Polkassembly was a website for reading, discussing and voting on the on-chain referenda of Polkadot and Kusama, run from 2020 to 2026 by a company, Premiurly, and paid for through a series of treasury proposals to the networks it served. Polkadot decides runtime upgrades and treasury spending by token-holder referendum, and the referendum itself carries only a call and a vote tally; Polkassembly attached a title, a description, a comment thread and a voting button to each one. In March 2026 Polkadot token holders rejected its request for wind-down funding, and the team closed the business and turned the site into a read-only archive. The votes it carried remain on-chain; the discussion it hosted remains readable only as long as the archive runs. See DAO tooling discontinuity for the general pattern.

What it did

An on-chain referendum on a Substrate chain is a privileged call, a track, deposits and a running tally. Polkassembly indexed each new proposal from chain data and opened a post for it, which only the proposer could edit, so the author could write the case the call itself does not carry. Anyone could comment, and holders could vote directly from the website using a browser extension wallet. Optional email gave account recovery and notifications when a new proposal appeared on-chain.

The feature set followed Polkadot's governance. After OpenGov replaced the Council in 2023, the app showed each referendum by track, split a vote into the voter's own and delegated weight, and recorded a voter's history and stated reasons, according to the work plan in referendum 183; the team's archive note adds per-track conviction delegation dashboards and Technical Fellowship tooling. The same plan describes AI summaries of proposals and moderation of Polkassembly threads by the Polkadot and Kusama forum moderators. Polkassembly also became an on-chain identity registrar: Polkadot referendum 23, on the General Admin track, added its account as a registrar on 19 July 2023, and Kusama referendum 327, submitted in December 2023, did the same. The 2025 work plan in referendum 1463 lists identity setup for multisig and proxy accounts, proposal creation across asset types and tracks, and support for more wallets.

It was not limited to the relay chains. The network list in its codebase names 64 Substrate networks, test networks included, among them Moonbeam, Astar, Centrifuge, HydraDX, KILT and Polymesh, and the team's own record claims 50+ networks and 250,000+ participants. Subdomains such as moonbeam.polkassembly.io and astar.polkassembly.io still answered on 2 October 2026. The same company built PolkaSafe, a multisig app for Polkadot treasuries, which it lists alongside Polkassembly.

From Parity to Premiurly

Polkassembly started inside Parity Technologies, the company that wrote the Polkadot client: the paritytech/polkassembly repository has its first commit on 21 October 2019, and Nikhil Ranjan, later Polkassembly's CTO, was committing to it by December 2019. Premiurly, registered as Premiurly OÜ in Tallinn and describing itself as building governance tools for Substrate chains, forked the repository in July 2020 and ran the product from then on. Parity archived its copy in September 2021, noting in the final commit that Premiurly had forked the code rather than taking a transfer.

The code moved again in March 2023 to the polkassembly GitHub organisation, and a rewrite, polkassembly-v2, began in August 2024. The team's impact page names Jaskirat Singh (CEO) and Nikhil Ranjan (CTO) as founders and says a 2022 strategic round included Gavin Wood, the Polkadot co-founder; the page gives no amount.

Funded by the treasury it served

Polkassembly had no token. It paid for development and hosting through requests to the treasuries of the networks it served, and from 2021 called the arrangement a "social contract": a recurring maintenance request that alternated between the Polkadot and Kusama treasuries, quarterly at first, as treasury proposal 53 explains, then half-yearly from 2023 and annual from 2024. Referendum 483 gives the reason for the annual cycle: stable funding to keep a development team together between requests. The table lists the requests that the treasuries' own records file under Polkassembly; outcomes for OpenGov referenda are the conviction-weighted share of aye votes in the final tally.

Under the original governance model each treasury proposal was approved by a Council motion, and the five Polkadot motions in the table passed 8–0. Under OpenGov each request went to a public referendum on a spender track sized to the amount, and on Polkadot the aye share fell with each request from late 2023 on, as the outcome column shows. That arrangement matches what the wiki describes for DAO service providers rather than for ordinary tooling: every payment went through a public vote, and each renewal date was known in advance.

Closure and the archive

On 10 February 2026 Polkassembly submitted referendum 1839, "Continuity Settlement & Transition Proposal", on the Medium Spender track. It asked for money to settle a discounted part of unpaid contributor pay for work already delivered and to cover the legal and administrative cost of ending the company's current operating phase. Commenters asked for an itemised list of every earlier payment and argued that wallets such as Nova Wallet and SubWallet now handled voting. The referendum was rejected on 10 March 2026 with about 14.2m DOT of conviction-weighted nay against 26,430 aye.

Two weeks later the team shipped an archive banner and footer (24 March 2026) and an impact page summarising six years of operation. The README added on the same release says the business is closed, the code stays public, and the governance record would stay readable at polkadot.polkassembly.io through 31 May 2026. The site outlived that date. On 18 July 2026 Nikhil Ranjan pushed two commits to the v1 app that replaced its Redis cache with a Firestore store and an in-memory cache and removed decommissioned Subsquid indexer endpoints, and on 2 October 2026 polkadot.polkassembly.io still listed current referenda, up to number 1953, under an "Archived 2026" footer. Nothing on the site states a new end date.

The Governance Apps page of the Polkadot wiki gave Polkassembly its first and longest entry until a commit on 15 September 2026 removed it; the live page lists only SubSquare and the Delegation Dashboard.

What survives follows the split on the discontinuity page. Every referendum, vote and treasury payment is on-chain and readable from any front end, so the closure cost the networks an interface. The proposal descriptions and comment threads were stored by Polkassembly, and they stay readable only while the archive runs.

Polkassembly and SubSquare

SubSquare, built by OpenSquare, did the same job over the same chain data: it indexes referenda, treasury proposals and bounties on Polkadot, Kusama and other Substrate chains, attaches discussion, and lets a holder vote. The two ran side by side for most of OpenGov, and a holder could vote on either, since the vote is a transaction to the chain rather than to the site. SubSquare is funded the same way: referendum 1225 paid 469,845 USDT in November 2024 for twelve months of maintenance, retroactively, with 72% aye, and referendum 1612 paid 444,124 USDC in July 2025. Its repository was last pushed on 30 September 2026 (GitHub API, read 2 October 2026), and it is the governance app the Polkadot wiki now lists.

Both teams depended on continued treasury approval, and in 2026 the treasury stopped approving Polkassembly. Because OpenGov is fully on-chain and any client can read and submit to it, the network did not need to migrate anything when Polkassembly stopped; holders switched sites.

How Caper approaches this

In OpenGov the binding vote is on-chain and the deliberation around it was hosted by a company. A caper moves part of that deliberation into the decision itself: a proposal is a slate of options stored in the contract, one of which can be a debate position that is ranked with the rest and can win outright without executing anything, and settling the vote is permissionless work any account can do, so finishing a decision does not depend on one operator. Polkassembly did something a ranked slate cannot: it held the free-form reasoning, author-edited descriptions and identity-linked replies that explain why an option was on the slate, and Polkadot's openness to competing front ends meant another client could take over the day it stopped. A caper's ballot records which position won, not the free-form argument behind it, so that part of its record depends on where its members choose to talk.

References

• Polkassembly – polkassembly-v2 README, archive note · impact page · polkassembly.io (read 2 Oct 2026)
• Polkassembly – polkadot.polkassembly.io (archive, read 2 Oct 2026) · networkConstants.ts · archive rollout commit, 24 Mar 2026 · cache replacement commit, 18 Jul 2026
• Parity Technologies – paritytech/polkassembly · final commit pointing to Premiurly's fork, Sep 2021
• Premiurly – Premiurly/polkassembly · premiurly.in
• Polkadot treasury – treasury proposals 53, 83, 99, 188, 240; referenda 23, 183, 483, 1463, 1839 (via SubSquare)
• Kusama treasury – treasury proposals 116, 155; referenda 75, 200, 327 (via SubSquare)
• SubSquare – subsquare.io · opensquare-network/subsquare · referenda 1225, 1612
• Web3 Foundation – Polkadot wiki, Governance Apps · the page as of June 2025 · page history