Snowbridge 2026/2027 Maintenance Proposal
Summary
Snowbridge is Polkadot’s trustless bridge to Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem, providing critical infrastructure for liquidity and users moving between the two ecosystems. Over the past year the bridge processed ~21,000 transfers, maintained $10M–$20M in monthly volume, and generated 14,100 DOT in revenue for the Polkadot Treasury (view dashboard).
During the previous funding period the team delivered Snowbridge V2, reducing bridging fees by up to 90%, enabling arbitrary contract execution, and launching support for Base, Optimism and Arbitrum.
This proposal funds the basic maintenance and operation of the bridge for the next 12 months. The total request is $364,200 for 12 months, significantly smaller than the previous proposal.
Overview
Snowbridge is Polkadot’s common good trustless bridge to Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem.
Over the past two years it has become core infrastructure for cross-ecosystem liquidity, enabling users to move assets between Ethereum (and recently Base, Optimism and Arbitrum) and the Polkadot ecosystem without trusted intermediaries.
Statistics about the last year:
- TVL: TVL peaked at $180M in October 2025 and currently stands at ~$60M, reflecting the broader crypto market downturn rather than a decline in bridge usage.
- Monthly Volume: Despite the extreme bear-market, Snowbridge usage has grown, with monthly transaction volume consistent between $10M-$20M. In October last year, volume jumped to $70M.
- Snowbridge dApp: The Snowbridge dApp has had ~29k visitors in the last year, with 4.2k users using Snowbridge to transfer tokens (20% of all transfers).
- Revenue Generation for Treasury: Snowbridge is one of the few treasury-funded projects that directly returns revenue to the Polkadot Treasury through bridge fees. Snowbridge has generated approximately 14,100 DOT in revenue from fees, and this was automatically deposited into the treasury.
- Hydration: Snowbridge is the main bridge supporting transfers to and from Hydration, Polkadot’s most successful DeFi project. In the last year, Snowbridge has enabled ~13k transfers between Hydration and Ethereum.
- Transfers: There have been 21k transfers through Snowbridge in the last year.
- Third-party relayers: Third-party relayers have started appearing organically, a sign that Snowbridge is maturing into decentralized infrastructure that others are building on independently.
Snowbridge had two main goals for 2025, besides running a secure bridge:
- reduce bridging cost
- reduce transfer latency
Our team has delivered on this promise, slashing bridging fees for our users by at least 80%, and reducing latency where possible.
Our review of the last year can be viewed at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UY1-Ju5WvAlYM4gv8NbSJh7Rurdpu8zZOrs5Fv8d7Io/edit?usp=sharing
Why Snowbridge Matters for Polkadot
- Liquidity access: Snowbridge connects Polkadot to the largest liquidity ecosystem in crypto: Ethereum and its L2s.
- Trustless architecture: Unlike multisig bridges, Snowbridge verifies Ethereum consensus directly on Polkadot.
- Core ecosystem infrastructure: Projects like Hydration and NeuroWeb rely on Snowbridge for Ethereum liquidity.
Team
This proposal covers the scope of 2 full-time equivalent engineers (FTE). The core team commits to ensuring that two team members are allocated to the project at all times, regardless of the individual availability of specific team members.
Operations and Maintenance
Since software continuously evolves, ensuring Snowbridge continues to run securely and smoothly is by no means a passive task. Our team works on maintaining Snowbridge every day by investigating security reports logged through our bug bounty, ensuring our off-chain components are compliant with on-chain changes, such as updating our relayers and indexers when runtime upgrades occur. Our team is always on call for potential issues with transfers or user support.
Success metric: Snowbridge continues to run as a high availability and secure service.
Ethereum Hardforks
As part of Snowbridge’s trustless architecture, the Ethereum light client on BridgeHub needs to be compliant with the Ethereum consensus spec. About twice a year, Ethereum undergoes hardforks that changes the format of consensus updates. Our team needs to be proactive and update:
- Update the on-chain Ethereum light client, generate real test data and write tests
- Update relayers and verify proof generation and verification
- Update local end-to-end scripts to use the new consensus client (Lodestar node)
- Update Westend relayers and our self-hosted Lodestar Sepolia node, coordinating the Westend upgrade in time to test the switchover on Sepolia before mainnet
- Coordinate with Ethereum core dev PMs on mainnet fork timing to ensure sufficient lead time for a governance proposal
- Prepare and test the runtime upgrade release (including Chopsticks testing) in time for the hardfork
- Upgrade our Lodestar node to the required version before the fork
Ethereum’s latest upcoming hardfork, Gloas, is expected to enact within the next 6 months. Heze is expected before end of this proposal, between H2 2026 and H1 2027.
Bridge Support
The reason will monitor bridge availability during office hours, ensure relayers are running and providing consensus updates in a regular cadence.
Runtime Upgrades
Since Snowbridge is deployed on BridgeHub and AssetHub, runtime upgrades affect our off-chain infrastructure, and requires our team to update chain metadata in our indexer, gas estimator and sometimes UI and relayers.
Bug Bounty
The bug bounty fund is addressed in a separate proposal.
Past Year in Review
For a detailed review of the past year’s work, see Year In Review 2025/2026.
Cost Breakdown
The total ask is $364,200 covering the period from May 2026 to April 2027.
Engineering: $250,000
| # | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 full-time developers ($9,417/month each × 12 months, $60/hr) | $226,000 |
| 2 | Technical lead reviewer ($2,000/month × 12 months) | $24,000 |
| Total | $250,000 |
The two developers handle all ongoing Snowbridge development and maintenance work. The technical lead reviewer is our main Solidity expert, providing architecture oversight, code review and internal security audits over any Solidity changes.
Scope of Work
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Ethereum hardfork support (Gloas, Heze) | On-chain light client updates, relayer updates, proof generation changes, testnet coordination, Chopsticks testing, runtime upgrade release, governance proposals |
| Runtime upgrade compatibility | Update off-chain infrastructure (indexer, gas estimator, relayers) when BridgeHub/AssetHub runtime upgrades land |
| Relayer operations | Monitor and maintain consensus relayers, debug relay delays, handle stuck transfers |
| SDK and e2e test maintenance | Keep the Snowbridge SDK and end-to-end test suite up to date — required for verifying bridge correctness on every change |
| XCM handling improvements | Ad-hoc improvements related smarter XCM construction, for better error handling, etc. |
| Security audit follow-ups | Address any security findings that our team receives (we sometimes receive ad-hoc findings via email) |
| Polkadot SDK contributions | Ongoing upstream contributions to the Polkadot SDK for Snowbridge-related code |
Estimated Hours Breakdown
| Task | Hours |
|---|---|
| Ethereum Hardforks | 700 |
| Gloas hardfork (light client updates, relayer changes, proof generation, testnet coordination, Chopsticks testing, runtime release, governance proposal) | 350 |
| Heze hardfork (same scope as Gloas) | 350 |
| Runtime Upgrades (~6/year) | 450 |
| On-chain changes that impact Snowbridge, updating of tests | 200 |
| Update off-chain infrastructure per upgrade (indexer metadata, gas estimator, relayers) | 250 |
| Relayer Operations | 350 |
| Consensus relayer monitoring and fixing compatibility issues with onchain code | 200 |
| Relayer optimizations to reduce infra costs | 150 |
| Solidity & Gateway Updates | 350 |
| Gateway contract updates for BEEFY changes | 100 |
| Solidity code review and internal security audit (technical lead) | 250 |
| SDK & End-to-End Testing | 450 |
| SDK updates to stay compatible with runtime and contract changes | 200 |
| End-to-end test suite maintenance and new test coverage | 250 |
| Infrastructure & DevOps | 600 |
| Lodestar node upgrades and maintenance | 150 |
| Westend/Paseo testnet infrastructure | 250 |
| Self-hosted indexer maintenance | 200 |
| Incident Response | 400 |
| Bridge incident investigation and resolution | 250 |
| Security finding triage (ad-hoc reports) | 150 |
| Unforeseeable feature and Improvement requests | 450 |
| Total | 3,750 |
Core Infrastructure: $64,200
Our team has done significant operational cost cutting over the past year, eliminating or self-hosting services that were previously paid for. We remove third party dependencies where we could and moved to self-hosting, to save on costs. We’re also only asking the treasury to cover infrastructure related to core bridge operations and consensus - not off-chain products, message relayers, frontend nor ancillary services.
Total core infrastructure costs are $64,200 annually.
Infrastructure
| # | Item | Annual |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beefy light client on-chain costs (Ethereum gas) | $35,000 |
| 2 | AWS (Lodestar node for consensus updates, Paseo and Westend infra, Sepolia node, Indexer for monitoring) | $26,500 |
| 3 | Github | $2,000 |
| 4 | Testing gas fees | $700 |
| Subtotal | $64,200 |
Summary
| # | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Engineering | $250,000 |
| 2 | Company margin (20%) | $50,000 |
| 3 | Core bridge infrastructure | $64,200 |
| Total ask | $364,200 |
Payment Structure
Our budget has been kept minimal, focused on core bridge infrastructure, consensus costs and engineering costs that are far below market rates. In order to remain competitive, it’s important for our staff and business to have security for our runway, and so we’re asking for a single up front payment covering the year’s runway of $364,200.
Comments (1)
snowbridge is awesome, easy aye