Extend 50 000 DOT Collateral Loan for Spacewalk Bridge (Ref #748) – 6-Month Roll-Over
Context
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In Referendum #748 the Treasury loaned 50 000 DOT to Pendulum so the Spacewalk bridge could post 200 % collateral for Stellar ↔ Polkadot transfers.
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Since then the bridge has gone live and SatoshiPay released Vortex, a fiat off-ramp that lets users swap Stellar-based stablecoins into EUR, ARS and BRL (via Moonbeam for EVM chains). Vortex has now cleared more than US $1.5 million in transactions across Europe and Brazil.
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To cut collateral costs and improve efficiency, an alternative BRL corridor has already been enabled by routing transfers through the Polkadot-native BRLA.digital stablecoin on Moonbeam.
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Work under way on further collateral-free paths across networks
Ask
We propose a symbolic Treasury motion with a 1 DOT transfer to the Treasury that signals an extension of the existing 50 000 DOT loan by six months (to 31 Jan 2026). Repaying now and re-requesting later would force a temporary scale-down of bridge capacity and interrupt EUR/ARS fiat ramps.
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The DOT stays in the same multisig and remains staked as vDOT during the extension.
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We want to extend the loan duration by six months so that we can keep the current paths via Spacewalk operational, while we are establishing other collateral-free routes for Vortex. Principal will be returned once collateral-free routes fully replace the original Stellar vaults.
Please vote Aye if you support keeping the loan active so the bridge and Vortex off-ramp can continue to operate without disruption while alternative routes are finalised.
Comments (2)
Requested
Proposal Passed
Summary
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Aye
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Nay
Aye (8)0.0 DOT
Support0.0 DOT
Nay (2)0.0 DOT
These "notarization" referenda don't make much sense if they are requested at a lower track (For us they don't make sense at all but that's another story).
It should be made on the medium spender track or higher as this can simply be "socially approved" by a single mindless DAO vote.
Also make sure to verify your id on chain.
@SAXEMBERG How would you like to have these kinds of referenda if you think they don't make sense at all? We can also post a discussion on the Polkadot forum, but we wanted to give the community the chance to vote on this again.
Hello,
Could you mention what benefits this loan has generated for the Polkadot ecosystem so far and what the outlook is for the next six months? Thanks
Hey @SIM-DOT.
This loan enabled us to bridge enough EURC from Stellar to Pendulum and thus Polkadot, to allow for very low slippage trades on Pendulum's forex-optimized AMM. Vortex uses this AMM to give European users selling their stablecoins an exchange rate that is very close to the interbank rate of the respective fiat currencies. You can check and compare the exchange rate by yourself on Vortex here. Without the loan, the Spacewalk vault wouldn't be able to bridge enough EURC from Stellar to give such a great rate with low slippage for larger transactions.
As far as we know, Vortex is currently the only service that allows Assethub users to natively withdraw their USDC directly to their European or Brazilian bank account. You can see on the Spacewalk Asset List dashboard on Dune that ~930k EURC were bridged between Pendulum and Stellar via Spacewalk. This volume wouldn't have been possible without the loan, as we added the DOT/vDOT as collateral on the Spacewalk vault.
We know that the collateralization mechanism of Spacewalk is not very capital-efficient. We are in talks with our stablecoin partners to create integrations on networks other than Stellar. This would allow us to free up the collateral required for Spacewalk. These integrations are not live yet however, which is why we want to extend the loan for a couple of months so we can work towards establishing these collateral-free routes. With the extension of this loan, we can continue providing an amazing exchange rate to Polkadot/Assethub users withdrawing their stablecoins for the time being.