Snowbridge Launch and Treasury Proposal

Launch

Snowbridge is live! We've been up for ~ 2 weeks, running smoothly since launch, with no issues and usage is starting to grow.

If you're not familiar with it, it's a bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum that is designed and implemented to be fully trustless, with no multi-sig or third party involved. It’s a major innovation for interoperability in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Snowbridge is one of the longest running and most complex public goods project in the Polkadot ecosystem outside of Parity itself, and many teams have eagerly awaited the launch.

We've also already finished off 3 - 4 integrations with other teams, and are expecting to ramp up integrations across all parachains over the next month before a wider growth and adoption program.

If you missed the launch, see more details in our blog announcement here and try it out yourself using the app here.

Treasury Proposal

With the launch done, we’ve completed all our milestones from our original proposal in 2022 and are set up for the long term success of the bridge. In that proposal, our team and the Polkadot community agreed upon our expected milestone payments and incentives which totalled to ~$10 mil worth of DOT.

This proposal finalizes the payments for our 2024 completed engineering milestones, operating costs and team incentives. It also adds additional controls on those team incentives to ensure strong alignment between the team and the Polkadot community, and gives medium-term insurance guarantees to bridge users.

The proposal is long as it documents a lot of the work we've been doing over the last 2 years as well as future plans, but we're looking for any early support, feedback and discussion here before going live with the proposal.

The executive summary of the propsal is copied below, and the full proposal is here:

https://spinamp.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmRSkK7YVbnTDYCsgWhyfvDydtbSi1uyWDbRDrxPvnPzmi

(Note: exact numbers will be updated based on the Subscan EMA7 rate on the day of submission)

Executive summary

Total amount: 505157 DOT and 2812500 USDC (~5,797,500 USD, based on the current Subscan EMA7 rate of 6.22, with a 5% buffer for slippage)

This is broken down into:

• Audit & Operational costs: Single payout of 187849 DOT (based on $1,110,000). Paid on execution of proposal
• Milestone completion bonus: First 12 out of 24 months vesting payouts, covering the period from July 2024 to July 2025. 13221 DOT per month, totalling 158652 DOT. Scheduled for monthly claim, starting immediately. (based on $937,500)
• 3-months post launch bonus: Single payout of 158656 DOT (based on $937,500). Scheduled for claim 3 months after launch.
• Successful operation incentives: First 9 out of 21 months payouts, covering the period from July 2024 to July 2025. 312500 USDC per month totalling 2812500 USDC.

Beneficiary Address: 129Uxho5oKBz6js8dwjoQLzLjYsEs4ZLBtS7KRotQbunVNfP

This payment covers:

• Auditing costs (both retroactive and future 2024 costs)
• Sponsorship for light client relayer costs for 2024 (both retroactive and future costs through July 2025)
• Already completed engineering and launch milestones
• The first 6 out of 21 months of successful operation incentive payments, based on the schedule agreed upon in our original proposal, for longer term success in maintenance and development work on the bridge.
• Medium-term Insurance for users of the bridge and the wider Polkadot community.

Snowbridge, the first fully trustless Polkadot <> Ethereum bridge is live. We’ve completed all our milestones from our original proposal last year and are set up for the long term success of the bridge.

Demo (on Polkadot): https://app.snowbridge.network/

See the Completed Work and Future sections in the full document for a summary of our completed milestones, last year of work and future plans.

Our last successful proposal was in 2022, where our team and the Polkadot community agreed upon our expected milestone payments and incentives. The agreed total milestone payments and incentives totalled ~$10mil worth of DOT.

This proposal finalizes the payments for our 2024 completed engineering milestones, operating costs and team incentives. It also adds additional incentive alignment controls and medium-term insurance guarantees for the bridge. Further details on the payment and incentive structure, see the full document.

A summary diagram of payment flows:

The execution is a batch transaction, with spends that are delayed over the next year to cover all 4 payment buckets mentioned. There is a table that specifies the amount, validFrom and days delayed of each spend in a much simpler, easier to read form at the end section of the full proposal, linked above.