Snowbridge 2025/2026 Stabilized

Update Aug 5th:

This is a new proposal is intended to replace our previous ref 1682. We have made some changes to address feedback that we've received. The changes are as follows:

The majority of funds are paid in stablecoins.
Our runway payment is split into 2 payments, now with only the first half up front and the remaining half in 6 months.
Our failed proposal has been removed from this proposal and will be submitted in a separate proposal.

Our final payment on-delivery has been left as is in DOT at ~116k DOT. This should still only be paid out if we complete all our milestones on time and the payment can be cancelled by OpenGov at any time before then if they’re not happy.

We believe that keeping this in DOT signals our team’s commitment to DOT’s success - asking for DOT is an economic risk that the team willingly makes to enhance incentive alignment. The DOT amount is also far smaller than in our original proposal and will not have a significant impact on the treasury’s DOT holdings.

The updated summary is below, and the updated full proposal is here: https://www.notion.so/snowfork/Snowbridge-2025-2026-Stabilized-246296aaabef8082b1b4cb6597207c74

Snowbridge, a trustless Polkadot-Ethereum bridge, has been now been live for over a year, running successfully with no onchain issues and zero onchain downtime. With our launch, we shifted to doing extensive marketing and business development work — the main milestone in our 2024 proposal was to successfully integrate with 6 parachains and we’ve radically surpassed that milestone:

Snowbridge now has integrations with ~24 parachains, wallets, apps, and other services across the Polkadot ecosystem.
Snowbridge has also grown to over $75M TVL, the second highest across all protocols on the Polkadot network.
Snowbridge has seen an additional ~$15M in growth over the last month since our last failed proposal and we expect growth to continue further through the year.
Snowbridge has become a key piece of infrastructure for most of the top products in the Polkadot ecosystem including Hydration, Asset Hub and Mythical:

This proposal is for a roadmap for the next year that covers:

Deploying V2, an overhaul of our protocol with many new improvements
Adding support for major Ethereum L2 chains
Support for single-click, multi-hop swap and bridge transactions
Simplifying the SDK developer experience and documentation
Optimizing our light client for faster, cheaper bridging - down to 1-2 minutes for Polkadot -> Ethereum transfers.
Giving OpenGov new superpowers that it can use to poach liquidity from Ethereum products
Ramping up support for stablecoins and improve the UX of stablecoin-based payment flows
Improving our consumer-targeted marketing efforts
Improve the decentralisation of our off-chain components
Continuing to operate, secure and keep the bridge up to date

The cost for this roadmap is ~$1.87M. The proposal also includes an additional $937.5k retroactive payment for completed past milestones. This brings the total cost of this proposal to ~$2.8M.

The roadmap payment is split into an advance payment and a completion payment in 1 year based on successful, on time delivery.

The full breakdown of these roadmap items, as well as details on the cost and payment structure is in our full proposal here: https://www.notion.so/snowfork/Snowbridge-2025-2026-Stabilized-246296aaabef8082b1b4cb6597207c74