Preamble

Hey, assembly :)

As a good engineer I’m a bit lazy to write hundreds lines of a grant application before knowing whether anyone is actually interested in what I’m about to propose. So I’ve decided to start with this nice little discussion, mainly to see if there is at least some tension or interest around what we are building at Chain.Love.

I'd really appreciate a feedback - even negative. A clear “no” is better silence, cuz at least you know why you are failing.

Fable

Problem statement

So, let me start this with a simple question.

How do you personally discover services available in the Polkadot ecosystem?

While doing my research I came up with https://polkadotecosystem.com/tools

There are things that I definitely like and do not like about this page, namely:

Pros:
1) It is open-source. In an active community having an open-source documentation is a total must-have. Otherwise you are going to simply drown in following many updates that are happenning in the tools for the ecosystem

2) https://x.com/lvweb3 have been around Polkadot ecosystem for a couple of years now, and probably he gains trust of the Polkadot ecosystem, which can be clearly seen by the voting last year with more than 78% of voters voting in favor of issuing a grant.

3) Multi-language, so people can find information useful in their language, although I see that the portal is not fully translated and suffers from constant language switching when navigating through different pages.

4) The website is fully dedicated to the ecosystem. This approach is having it's own pros and cons, of course.

Cons:

1) How do I actually compare anything there? Like, when opening polkassembly I wanted to know if any of the wallets I'm already having is actually supporting both EVM networks and Substrate ones, just not to install yet-another-wallet-that-I-will-forget-soon, but can I do that? Or, when I'm thinking about developing a dApp - I want to check which of the RPC providers are having limitations, and what are these limitations really?

2) Are there at least links to these providers, so when I'm googling I'm not getting into a scammy website?

3) The last update was several months ago and some of the tools were not updated for much longer. Can we say that all the data stays the same when it comes to months of work? The problem is essentially lack of incentive for anyone to go and update this page beyond a https://x.com/lvweb3 man supporting it and a few contributors who appears around once a year.

The last point is not made to do any harm, but rather to ask a question - what incentive does one have to participate and keep all the documentation up to date? Keeping the documentation up to date will always be "an expense" for the ecosystem. And that is the problem we are aiming to solve at Chain.Love.

What is Chain.Love?

As a part of a team I have been working on a platform that can be described as a “marketplace” of Web3 services. It’s key component is called “Toolbox” - a place to discover, compare and access different services available over the ecosystem:

The points I've addressed above we are covering in the following way:

1) We build it on top of the open-source database: https://github.com/Chain-Love/chain-love .

2) We keep our contributors motivated - every adjustment that brings value to the ecosystem is paid according to the established set of rules (aka "Database population grant program").

3) We launch a subdomain that is dedicated to the ecosystem, with no network-switcher, so no "user leak" occurs here.

4) We have a fully-functional search, filter and side-by-side comparison across categories

5) We have been noted and trusted by a number of major ecosystems, examples:
a) Arbitrum

b) Filecoin

c) Algorand

d) ChainBase

6) We are not only verifying all the links in our database, we have also periodic automatic checkers that update all the outdated links and remove deprecated projects

7) We have a working AI search that helps users to get answers in their natural language. To clarify - regular AI is not as good because it does not have our database as an information source. And AI is only as good as its sources. Web3 service data is fragmented, non-standardized, and changes frequently. As a result, generic AI answers about RPCs, pricing, limits, or features are often outdated or simply wrong.

Try for yourself! Imagine you are an engineerthat wants to build adApp… on Ethereum. You don’t have much money, but your app will be super RPC call-intensive. Now, try asking any AI you know on what is a cheapest RPC provider on Ethereum from the query fee perspective. I can predict the answer more or less, since we used to run these tests dozens of times: “Absolutely! Here are the top-3 providers on Ethereum with lowest access fee as of <CURRENT_MONTH> 2026!” And then it will give you a list of 3 random provider names and their hardly comparable query fees, while proofing it with an article written back in 2023.

Now, try this for a change: Chain.Love ChatGPT

Now. Of course, the money have to come from somewhere, right? In Chain.love we are not only having our own runway, but we already secured more than $20k MRR (monthly recurring revenue) by selling side services (such as RPC, Indexing, Performance monitoring, Advertisment, etc.), and we are aiming to make a big leap towards becoming a transactional marketplace.

Roadmap: Transactional marketplace

We want providers to be able to "plug-in" their solutions and sell them in a fully automated mode via an OpenAPI standard we are currently developing.

That part is being under construction as we speak. We are actively looking for an ecosystem that may be interested in funding/investing into its development, to secure a flow of purchases through the ecosystem's native token. It’s a bigger investment, but also a much bigger outcome once real transactions start flowing.

Summary

We would love to deploy Chain.Love over Polkadot, and I’m curious here whether you see the value in such a solution?

There are three possible modes:

a discovery / comparison layer (Toolbox) - it can be a quid pro quo, with us deploying it even for free in exchange for an active promotion inside of the ecosystem;
same Toolbox, but as a paid servce - with all the SLAs and hard guarantees of regular updates from our team (see example of our reports here)
a fully-featured services marketplace

I’m very curious whether either of these aligns with the current interests and priorities of the Polkadot ecosystem.

Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to read this. Any feedback — positive or negative — is genuinely appreciated.

Looking forward to your thoughts,

Arsenii

Project Summary

Chain.Love is a Booking.com–style marketplace for the Web3 infrastructure.

Used by developers and AI agents, it enables discovery, comparison, and access for infrastructure services (APIs, CPU/GPU compute, dev tools) via a single UI and API.

Our mission is to make blockchain services accessible, transparent, and reliable by providing networks, providers and developers with a unified hub for discovery, comparison, and consumption of Web3 services. We empower ecosystems to grow faster by reducing fragmentation, increasing trust, and enabling fair competition among providers.
A deeper story-telling dive into why the project is important and also a comparison with the existing solution is available at the Discussions tab

Problem-solution set

Problem

Web3 infrastructure is fragmented and inefficient. Developers building on new blockchains face a messy and time-consuming process when setting up services they depends on:
• Developers struggle to discover and compare infra by price, limits, features, and performance. The process is manual and time consuming
• Each chain documentation links to different SDKs, APIs, bridges, wallets, faucets, oracles, and other tools — all with their own docs, pricing, limits, and formats. More information about how this affecting the Polkadot ecosystem is available here.
• Every developer has different needs: some care about uptime, others about speed, privacy, programming language adoption, specific API methods, or regional access. But today, finding the right provider means digging through scattered resources and testing everything manually.

Solution

Our Toolbox layer is aligning the incentives. It acts as a single, trusted hub where developers can discover all available options and compare providers side-by-side:
• Devs get single UI/API to find, compare, and access all services for all networks. They may also leverage performance monitoring and load balancer as a service to achieve higher quality of the Polkadot's APIs.
• Providers get aggregated demand and lower customer acquisition cost
• Automatic fisherman-like verifications designed to verify the existence of the providers and the quality of their services

Costs justification

There are 3 main cost drivers:

Engineering time — core marketplace development and performance module tuning, including initial configuration and testing aligned with Polkadot ecosystem parameters (API setup, validation, and benchmarking).
Maintenance time — ongoing work required to ensure high availability and reliability of the Chain.Love service.
Documentation, open-source database population, and developer engagement — maintaining and expanding public documentation, contributing to the initial dataset and its regular updates, actively participating in community channels (chats, forums, and other ecosystem venues), monitoring ecosystem development, proactively updating information about newly emerging services, and encouraging developers to contribute to the open-source database.

Milestones

Milestone 1

Amount (DOT): 5000
Timeline: within 1 week
Milestone description:
Developers want to be able to easily discover, compare and access service in the Polkadot ecosystem. They need verified, structured, comparable, visually-represented datasets when discovering web3 service providers. For that developers need a place where I can discover, compare and purchase Web3 servces. They can't rely on documentation alone, because once one decide to build on Polkadot, the questions one need to answer immediately become practical and comparative than the documentation may answer, namely:
- Is there an SDK/library for the programming language I'm planning to write on?
- Where to get free tokens? Which faucet are reliable? Do they provide enough funds for me? Will I need to perform the KYC?
- Is there a wallet that is compatible between all the network I plan to deploy on?
- Which oracles, RPCs, bridges do exist, and which have usable free tiers?
- Is there a company performing security audits?
- How do I compare all these options in a big ecosystem side-by-side without visiting 10 sites and reading inconsistent docs?

Today, there is no neutral, structured, up-to-date answer to these questions in the Polkadot ecosystem. The reality is described at the Discussions tab.
As a part of this milestone we deploy a life installation of Chain.Love Toolbox. A real-life example on how one looks inside of the Polkadot-based network - Astar - can be seen here: https://astar.chain.love

Deliverables

1) https://polkadot.chain.love toolbox
2) Embeddable Toolbox widget ready for inclusion in the Polkadot docs or any ecosystem pages (optional). Example: https://chain-love.gitbook.io/chain.loves-toolbox/features/widget-for-docs/example-of-our-widget
3) At least 5 (or maximum existing) providers listed per every existing category that matches the Polkadot ecosystem (currently there are 13 categories: apis, explorers, oracles, bridges, sdks, faucets, analytics, wallets, platforms, ramps, security, storages and other services; a number of categories is constantly increasing)
4) (Optional) New categories added where relevant to the Polkadot ecosystem
5) AI-powered search fully operational on Toolbox that returns relevant and consistent results for user queries. Why usual AI is not fitting here is described at the Discussions tab

Milestone 2

Amount (DOT): 5000
Timeline: within 3 months
Polkadot ecosystem deservers to see a real-time adoption and usage metrics of the solutions, that were bootstrapped using the grant funding. As a part of this milestone we will publish public real-time MAU analytics dashboard and will dedicate efforts to bootstrap the usage of the Toolbox in the Polkadot ecosystem. As well, we will continue our efforts on increasing the overall Toolbox adoption as an industry standard.

Deliverables

1) A growth of at least 25% MoM active usage is achieved for the first 3 consecutive months
2) Toolbox uptime ≥99.9% since launch
3) Developer feedback loop live (GitHub Discussions, Polkadot forum, or equivalent)
4) A set of patches in the existing Polkadot documentation proposed to include Chain.Love as the information source.

Milestone 3

Amount (DOT): 10000
Timeline: 12 months+
During the support phase that will last at least a year, and likely more (roadmap to full self-sustainability can be found at the bottom of this page) we will keep updating the Chain.Love database of the Polkadot ecosystem, improving the marketplace and encouraging regular developers to contribute into the open-source database of Polkadot ecosystem services

Deliverables

1) Regular database updates (at least 2 per month) with at least half of the contributions being done by external contributors. At least 15 unique contributors, with at least 30 pull request merged from them, updating information about the Polkadot ecosystem.
2) ≥3 top developer-requested features shipped based on community feedback
3) Monthly and quarterly updates summarizing progress, and a comprehensive maintenance report at the end of the 12-month period.
4) (optional) new categories added to better represent Polkadot ecosystem

Project success metrics

We believe that the key success criteria for this project is it becoming fully self-sustainable and supporting Polkadot ecosystem for years ahead. For that we need to keep increasing our adoption, and developing a distinct unique features, such as the one described later in this proposal in the Roadmap section.

As for the adoption part, we have a structured plan on how to attract more users and make our product more visible, namely:

1) Search indexing – provider pages and comparison pages (“RPC A vs RPC B”, “Best free Polkadot oracles”) indexed by the search engines similarly to Versus-style sites.
2) AI ingestion – MCP / structured access so LLMs pull fresh web3 services data instead of hallucinating.
3) Docs integration – we have an open-source widget that is basically a light embeddable version of Chain.Love that you may include into your network documentation.
4) Providing additional functionality on top - monitoring and load balancer as a service. Also, developing a transactional marketplace will solve a problem of services being scattered too much. The roadmap to it is described below.
5) Developers motivation - we believe that no matter how much we try we will not be able to keep up with the pace of changes in the such a rapidly developing ecosystem as Web3. This is why we’ve realized, that the path to succeed here - is to motivate those working with the chains - developers - to contribute into our database. For that purpose we’ve made it open-source, and for that purpose we are running a reward program, giving tiny, but stable[coin] rewards to those contributing. We are maitaining a balance by not providing too high bounties (and yet providing tangible ones) to ensure we attract visioners, not bounty hunters.
6) DevRel alignment – positioning Chain.Love as a complement to official docs, not a replacement. This approach has already been positively validated with DevRel teams and developers across multiple ecosystems (Arbitrum, Algorand, Filecoin, Flare, Sonic, Somnia). Here are the few examples of ecosystems posting about us:
-Arbitrum
-Filecoin
-Algorand
-Chainbase

Additional criterias include:
- High uptime of over ≥99.9% since launch
- Proven MAU growth trend with public analytics
- Alive community that submits PRs and suggest new features to implement.

Roadmap

Chain.Love team currently runs more than 15 live installations across multiple blockchain networks, serving over 1,000 real monthly active users (developers). We live off the initial investment from Protofire DAO, as well as a number of grants and recurring clients:

$20k+ MRR
Customers : Filecoin, Arbitrum, Somnia, Fuse, Algorand
Grants received: Filecoin Foundation, Arbitrum DAO
Winner of EigenLayer Hackathon, validating reliability module

To become fully self-sustainable we are in progress of transition to becoming a transactional marketplace. For that, we develop and OpenAPI specification (so providers can integrate with the Chain.Love in an automated way) and a x402-based system (so user purchases can be done automatically). The scope and the proposed butdget of this proposal, for now, remains on addressing the service discoverability problem (why this is a problem can be seen at the Discussions tab), however, should there be interest from the ecosystem in bringing the x402-payments to the Polkadot ecosystem, we would be very interested in collaborating and contributing in that direction.