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):
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.