With great joy and a warm heart, I hereby announce that Helixstreet, a decentralized validator residing in Basel, has dutifully fulfilled his civic duty by casting his vote, and the votes entrusted to him, in favor of this great proposal.

The Polkadot Blockchain Academy has cemented itself as a staple of high quality developer education and onboarding for students around the world.

We can already feel the positive impacts in the ecosystem from the students who have graduated. Students from the academy are launching new projects, using word of mouth to bring other smart minds into our ecosystem, and using the information they learned to educate others in the same way we have educated them.

Obviously I am biased in my view of the PBA, as I am one of the instructors and course developers for the program, but testimonials from students should make it clear what a positive impact this program is.

In case there are any new eyes to this proposal who are questioning the amount of spend here, I want to make clear how much of a great investment this program is for the Polkadot community.

I conservatively estimate that a student that completes the PBA has experiences the equivalent onboarding as 6 months in a high quality Polkadot ecosystem dev team. Assuming those 6 months are worth around $50,000 of salary, and that we educate around 90 students each academy, we are bringing to Polkadot at least $4.5M of value in just raw education time, not even counting the network effects and tangible outcomes that result at the end of the program.

If anything, I would push that the academy asks for more funds to pay for instructors to continue to build and keep up to date high quality content for the latest in Polkadot, and for different kinds of users, for example those who need more introductory level material into Polkadot, or those who need to delve deep into specific technical parts of the Polkadot SDK.