Snowbridge 2025/2026 Milestone Payouts
Beneficiary:Full Proposal: https://snowfork.notion.site/Snowbridge-2025-2026-Milestone-Payouts-1f2296aaabef803391dde2cfba18a7d6
Overview
Snowbridge (https://app.snowbridge.network/) has now been live for almost a year, running successfully with no on chain issues and zero on chain downtime. It’s the longest running and most complex public goods project in the Polkadot ecosystem outside of Parity itself and since launch has become critical to the Polkadot ecosystem.
Snowbridge is the only fully trustless bridge in the ecosystem - meaning it is both fully governed by Polkadot itself and fully owned by the Polkadot Treasury as a system that can facilitate further growth and value flow into the treasury.
(For a deeper dive into Snowbridge’s purpose and value to the Polkadot ecosystem, see the “Purpose” section in our original funding proposal)
Since our launch, we've seen:
- Total Value Locked (TVL): ~$63M
- Top Assets: MYTH, KILT, TBTC, AAVE, WETH, ETH, wstETH
- Ecosystem Integrations: ~24 different integrations with parachains, wallets, apps, and other services across the Polkadot ecosystem. We’ve detailed all of these in the full proposal, but they include:
- Helping Mythical launch their parachain, bridging over all their ERC20 tokens
- Hydration integration with plans for their upcoming incentive program.
- Major efforts towards Polkadot hub, integrating with Asset Hub and driving adoption of Asset Hub along with support in developing wallet integrations
- Collaboration on design of XCMv5 and supporting XCM adoption in general.
- StellaSwap integration and their newly launched liquidity program
We’re also expecting a burst of additional TVL soon, as some new key assets and stablecoins will soon launch on Hydration and other chains.
Year in Review and Purpose of Proposal
Our team has continued to ship tons of features and improvements for Snowbridge over the last year including significant cost and performance improvements, developer tooling for integrations and a major re-architecture into Snowbridge V2 for much improved arbitrary messaging support.
Our original proposal was in 2022, where our team and the Polkadot community agreed upon an expected milestone payment plan and incentives for the long-term project. This led to the successful development and launch of Snowbridge, and our follow up proposal last year kicked off those milestone completion payments which have been unlocking monthly over the last year.
This proposal covers the next year of spends for the final 12 milestone payments and team incentives from June 2025 to June 2026. It also renews the insurance and bug bounty programmes that we put in place last year for further incentive alignment.
Our team has continued to deliver improvements over and above those in our milestones and we’ve become involved in a myriad of efforts that have brought significant value to the wider Polkadot ecosystem beyond just for Snowbridge. This proposal reviews our past year and suggests a continued roadmap with growth plan efforts for the coming year.
We'd also love to get early feedback from the community with regards to our future plans and opinions on how Snowbridge should continue to grow and evolve in ways to bring the most value to the Polkadot community - our team is committed to keep delivering value and if any further ideas come up for our roadmap, we'd love to consider them!
Payment Overview
Total amount: 254,064 DOT and 4,062,500 USDC (~5M USD, based on the current Coingecko price of 4.10, with a 10% buffer for slippage), broken down into:
- Milestone completion bonus:
- 21,172 DOT unlock per month from June 2025 to June 2026. Total 254,064 DOT (based on $937,500).
- Covers our final 12 months expected payouts for completed engineering and launch milestones
- Successful operation incentives:
- 156,250 USDC & 156,250 USDT unlock per month from May 2025 to June 2026. Total 4,062,500 USDC.
- Covers our final 13 out of 21 months payouts. (based on the schedule agreed upon in our original proposal for longer term success in maintenance and development work on the bridge)
- Insurance and Bug Bounty: The above milestone and operation incentives will also be allocated to be used for bridge insurance and bug bounty payments until they unlock.
Beneficiary Address: 129Uxho5oKBz6js8dwjoQLzLjYsEs4ZLBtS7KRotQbunVNfP
Comments (3)
Snowbridge gives us access to only one ecosystem but is costing us more than $5M in a single year. what is the rationale here?
i don't know what it takes to build a trustless bridge, but this cost is pretty fucking wild to my senses.
over 150k per month on what exactly?
how many people are in the team to justify such high monthly payouts?
what exactly does the money cover?
furthermore, are we to expect that this will be the yearly budget for maintaining Snowbridge? or will it go down overtime?
on the whole, this seems like pretty expensive infrastructure.
Snowbridge does little to no marketing that i see. so it is hypothesized that all of this is development and maintenance costs. is this so? perhaps i am missing/misunderstanding some important factors.
Considering the size of the spend, I would want to see a more detailed breakout of the costs and allocations.
I think there's no disagreement that Snowbridge and Hyperbridge are great, and valuable, additions to the network. But I believe more transparency in the allocations will go farther. You may also want to estimate any follow-up expenditure for annual costs going forward. It would be helpful to knows how much will this support cost and when it will taper, as you mentioned in the proposal.