Snowbridge Long Term Funding Proposal
- Treasury Proposal: Snowbridge Long Term Funding Proposal
- Beneficiary: Snowfork, 12UDxESUsqUZi5R5MpovTZLpAWZXPVWHJQkEprcT6MVdKh3A
- Requested amount: 2,448,000.00 based on EMA7 rate by Subscan
- Scope: Software development / Protocol development / 2 x Parachain launch / 2 x Ethereum Smart Contract Deployment / 2 x Parachain & smart contract maintenance and support
Summary: Snowbridge is a fully trustless, permissionless and general purpose bridge between Polkadot networks and Ethereum. The proposal covers a request for a 2 years worth of runway for all operations for the Snowbridge team (1 year retroactive, 1 year in future), with the goal to launch as a common-good bridge on Kusama and Polkadot. Our bridge will launch on the Bridge Hub, a common-good parachain that is being developed by Parity for Kusama and Polkadot. The proposal includes a motivation for supporting and promoting Snowbridge, a long term roadmap, governance and economic plans as well as incentives for successful execution, launch and long term running of the project.
Introduction
Snowfork is one of the longest running teams contributing to the Polkadot ecosystem. For over 2 years we've been working on Snowbridge, a fully trustless and permissionless bridge to Ethereum. We successfully built and completed an initial version of this bridge in September 2021, based on an Ethereum Proof of Work light client and on Parity's original BEEFY proof system funded by an initial grant from the Web3 Foundation.
This was never deployed to Polkadot due to it's dependency on these old BEEFY proofs, but since September 2021 Snowfork has continued to work on the project and has been self-funding the work. The bridge is now live on Rococo and upgraded to utilize Ethereum Proof of Stake proofs and Lean BEEFY MMR proofs (which are a new improvement that is now a core part of Substrate). We aim for both these new BEEFY proofs, and Snowbridge itself to be deployed to Kusama and Polkadot in the coming months.
Polkadot should be launching a Bridge Hub parachain in the coming months too, and Snowfork is expecting to be a key part of this hub.
Purpose
Polkadot already has a few live Ethereum bridges across various parachains, but these all compromise on Polkadot's security and trust model. Some are secured by trusted multi-sigs, some are secured by alternative insurance collateral, but none are secured by Polkadot and none of the Ethereum or ERC20 assets that exist in the Polkadot ecosystem today are secured by Polkadot's security and trust model.
We believe that without a fully trustless bridge that is secured by Polkadot itself, the security of the wider Polkadot ecosystem is put at risk and that Snowbridge's trustless design is essential to a healthy ecosystem that can support Ethereum-based assets. Similarly, trustless support for Polkadot assets across the Ethereum ecosystem will be a valuable boon for us all.
Snowbridge is also general-purpose, supporting arbitrary message passing and cross-chain smart contract calls, so any kinds of applications can be developed on top of it beyond plain asset transfer.
Additionally, as a common good service, longer term Snowbridge will be able to provide new value for the DOT token itself and generate an additional source of income for the treasury, or an additional lockup/burn mechanism for reducing the DOT supply.
Funding Proposal
This proposal is a funding request for 2 years worth of long term runway for all operations for the Snowbridge team (1 year retroactive, 1 year in future), with the goal to launch as a common-good bridge on the Bridge hub on both Polkadot and Kusama.
The full proposal has been uploaded to IPFS seperately, and includes extensive additional details related to further motivation for supporting and promoting Snowbridge, a long term roadmap, governance and economic plans as well as long term economic incentives for successful execution, launch and running of the project.
The full proposal with details is here: https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmfYGxQvyjVrgm9ajfzCysbuvLXdsRxP5R5HFjWcrj2yYY
We request that anyone looking to meaningfully contribute to this discussion also reads through this full proposal.
This initial funding requests will be created alongside a secondary request on Kusama (see here for the corresponding polkassembly post on Kusama):
- Requested USD on Polkadot: USD 2,448,000.00 based on EMA7 rate by Subscan.
- Requested USD on Kusama: USD 612,000.00 based on EMA7 rate by Subscan.
There is an additional request for ~USD 10,000,000.00 of long term economic incentives tied to key success milestones on the bridge, tied to measurable impact on the Polkadot ecosystem, although this payment will not be part of this first requested allocation.
We're planning to push out this proposal in the next month, and so are looking for early feedback and discussion from the community before going live with the proposal.
Summary of roadmap
Our roadmap includes the past year of work which has involved building a new proof-of-stake based light client, a new Lean Beefy Light client, a large amount of improvements to our testnet operations and tooling for production-grade operational support, various new features that improve the usability of the bridge including a permissionless, self-service channel and XCM auto-forwarding, as well as various contributions to Substrate, the Go-Substrate-RPC-Client and other improvements to the Snowbridge codebase.
It also includes our Rococo launch, which is now live, as well as our upcoming future year plans which include client SDK development, cross-chain governance and upgradability, additional security features like a circuit breaker and staged TVL limits/rollout, auditing and adversarial testing, infrastructure improvements, gas pricing improvements, permissionless app deployment and of course our launch on Kusama and Polkadot. It also includes on going maintenance and support for the bridge post-launch.
See the full funding proposal for more details.
Comments (20)
Comments (20)
EDIT OCTOBER 18th
I understand now after talking to Snowfork team and other experts who are knowledgeable about the situation that there is a fair bit of backstory here that also requires a deeper technical understanding, so i now believe the decision to choose candidates for a common good bridge hub product is appropriate, and should be made by those experts. there's no doubt there has always been a great need in the ecosystem for trustless bridges, and given that they take a long time to develop, it makes perfect sense that the decision to encourage Snowfork to pursue a solution for this critical piece of infrastructure was justified under the common good model.
i will be refraining for voting on the proposal and would like to apologize to the Snowfork team for the misunderstanding.
ORIGINAL POST IS BELOW
Megan from Darwinia here.
appreciate the overall vision and work on trustless bridging that you've completed already (and that also would up obsolete,) but in the year or so since your w3f grant funding ended and we stopped hearing about this project, Darwinia procured parachains and continued developing at great cost, and has already delivered the first trustless light client-based ETH2.0 <> Substrate bridge, with (XCM-compatible) routes rolling out to major parachains and between Polkadot and Kusama very likely before the end of 2022.
resurrecting a project under a common-good model that is still in the research and testing stage, and figuring out issues like 'how to be able to use the service without requiring non-native tokens?' while being funded by the Polkadot ecosystem as a direct competitor to other bridgehubs who have self-funded, had to compete in auctions and secure their own parachains, and already deployed working solutions, doesn't sound like a good use of resources to me.
i think the proposal is a year or more too late and, if approved, would be stepping on the toes of already established projects like Darwinia that are entirely self-funded and already provide a solution. it's also a sticky situation because who's going to want to develop in the Polkadot ecosystem knowing that their technology can be assimilated by Parity and deployed as common-good at any time, outside the need for them to actually compete?
i will be voting 'nay'
Dustin Lee here. I have since had a change of heart after learning more about what snow fork is and its future addition to this space. I do appreciate everything that is being done to build out of this ecosystem. There will be many bridges, and some of them commongood which is a great thing!! So going forward I see this as a important milestone for the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem !!! Previous response: Snowfork project was left behind quite a bit ago when we really needed it. Since the inception of beefy , teams have been waiting to implement the usage but have gone the centralized bridge route. Projects such as Darwinia and or Composable have been focusing on building a bridge hub in the same sense compared to this project has but with community in mind . The biggest aspect is these projects have spent the time to self fund, acquire parachains, partake in community activities in the core of dotsama. This completely erodes all those who decide to want to build niche projects that want to add value to substrate while on the other hand Parity on the fly can just build their own inhouse projects that discredits those who have been building. Lets take a step back and give recognition. We are all building for the same cause in mind a multichain architecture and security from the ground up.
EDIT OCTOBER 18th
I understand now after talking to Snowfork team and other experts who are knowledgeable about the situation that there is a fair bit of backstory here that also requires a deeper technical understanding, so i now believe the decision to choose candidates for a common good bridge hub product is appropriate, and should be made by those experts. there's no doubt there has always been a great need in the ecosystem for trustless bridges, and given that they take a long time to develop, it makes perfect sense that the decision to encourage Snowfork to pursue a solution for this critical piece of infrastructure was justified under the common good model.
i will be refraining for voting on the proposal and would like to apologize to the Snowfork team for the misunderstanding.
ORIGINAL POST IS BELOW
Megan from Darwinia here.
appreciate the overall vision and work on trustless bridging that you've completed already (and that also would up obsolete,) but in the year or so since your w3f grant funding ended and we stopped hearing about this project, Darwinia procured parachains and continued developing at great cost, and has already delivered the first trustless light client-based ETH2.0 <> Substrate bridge, with (XCM-compatible) routes rolling out to major parachains and between Polkadot and Kusama very likely before the end of 2022.
resurrecting a project under a common-good model that is still in the research and testing stage, and figuring out issues like 'how to be able to use the service without requiring non-native tokens?' while being funded by the Polkadot ecosystem as a direct competitor to other bridgehubs who have self-funded, had to compete in auctions and secure their own parachains, and already deployed working solutions, doesn't sound like a good use of resources to me.
i think the proposal is a year or more too late and, if approved, would be stepping on the toes of already established projects like Darwinia that are entirely self-funded and already provide a solution. it's also a sticky situation because who's going to want to develop in the Polkadot ecosystem knowing that their technology can be assimilated by Parity and deployed as common-good at any time, outside the need for them to actually compete?
i will be voting 'nay'
Dustin Lee here. I have since had a change of heart after learning more about what snow fork is and its future addition to this space. I do appreciate everything that is being done to build out of this ecosystem. There will be many bridges, and some of them commongood which is a great thing!! So going forward I see this as a important milestone for the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem !!! Previous response: Snowfork project was left behind quite a bit ago when we really needed it. Since the inception of beefy , teams have been waiting to implement the usage but have gone the centralized bridge route. Projects such as Darwinia and or Composable have been focusing on building a bridge hub in the same sense compared to this project has but with community in mind . The biggest aspect is these projects have spent the time to self fund, acquire parachains, partake in community activities in the core of dotsama. This completely erodes all those who decide to want to build niche projects that want to add value to substrate while on the other hand Parity on the fly can just build their own inhouse projects that discredits those who have been building. Lets take a step back and give recognition. We are all building for the same cause in mind a multichain architecture and security from the ground up.