Currently, there are two testnets in the Polkadot ecosystem, both being paid for, serviced, and run by Parity: Westend, and Rococo. As a result of the decentralization of Parity, Rococo will be decommissioned in 2024 leaving a gap in Polkadot testnet offering. This gave us a chance to reimagine how a community run testnet would operate, who would maintain it, and what support would be available for new and existing developers building in Polkadot.

A dedicated group of ecosystem agents from Portico, Amforc, Dwellir, Paradox, R0GUE, StakePlus, and Zondax played a key role in the testnet's development, spending 2+ months of personal costs in late 2023, leading to its launch on December 22nd, 2023. Portico and R0GUE are made up of individuals from the Parity “Delivery Services” team who have had vast experience running Rococo over the last 2+ years. 

The new developer testnet, ‘Paseo’ has subsequently launched in late 2023 and is seeking 125,018 DOT ($850,000) from the treasury to operate and run for 1 year (Jan 2024 to Dec 2024). These funds will be managed via a bounty and paid to individuals quartlery in advance, over the 12-month funding period.

This testnet is planned to receive updates just before Polkadot, rather than earlier than Kusama - conceptually making it more stable than Westend and closer to Polkadot in terms of code. It will allow new teams an easy environment to build and deploy, where the development environment of the testnet closely matches production (Polkadot). For dapp teams building on existing Parachains, these parachains can test and run their chains on Paseo, giving them greater confidence to deploy to Polkadot, offering greater stability to the dapp teams. Anyone can deploy here, not just parachain teams, opening up the ability for new builders and teams wanting to experiment with building their own appchain.

This proposal outlines a bounty to manage the following:

1. Setting up and maintaining the testnet - including upgrading the testnet relay chain runtime as per updates from the fellowship.

2. Maintaining required system chains and upgrading the runtime as per updates from the fellowship. The system chains managed will be Assethub, Coretime, and Bridgehub for the initial launch. 

3. Developer community management and technical support

4. Hardware to run the network - collators for system chains, validators, RPC services, logging, etc

Please see the full proposal below with a breakdown on costings and Q&A

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1--itI-kZAIPoMCTp377IoA8qNx3isC2FmowhRfkmxYw/edit?usp=sharing

Original discussion post: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/2100