DAP Release on Polkadot

[sigurpol]

I'm posting early to propose a release for Polkadot RelayChain, AssetHub, BridgeHub, Collective, Contracts, Coretime and People to be enacted no later than March 14th, 2026.

The release aims to provide support for DAP Phase 1 deliverables, as described in the forum proposal and in the related WFC.

In particular, we aim to introduce the following changes around staking and issuance:

• Make nominators non-slashable and unbond-able in just two eras.
• Provide a way for staking accounts to allow another account (Staking Operator) to manage the validator operations.
  • To support nicely pure proxy case, we also enable operators to set session keys on AssetHub
• Enact the new hard pressure reduced issuance model (2.1B max supply).
• Stop treasury burns.
• Introduce the first version of the DAP system (hub and satellites) to collect burns/slashes into an issuance buffer account

We would like to base the release on Polkadot SDK stable2512. For this, there is already a PR in progress: #951 (thanks @pandres95 🙇 ) , now superseded by #1065 .

NOTE: this is meant to be a Polkadot only release , meaning that Kusama won't support DAP, nominator not slashable, fast unbonding etc. Still, everything should work seamlessly once/if we decide to release Kusama .

Hopefully we can co-coordinate the update and complete the necessary reviews, encompassing any additional features and fixes beyond DAP that we may decide to include. Feel free to add them below in the comments