RegionX - Coretime Marketplace Production Deployment Phase 1

Short Description

The RegionX parachain implements a trustless Coretime marketplace and an order model for indicating Coretime demand. All required functionality of the parachain has been implemented, and we would like to proceed with deploying it into production, as we see that many teams would benefit from the features it provides. The parachain will delegate its governance and revenue to DOT holders (KSM for the Kusama parachain). This is the Phase 1 proposal, where we are first seeking funding to proceed with deployment on Kusama and to refine the Coretime Hub user interface for improved design and user experience.

Context

We have observed that Coretime sales have been live on Polkadot for some time, and there is no denying that Coretime is currently very cheap. Right now Polkadot has more resources to offer than the current demand it has. However, this isn’t because ‘there are no projects on Polkadot’, but rather because Polkadot is really scalable and can host a bunch of rollups.

We believe Polkadot is currently the best platform for hosting rollups, and the main focus in the upcoming period should be to market this fact and attract new teams to the ecosystem. This is something we also want to be actively involved in moving forward.

However, just because Coretime is cheap right now doesn’t mean there is no demand for a trustless Coretime marketplace. We talked with multiple teams from ecosystems that would have benefited from a deployed Coretime marketplace.

The current main reasons we believe it is important to have the marketplace deployed on both Polkadot and Kusama:

With more projects deployed and with elastic scaling being used by bigger projects, it is likely that the demand for Coretime will highly increase. This scenario would highly require a secondary marketplace where Coretime can be purchased after all cores are sold on the bulk sale.
The bulk sale only offers Coretime for the upcoming bulk period, meaning it is not possible to purchase Coretime for immediate use. This can be an issue for projects that missed purchasing Coretime during the bulk sale or for those that experience increased on-chain activity and need to scale up with an additional core.
Many parachains considering deployment on Polkadot would likely want a secondary marketplace for purchasing Coretime—either to scale on the go or to ensure there is still a trustless way to procure Coretime if the bulk sale sells out.

A Common Good Chain, but Not a System Parachain

We aim to make the RegionX parachain a common good parachain with DOT as its native token.

DOT will serve as the primary currency for all chain functionality, meaning governance will be delegated to DOT holders, and all fees will be charged in DOT. As a result, the RegionX treasury will also be managed by DOT holders through governance.

However, we don’t want to make the RegionX parachain a system chain. The main reason is that this would delegate the parachain's maintenance to the Polkadot Fellowship, which already has many things to look after. We believe it is better to have a dedicated team specifically focused on working on and maintaining the RegionX parachain.

Link to the proposal document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16OzV_c0sk8t-NvKXklswDATiT76NGp-YBD2TglSScxI/edit?usp=sharing