Using the Moonbeam Community Forum

Katherine
Moonbeam Network
Published in
8 min readOct 26, 2022

The Interim Treasury Program is a 6-month program that establishes a separate community Treasury Council to manage Treasury funds, a budget for Treasury spending, and a required discussion time to gather community feedback on possible future Treasury proposals.

When a community member has a new idea for a Treasury proposal, the first step they’ll need to take before submitting a formal on-chain proposal is to post their idea on the Moonbeam Community Forum. The proposer will collect feedback from community members and the Treasury Council for five days.

After five days of community engagement, the proposal can be submitted formally on-chain along with a proposal bond. The proposal bond on Moonbeam and Moonriver is 5% of the amount requested by the proposer, with a minimum amount and no upper limit. The minimum is 100 GLMR on Moonbeam and 1 MOVR on Moonriver, although these amounts may change in the future.

The proposal can then be converted to a Council motion or rejected by any member of the Treasury Council. If none of the Treasury Council members propose it as a motion, the bond stays locked and cannot be claimed back by the proposer.

Assuming the proposal was converted to a Council motion, the motion will then be subject to an on-chain vote. A majority of 3/5th of the Treasury Council is required to pass the motion. On the other hand, the threshold for rejecting a proposal is at least 1/2 of the Treasury Council. If the proposal passes, the funds are disbursed from the Treasury after the current spending period has passed and sent to the beneficiary address. If the proposal is rejected, the proposal bond is burned.

For more information on the Treasury proposal process, please visit the Treasury page of the Moonbeam documentation site.

The happy path for a Treasury proposal is depicted in the following diagram.

The Moonbeam Discussion Forum will be used throughout the entire submission process of Treasury proposals. As proposals progress through the phases, community members can track the status from within the forum to see if it’s being reviewed, voted on, passed, rejected, and more.

Getting Started with the Discussion Forum

To access the Moonbeam Community Forum, you must be a member of the Moonbeam Discord community. You can then sign up to get access to the forum using your Discord credentials.

To sign up for the first time or log in for returning users, click Log in and then Log in with Discord.

You’ll be taken to Discord, and if you’re not already logged into Discord, you can log in. Then you’ll be prompted to authorize the Moonbeam Community Forum to access your Discord account. Upon authorization, you’ll be redirected to the Moonbeam Community Forum.

If you’re a first-time user, your account information will be pre-populated for you. All you’ll need to do is to click Create your account.

Once you’re logged in, you can explore the latest discussions, join conversations, and create your own discussion for a proposal idea you may have. Before posting or commenting for the first time, be sure to familiarize yourself with the FAQ to learn about the community guidelines.

Proposal Statuses

As you begin to explore the Moonbeam Discussion Forum, you’ll notice that proposals have a status tied to them. A proposal can have any of the following statuses depending on where the proposal is throughout the submission process:

- Idea — for new proposals seeking community feedback and Treasury Council input
Submitted — for proposals that have been submitted formally on-chain along with a bond and have not yet been reviewed by any members of the Treasury Council
Reviewing — for submitted proposals that are being reviewed by a member of the Treasury Council to determine whether the proposal should be converted to a Council motion
Voting — for a proposal that has been converted to a Council motion and is being voted on by the members of the Treasury Council
Passed — for a proposal that was voted on and approved by at least 3/5ths of the Treasury Council
Rejected — for a proposal that was voted on and rejected by at least 1/2 of the Treasury Council

Interacting with a Proposal

The Moonbeam Foundation Forum’s homepage has three discussion categories. For Treasury-related proposals, you can navigate the Governance category and click on Treasury Proposals.

From the Treasury Proposals forum, you can review the Treasury proposal template, the top, and the latest proposals and create new proposals.

When viewing proposals, you can click on All tags to filter proposals by different tags, for example, getting the proposals for Moonbeam, Moonriver, or Moonbase Alpha or by the status of the proposal. Proposals with a lock icon next to them indicate the proposal is no longer up for discussion.

If you click on a specific proposal, you can get more information about what the proposer is proposing. You can like, share, bookmark, pin, and set up notifications for the proposal. By default, you’ll be notified if someone mentions your name or replies to you. If you notice a problem with the proposal, you can flag it.

You can provide feedback on a proposal if it is labeled with the Idea tag and isn’t locked. Before commenting on the proposal, please take some time to review the community guidelines. To provide feedback on the proposal, you can take the following steps:

  1. Click on Reply
  2. Enter your thoughts into the text box
  3. When you’re ready to submit your comment, you can click on Reply again. Otherwise, you can click on Close, where you’ll be able to delete your comment or save a draft for later.

Creating a Proposal Discussion

The first step to creating a Treasury proposal is to post your idea on the Treasury Proposals forum. It is recommended to review the community guidelines before creating a post for the first time.

From the Treasury Proposals forum, you can get started by clicking on New Topic. The text editor will pop up at the bottom of the screen and will be pre-populated with the proposal template. You will need to adhere to the template structure when creating your proposal.

For the first couple of times, you create a post, the panel on the right side will appear to help you get started. You can close out of that panel to see a preview of your proposal as you write it.

When filling out your proposal idea, you’ll take the following steps:

  1. Enter a title for your proposal idea. The title should follow the format as seen in the body of the proposal: [Proposal: XX][Status: Idea] proposal title . For example, [Proposal: XX][Status: Idea] Sample of treasury proposal in Moonbase Alpha . The XX will be updated with the proposal ID once the proposal has been formally submitted on-chain
  2. Verify you’re adding your proposal to the correct category. All Treasury proposals should be in the GovernanceTreasury Proposals category
  3. For each of the sections, you can fill out the requested information for your Moonbeam Treasury Proposal (MBTP)
  4. Once you’ve reviewed your proposal and it looks good, you can submit it by clicking on Create Topic. If you need more time, you can click Close and then Save the draft for later. Or you can also discard your proposal by clicking Close, then Discard

Once you’ve submitted your proposal idea, it will be subject to approval by one of the forum moderators. The moderators will ensure the proposal follows the posting template and is associated with the right category and labels. Once posted, a notification will be sent to the Moonbeam Discord in the #🏛️governance-forum-updates channel to inform community members that they can engage in discussion. The proposal will be open for discussion for at least five days.

After five days, the proposer can submit the proposal on-chain. When creating the on-chain proposal, the proposer will need to specify the beneficiary and the requested amount and submit the proposal along with a proposal bond. The proposal bond will be 5% of the requested amount or the proposal bond minimum, whichever is greater. The proposal bond minimum is 100 GLMR on Moonbeam or 1 MOVR on Moonriver. You can create and submit the proposal via Polkadot.js Apps. Make sure that in Polkadot.js Apps, you are connected to the network you want to submit the proposal on.

Once submitted, the proposal will appear on Polkassembly. Then on Polkassembly, as the proposer, you can edit the description of the proposal to include a link to the proposal discussion on the Moonbeam Discussion Forum. You must be logged in to Polkassembly with the same account you used to submit the on-chain proposal. Make sure that in Polkassembly, you are connected to the network you’ve submitted the proposal on.

After submitting the on-chain proposal, you’ll need to edit your proposal on the Moonbeam Discussion Forum. You will need to update the title to include the proposal ID, and the status will need to be changed to Submitted. For example, [Proposal: 07][Submitted] Sample of treasury proposal in Moonbase Alpha . To update the title, you can click on the pencil icon next to the title and take the following steps:

  1. Update the title to include the proposal ID and change the status to Submitted
  2. Click on the check mark icon to save the changes

You’ll also need to add a comment to the proposal containing a link to the proposal on Polkassembly. To do so, you can take the following steps:

  1. Click on Reply
  2. Paste the link to the proposal on Polkassembly in the text box
  3. To submit it, click Reply

Once your comment has been posted, you’ll need to click on the Solution button to connect the on-chain proposal to the proposal discussion.

The solution button will turn green, and the body of the discussion post will automatically be updated to show the discussion has been solved via the on-chain proposal on Polkassembly.

As the proposal progresses through the remainder of the submission process, the Treasury Council will update the status of your proposal.

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