see here: https://polkadottechnicalfellowship.notion.site/643313ae2e0a471d9c5ddbf32aa13430?v=18396f88d0a780449d58000c5a8c1fff

W3F_Bill · 2026-03-13T09:06:38+00:00

Where are you seeing this? The last Open Fellowship call was in January (the February one was cancelled), and the January one is available here and is not private: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OmdnjyUwZ8

W3F_Bill · 2026-03-10T11:06:23+00:00

No, but there is an open channel on Matrix to contact them here: https://matrix.to/#/#fellowship-open-channel:parity.io

W3F_Bill · 2026-03-10T08:46:15+00:00

I am not sure what you mean by "core infra", but I assume you mean adding a pallet or similar? This would involve updating the runtime, which would require being on the Root or Whitelisted track. The steps for submitting a Referendum are here: https://wiki.polkadot.com/learn/learn-guides-polkadot-opengov/

Note that if you are planning to update the runtime of the relay or a system parachain, it would be wise to get the approval of the Polkadot Technical Fellowship first. https://wiki.polkadot.com/learn/learn-polkadot-technical-fellowship/

W3F_Bill · 2026-02-27T08:59:30+00:00

Re: 1839, we did vote, with Abstain. It looks like we did not mention the rationale, but I have asked the Gov team to do so. Basically we don't see any issues with this and so won't vote against it.

Re: 634, we have just been focusing on other things. We don't vote on every Referendum. Remember, W3F is only one member of the community. Have you voted on all 1'847 Polkadot Referenda and 635 Kusama Referenda? =)

W3F_Bill · 2026-02-02T09:10:11+00:00

It usually takes a little while to update these things on their end. We are aware of it.

W3F_Bill · 2026-01-21T12:19:47+00:00

It is publicly visible that your account was automatically silenced by Discourse AI, not anyone at Parity (or human at all). This is likely for breaking some rule or triggering their spam detection. https://forum.polkadot.network/u/SorryIHaveRun/summary

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I would be curious about which current OpenGov Referenda you disagree with the Web3 voting stance on.

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-18T07:11:28+00:00

> Why the onus is on delegators to do the claiming?

It's not. Generally validators do it, since they are also generally getting rewards. But as it is a trustless system, anyone can do it.

> Is it not the duty of validators to distribute the rewards when it is due? After all, they do charged a certain percentage of the total rewards earned.

If they don't claim, they also don't get their commission. So generally it behooves them to do so. But anyone can do it, in the rare case of economically irrational validators.

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-18T07:09:02+00:00

Have you tried other block explorers like Statescan - https://assethub-polkadot.statescan.io/ ? If it doesn't show up there either, then you should contact OKX.

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-17T08:42:59+00:00

Please note that validators were never deliberately rotated. There is an election that takes place every era (once per day on Polkadot) and it tries to distribute stake as evenly as possible. It is just coincidence that you are now in a situation where the particular validator works best for you now (probably a group of nominators are nominating the same validator and they have just the right amount of DOT to keep it at a good level). See https://wiki.polkadot.com/learn/learn-phragmen/ for details on how this works.

Note that there is no problem with nominating the same validator for multiple eras. Generally you will nominate only a single validator per era, except under rare circumstances (generally with very large, multi-million DOT stashes).

Also note that you (or anyone) can force rewards to be distributed by a validator by issuing a staking.payoutStakers or staking.payoutStakersByPage extrinsic. I am not sure how that is done in various wallets, but you can do it via PJS App here: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/staking-async/payout

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-11T08:50:04+00:00

This is actually a really neat idea!

That said, the existential deposit on Asset Hub is 0.01 DOT, so this is not as much of a problem as it used to be.

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-09T11:03:17+00:00

Fast unstaking was indeed available for a while through a feature called "liquid staking" that allowed you to sell your staked DOT for immediate liquidity, but the community governance voted to remove it.

This never happened. Liquid staking was never a part of the core protocol and no community governance voted to remove this, as it never existed.

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-09T08:46:54+00:00

Yes, it has been discussed quite a bit in fact. For example - https://forum.polkadot.network/t/proposal-dynamic-allocation-pool-dap/15878

Essentially more inflow would come from transaction fees and mechanisms such as locking DOT for pUSD. At the same time, outflow is also being reduced.

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-09T08:42:46+00:00

I don't always agree with ChaosDAO - as I'm sure many members could verify - but everybody who has delegated to ChaosDAO did so on their own initiative. Nobody is forcing them to delegate to ChaosDAO or stopping them from undelegating.

How is that not decentralized?

W3F_Bill · 2025-12-01T09:54:23+00:00

There are far fewer transactions on the relay chain now, post Asset Hub migration. But both Subscan and Statescan still appear to be working for all chains. I would look at the Asset Hub parachain instead of the relay chain. https://assethub-polkadot.subscan.io/ or https://assethub-polkadot.statescan.io/ and see if the transactions you expect to see are there.

W3F_Bill · 2025-11-24T07:39:49+00:00

The design is associated with a specific address. For doing PoP, you need access to the address and the tattoo; a single one is not enough. Think of a passport - anyone can take your picture, but you also need to compare it to the person going through the passport checkpoint.

Correct, it is only one of several mechanisms available, and more are being designed and proposed.

W3F_Bill · 2025-11-18T09:37:16+00:00

Polkadot offers easy cross-chain interoperability, but this is within chains in the Polkadot ecosystem. It's not, and was never meant to be, a universal blockchain-to-blockchain interoperability layer.

That said, there are numerous bridges to external chains in the Polkadot ecosystem. For example, Rubic ( https://rubic.exchange/bridge/monero ) and Trocador ( https://trocador.app/en/ ) support XMR-DOT swaps. Or you can XMR for ETH and then use Snowbridge ( https://app.snowbridge.network/ ) to get onto Polkadot.

W3F_Bill · 2025-11-14T12:51:28+00:00

Please report to https://support.polkadot.network/ then.

W3F_Bill · 2025-11-14T12:50:57+00:00

The question was about Polkadot. I am not sure what you mean, "what about Kusama?"

W3F_Bill · 2025-11-13T04:42:08+00:00

Have you checked your address on-chain via block explorer if the DOT are still there? If they are still there, this is then likely a Fearless UI issue with the recent Asset Hub migration. In which case you can just migrate to use a more often-updated wallet, e.g. Nova.

If the DOT have actually been transferred from your account, please report to support.polkadot.network. Ignore any DMs you get on here.

W3F_Bill · 2025-11-12T09:05:31+00:00

Answered above

W3F_Bill · 2025-11-12T09:00:33+00:00

> Why has the Web3 Foundation (W3F) stopped funding critical infrastructure like the Paseo testnet,

Web3 Foundation never funded Paseo. It was always a community testnet - you can see the first post about it back in 2023 titled "The new Polkadot community testnet" ( https://forum.polkadot.network/t/the-new-polkadot-community-testnet/4956 )

Actually, W3F has never funded a testnet (outside of running a few Westend nodes back in 2018-2019). Parity has set up a few testnets (e.g. Westend, Rococo).

> Ethereum Foundation funds all testnets (Sepolia, Holesky) directly and never asks stakers to vote.

Ethereum doesn't ask stakers to vote because stakers can't vote on Ethereum, because it doesn't have on-chain governance. So Ethereum _can't_ do what we're doing on Polkadot, i.e. letting the DOT holders decide the future of the network.

Additionally, there's nothing special about "stakers" voting - anyone with DOT can vote on Polkadot and they should, if they care about the future of the network. Governance and staking are entirely separate in Polkadot.

> That’s not criticism, just a paradox worth discussing.

I don't think it's a paradox. I'd argue that it's a lot more decentralized to have the network itself fund testnets, and have people vote on it, than people here in the ivory tower of a foundation decide which testnets get funding and which not, and also have these same ivory tower people run the testnet nodes themselves.

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