For those who still don’t understand Polkadot’s economic model:

Most blockchains generate revenue through transaction fees paid by users. Polkadot works differently. Its fees are among the lowest in the crypto ecosystem, and the goal is for them to eventually trend toward zero.

Instead, Polkadot is developing an innovative economic model based on Coretime, which is the platform’s main product.

🧠 What is Coretime?
Rather than charging for each transaction, Polkadot charges for network usage time. Projects pay to reserve access slots to network resources—similar to renting a server or a virtual machine in the cloud.

This system, still in its early stages, is built on two markets:

• A primary market managed by Polkadot itself.
• A secondary market open to individuals, where Coretime slots can be bought, resold, or traded.

📉 A Controversial Start
The secondary market doesn’t directly generate revenue for the ecosystem; trades mostly benefit individual participants. However, it was created to help establish a market value for Coretime.

At one point, Coretime was trading at around €45—a surprisingly low price for a network like Polkadot, whose market cap exceeds €6 billion.

In response, an entity (whose identity remains unofficial) decided to buy up large amounts of Coretime, artificially pushing the price up. The stated goal: to protect investors by giving the product a more credible perceived value.

Why this move?

In the current system, a parachain that acquires a Core on the primary market becomes its priority owner. This gives it the ability to automatically renew the Core each month without offering it back to the market, simply by accepting a 10% price increase over the previous month.

In other words, as long as the parachain agrees to this modest monthly increase, it can maintain exclusive access to the Core without competition.

With starting prices around 9 DOT per Coretime, this mechanism allowed parachains to retain access at a very low cost. As a result, it would have taken thousands of years for Polkadot to generate any meaningful revenue from this model making it difficult to attract serious institutional or retail investors.

Obviously, all of this seems perfectly orchestrated to me. The ecosystem is full of idealists disconnected from economic and financial realities, calling for coretime to become a public good. Many of them don’t own and likely will never own any DOT, yet they are generously paid in DOT, which they promptly sell as soon as they receive their “salary.”

They believe they’re building a wonderful Web3 with magical money, without realizing that it’s US, the investors, who are funding this dream. We are constantly diluted — we, the small wallets. Always remember that every approved referendum is thanks to us it's our money.

The goal of this initiative is, ultimately, to restore DOT’s value and put an end to this cycle of underperformance.
Five years ago, BTC was worth €10,000 and DOT was €4. Today, BTC is at €110,000… and DOT is still €4.

21:43 UTC. 10/06/2025

This message was posted at 9:43 PM on the Polkadot forum.An organization has monopolized a portion of the available cores on Kusama and Polkadot. I am forwarding the message to you. https://forum.polkadot.network/t/april-2025-coretime-purchase/12526/51

" coretimenegotiation

Hello everyone,

We recently allowed one of our Polkadot core slots to expire without renewal to observe market demand under natural conditions. Almost immediately, the core was acquired for approximately 922 DOT, showing that our thesis that cores are a valuable resource that was undervalued was correct. This is a reminder that those in the ecosystem who previously convinced DOT holders that cores were valueless were wrong.

As of today, we hold 73 out of 94 Kusama cores and 9 out of 22 Polkadot cores.

Based on on-chain data, we assess that the buyer was Parity Technologies. We would like to remind Parity Technologies that our inbox is always open if they would like to purchase additional cores from us, which will be ultimately cheaper in the long run. We are surprised that Parity has not suggested the use of an escrow account or similar in their negotiations.

To Parity or any other parties, always feel free to email us here regarding the purchase of Polkadot or Kusama cores: coretimenegotiation@proton.me

This shows that Parity’s initial offer of 200 DOT was, as we stated, a low-ball offer, which then resulted in our high-ball offer. The core, which was purchased recently, has a renewal price of ~922 DOT, which is far greater than our cores that renew at ~9 DOT. In fact, in just 4 months, it would have been better to purchase one or more of our 9 DOT cores, without trying to negotiate the initial purchase price lower.

Analysis of the relevant blocks indicates that the purchasing account submitted multiple tip transactions—totaling roughly 386 DOT—suggesting limited familiarity with the coretime mechanism. This activity highlights persistent flaws in the system’s design and the need for continued refinement.

https: //coretime- polkadot .subscan.io/extrinsic/1941750-2 - 47 DOT tip

This account was heavily funded to attempt to obfuscate the amount of DOT that would be tipped. Unfortunately, the owner of these accounts wasted ~386 DOT in tips, which to remind everyone is more than the amount of DOT they offered for our core originally for Mythos, which we hope goes to show the extent of Parity, Web3 Foundation and the Polkadot Technical Fellowship’s mental gymnastics and dishonesty into the actual value of cores.

We would like to thank those from the community who reached out to us via email to express their gratitude for the actions we have undertaken, which seems to have spurred on a renewed vigor in the Polkadot Technical Fellowship, which the token holders pay, to fix fundamental issues with the coretime system. Token holders should always scrutinize the Polkadot Technical Fellowship, and the Polkadot Technical Fellowship should work for the benefit of token holders and ecosystem teams; otherwise, we would suggest that token holders vote NAY on any future salary payment referendums to that collective. We would also suggest that the community of DOT token holders actively review the salary claims from members of the Polkadot Technical Fellowship to ensure that fellows are not double or triple claiming for the same work they carry out under their work at Parity Technologies, Web3 Foundation, and treasury grants.

We still have people emailing us who wish to purchase cores; however, we do not believe these people understand how coretime works, and it is difficult to demonstrate the options these potential clients have, which we believe reinforces our original statement about the lack of documentation and complexity of the coretime mechanism. We remain open for offers and negotiation for our owned cores.