PSEUDONYM: generative portraits of Kusama and Polkadot accounts (retroactive + Phase 1)
PSEUDONYM turns any Kusama or Polkadot address into a generative portrait, using only public on-chain data. This referendum funds the working version (retroactive) and Phase 1: a public experiment in whether people want to see, keep or hide their on-chain portrait.
Discussion since 7 October: Polkadot Forum · Subsquare #56
Live work: https://arkain.vercel.app · Archive: https://arkain.vercel.app/archive
Request
- Total: 3,333 KSM (Medium Spender limit)
- Budget: 14,000 USD (4,000 retroactive + 10,000 Phase 1). At 4.17 USD/KSM (CoinGecko, 20 October 2026) this would be 3,357 KSM, so the request is capped at 3,333 KSM (≈ 13,899 USD) and the difference is taken from the contingency line.
- Beneficiary (Kusama Asset Hub): EMsUTbNpFuTUwa6ybNZLAtA9sT3Fi6PSPP2gF9BWFbHfyad
- Duration: 26 weeks
Payouts (scheduled treasury spends; future payouts can be voided by governance)
| # | When | KSM |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | On enactment | 1,785.5357 |
| 2 | ~Week 10 (relay block 36,994,453, ≈ mid-January 2027) | 714.2143 |
| 3 | ~Week 22 (relay block 38,204,053, ≈ mid-April 2027) | 833.25 |
Phase 1 deliverables
- Wallet ownership via message signing (Polkadot.js, Talisman, SubWallet, Nova)
- Claim or veil: owners can mint a snapshot of their portrait on Kusama Asset Hub (no fee, no sale), or hide it from the public archive
- Verified reflections
- Public report on the results
- Code under MIT, artwork under CC BY
How Phase 1 will be judged
- Public counter and archive numbers reported at weeks 10 and 22, alongside the scheduled payouts
- A written report at week 26: portraits generated, claims, veils, reflections, and what did not work
- If adoption stays low, the report will say so plainly, and no follow-up proposal will be made without new evidence
Current state (honest numbers): 23 portraits generated since 16 October 2026 (the counter counts portraits, not people, and includes one of my own test renders). The archive includes my own portrait.
Why KSM: the Kusama treasury currently holds only a negligible amount of DOT, so the request is denominated in KSM.
Why Kusama: portraits read both Kusama and Polkadot activity, because many identities span both networks, but the experiment itself (claim or veil, snapshot mints, public archive) runs on Kusama Asset Hub.
Comments (1)
Polkassembly is now a read-only archive. Commenting is disabled.
Requested
Proposal Failed
Hey, I think something is wrong on your vercel website, the site takes extreme amount of cpu, is this due to smoldot? please optimize
@Rust Syndicate
Hello.
First of all, thank you for supporting this project. I am doing my utmost to ensure that art gains visibility within society.
Regarding the point you raised: the issue stems from the volume of data and the fact that the rendering engine is built using WebGL. I am gradually discovering the right approach to optimize it, and I will certainly be working on that.
Thanks again.