Decidimos
Decidimos
Decidimos is the app through which the department of Potosí decides how its share of the Uyuni lithium is spent — every community, per capita, down to the neighbourhood councils of Potosí city and Uyuni. It is live in closed beta with the 53 indigenous communities of the TIOC Nor Lípez, in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara. What it cannot do yet is pay anyone. We are bringing a proposal to OpenGov for US$190,000 to build the payment rail on Polkadot Hub — a gasless stablecoin wallet, a bulk payout engine, and merchant acceptance across a department of 861,292 people.
A lithium extraction and industrialisation plant at the Salar de Uyuni, in the lithium-rich zone of Nor Lípez. Sponsor: ACI Systems Alemania GmbH (ACISA), backed by the German Government through the Euler Hermes / UFK export credit coverage programme. Heitaria Swiss AG carries out the assessments, the community process and the Decidimos app for ACISA.
| Product | Lithium carbonate, battery grade, over 99.5% |
|---|---|
| Production | 80,000 t a year at steady state, after a 10,000 t a year pilot plant |
| Total cost | US$3,465 million |
| Ownership | Bolivia 51%, sponsor 49%. The sponsor funds 100% of the equity. |
| Life | 45 years modelled, 43 in production. Pilot from year 3, main plant from year 6. |
| Process | No evaporation ponds. Mechanical evaporation and crystallisation; the plant is a net producer of water. |
| Energy | 100% solar with batteries and solar thermal, off-grid. No diesel, no gas. |
| Jobs | 702 permanent, priority hiring for Río Grande and Nor Lípez |
| Water | 200,000 litres a day of drinking water guaranteed to Río Grande; surplus open to all 53 communities |
The 15% social mining initiative ring-fences 15% of the private shareholders' profits for the department of Potosí. It does not pass through the national treasury, and the sponsor does not allocate it: Potosí does, per capita, community by community. On top of it the project commits a fixed community programme and a fixed package for Río Grande, the host community. Decidimos is the tool through which the communities decide and follow all of it.
This is running software, not a concept. Communities propose, vote and follow the money in the app today, in Spanish, Quechua or Aymara. The Polkadot work starts on top of a live system, not a blank repository.
Today the whole initiative is spent on community works. The idea is to split it: one part keeps funding the works the communities vote for in Decidimos, the other part is paid directly, as dollar stablecoins on Polkadot Hub, to every verified resident of the department — the same amount per person, every month, into the wallet in the app they already use to decide and to check the accounts.
The governance platform is useful now, independent of when the plant produces. This award funds readiness and a funded pilot — nothing in the plan waits on lithium revenue.
DOT holders decide collectively how a shared treasury is spent, in public, on chain, with the record open to anyone. That is the same exercise 53 indigenous communities in Nor Lípez carry out over mining rent — except the voters are comunarios and the money buys water systems and school roofs. We are not explaining participatory budgeting to this community. We are asking it to fund the version that runs on the Altiplano.
Two engineering decisions worth stating. We build on REVM rather than PolkaVM: Ethereum compatibility on PVM is still described as early-stage, and a system moving other people's money should sit on the stable path, with PVM a later migration rather than a dependency. And the paymaster route that keeps a resident holding zero DOT is validated and published in phase 1 before anything depends on it, because account abstraction on Hub is newer than on long-established EVM chains.
| Phase | Deliverables | Result for a resident | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 months 1–2 | Wallet and gasless path. Smart account deployed per verified resident on Polkadot Hub, with a paymaster funded by Heitaria so the resident holds no DOT. Validation of the account-abstraction path on Hub, published openly including whatever does not work. Stablecoin balance visible in the existing app, on testnet. Public repository opened. | Opens the app and has a wallet, having bought nothing. | US$40,000 |
| 2 months 2–4 | Recovery and payout engine. Cédula-based account recovery with the community assembly as guardian, adversarially tested. Batched disperse contract driven by the assembly-ratified community rolls, with idempotency so a retry can never double-pay. Threat model and monitoring plan. | Loses the phone, goes to the assembly, gets the wallet back. | US$50,000 |
| 3 months 4–5 | Merchant acceptance and public verification. Merchant acceptance across the department. Public payout verification page. Daily governance digest anchored on chain. | Turns dollars into dollars in the nearest town, or spends them directly. | US$50,000 |
| 4 month 6 | Mainnet, pilot, audit and open source. Launch in the production app. Pilot disbursement to verified residents of Río Grande. Contracts audited before launch. Replication kit released open source: payout engine, paymaster pattern, recovery pattern. | Receives a real payment, and can prove it landed. | US$50,000 |
Where these figures come from. The initiative commits about US$104 million a year to the department, and all of it moves through the platform: the per-capita payments to residents, and the community works the assemblies vote for — contractors, suppliers and materials paid against milestones from the same rail, recorded in the same public ledger. That is the point of the system. Splitting the flow would break the audit trail. The payouts alone are 10.3 million transactions a year — 861,292 residents paid once a month. But a payment is not the end of the chain: the resident then spends it, at merchants on the same rail. At three to five transactions per payment, that is another 31 to 52 million, so 40 to 60 million a year in total. Works disbursements add fewer transactions of much larger size on top. Resting balances are one month of per-capita payments plus works budgets held between milestone disbursements — on the order of US$15 million at any given time, depending on the schedules the assemblies set.
Every payment is a stablecoin transfer on Polkadot — the monthly payout to a comunario and the instalment to the contractor building their water system alike. Every unspent balance, personal or communal, is stablecoin TVL sitting on Asset Hub. The money is there because a mine produced lithium and a contract obliges the operator to hand a share to the department — so it does not chase yield, it does not rotate to whichever chain is paying incentives this quarter, and it does not evaporate in a drawdown. This is the one kind of on-chain volume that is indifferent to the market.
On phasing, so nobody discovers it later: the plant runs a pilot from year 3 and the main plant from year 6, so the figures above are the steady state, not next quarter. The pilot in Río Grande is funded and runs inside this grant period, and the governance platform is generating real activity now.
We are bringing a Medium Spender referendum for US$190,000 — payable in stablecoins on Asset Hub or the DOT equivalent — to build the gasless wallet, the batched payout engine and merchant acceptance across the department, and to release the whole rail open source. In return Polkadot carries the entire initiative — about US$104 million a year of stablecoin settlement, US$4.4 billion over the life of the project, and tens of millions of transactions a year from a revenue stream that has nothing to do with the market. One technical question for the community before we post a preimage: is REVM on Polkadot Hub the right target for a payout system of this shape, or would you route it differently?