A Kusama contract lets several accounts share a 666.67 KSM decision deposit
Victoria Shinder2 min readA Kusama Wish for Change referendum needs a 666.67 KSM decision deposit before it can go to a vote, and governance takes that deposit from a single account. In a forum post on 30 October, Birdbrain, which describes itself as a Decent initiative, said a proposal can have support and still time out because nobody can carry the whole amount, and announced a contract that lets people and groups share it.
Each pool is fixed to one referendum and its exact deposit, with no owner, admin key or upgrade path. Contributors pay from their own accounts and can withdraw while the pool is open. The payment that fills the pool tries to place the deposit in the same transaction; if placement fails, anyone can retry. After the referendum ends, anyone can reclaim the deposit and trigger payouts, though no automated watcher runs yet. Approved, rejected, cancelled and timed-out referenda allow a refund; killed ones do not.
The first pool is live with real KSM for Wish for Change 676. It needs 666.66666666 KSM with a 5 KSM minimum, and funding closes on 3 November at 12:00 UTC, ahead of the referendum's estimated timeout that evening. The authors state plainly that the contract is experimental and has not had an independent review, and that they deployed before one to leave time before 676 times out. A rehearsal on the Paseo testnet mirrors the proposal byte for byte with free test tokens; the Kusama fork suite passed 88 checks, which the authors say do not replace public-network evidence. They ask for review of the XCM encoding, the balance checks and the payout handling.
What it means
The idea removes a real bottleneck: support for a referendum should not depend on one wallet large enough to post the deposit. The way it was launched cuts the other way. Contributors are asked to lock real KSM in an unreviewed contract against a deadline, and the authors themselves say the public-network refund is not yet proven. Their own advice, to try the Paseo pool and read the code first, is the right order.