A Polkadot Treasury proposal to fund the ongoing maintenance and feature development that keeps Polkadot connected to the wider multi-chain economy via a decentralised, non-custodial interoperability layer.
| Proposer (on-chain) | 15DqZ2p9xAZGjkCgcUoEuByL7mVgLnC8SaAQUccYgE9kKZvK |
|---|---|
| Beneficiary address | 15DqZ2p9xAZGjkCgcUoEuByL7mVgLnC8SaAQUccYgE9kKZvK |
| Requested track | Medium Spender |
| Total requested | $375,777 USDC - see Budget; split USDC (Asset Hub) |
| Payment mix | Three deliverable-gated milestones; denominated in USDC on Asset Hub |
| Team / entity | Chainflip Labs GmbH (Berlin, Germany) — VAT-ID DE339783144 |
| Contact | [email protected] |
| Prior funding | Sept 2024 Asset Hub integration (delivered; see Prior Work) |
| Licence | Open-source (Apache 2.0 / GPLv3), consistent with existing Chainflip repos |
In September 2024, an initial engagement through Velocity Labs through the DeFi and Infrasturucture Bounty governance funding, and delivered the first full integration of Polkadot Asset Hub into the Chainflip Protocol. That work shipped production support for USDC, USDT, and DOT on Asset Hub, including cross-chain messaging (XCM) integration, a validator witnessing module, monitoring-stack awareness, a testing suite, and mainnet deployment.
Since deployment, the integration has been running in production and has required continuous maintenance for runtime upgrades and infrastructure uptime. The code it runs on is also being phased out of the Chainflip protocol and needs to be reimplemented using the new Elections system to avoid depreciation and delisting. Chainflip is, in practice, the principal decentralised, non-custodial route for moving assets in and out of the Polkadot ecosystem from the wider blockchain economy, and one of the most heavily used Substrate deployments in production today. Its reliability, liquidity, and native Bitcoin support has earned integrations with widely used wallets and aggregators across the industry.
Maintaining and extending this connection is a public good for Polkadot: it is shared infrastructure that any user, wallet, parachain, or application can rely on, and the code is open-source. This proposal asks the Treasury to fund (a) the ongoing maintenance required to keep the integration healthy through Polkadot's runtime evolution, and (b) a defined set of feature-development milestones that deepen what users and developers can do across the Polkadot ↔ multi-chain boundary.
Note on scope and neutrality. This proposal funds open-source software maintenance and development that benefits the Polkadot ecosystem broadly. It is not a request to promote any specific token or product, and all deliverables are usable by the whole ecosystem.
The September 2024 engagement delivered:
The Chainflip protocol has processed over $7.5bn in swaps since launching into production over 2 years ago. It is one of the highest volume native bitcoin cross-chain exchanges in the space.
GitHub / repositories: https://github.com/chainflip-io/chainflip-backend
Team GitHub profiles: https://github.com/dandanlen https://github.com/marcellorigotti https://github.com/msgmaxim https://github.com/MxmUrw https://github.com/j4m1ef0rd https://github.com/nmammeri https://github.com/albert-llimos https://github.com/ramizhasan111
This proposal is structured as four discrete, deliverable-tied milestones. Each milestone bundles its development deliverables with the ongoing maintenance and operations work performed during that period, every Treasury spend is tied to accepted deliverables and a reported block of maintenance work.
All engineering time is costed at a base rate of EUR 100/hour (cost-plus). EUR figures below are the costing basis; the actual Treasury spend is denominated in USDC on Asset Hub (with an optional DOT component), converted at spot around the time each milestone spend is claimed.
The following work is performed continuously and reported as part of each milestone below. It is costed at EUR 30,000 per month and apportioned across the four milestones (see Budget). This pricing is based on the amount of on-call work that we have to allocate, infrastructure costs, as well as engineering time that we need to budget for to keep the lights for this integration on to a high standard. No maintenance spend is claimable except on delivery and acceptance of the milestone it is bundled with, accompanied by the public maintenance report for that period.
We are aware that there will be some overlap and parallelisation of work which may accelerate or delay milestone delivery, but due to the limitations of the governance process, we hope that the community will accept this wonky structure on the basis that this proposal will cover 6 months of maintenance regardless, in addition to the deliverables in each milestone.
Reporting: Each milestone delivery includes a public maintenance report (work performed, incidents, upstream changes handled) covering the time it bundles, mirroring the standard treasury milestone-reporting cadence, accounting for changes in actual delivery.
| Development cost basis | EUR 26,000 (2 engineers × 80h @ EUR 100/h, plus release team time of 10,000) |
| Maintenance cost basis | EUR 60,000 (2 months @ EUR 30,000) |
| Milestone total | EUR 86,000 |
| Target | ~July 2026 |
Development deliverables:
Maintenance deliverable: Public maintenance report for months 1–2 (runtime upgrades handled, validator/witnessing/monitoring upkeep, incidents, hours, cost).
| Development cost basis | EUR 16,000 (2 engineers × 80h @ EUR 100/h) |
| Maintenance cost basis | EUR 30,000 (2 month @ EUR 30,000) |
| Milestone total | EUR 76,000 |
| Target | ~September 2026 |
Development deliverables:
pallet-revive & extended extrinsics + maintenance (months 5–6)| Development cost basis | EUR 55,000 (3 engineers × 150h @ EUR 100/h, plus release team time of 10,000) |
| Maintenance cost basis | EUR 60,000 (2 months @ EUR 30,000) |
| Milestone total | EUR 115,000 |
| Target | ~November 2026 |
Development deliverables:
pallet-revive calls, enabling cross-chain swap recipients to interact with smart contracts on Polkadot Hub in a single transaction Transact support for map_account and other key extrinsics, allowing users onboarding via Chainflip to establish their on-chain identity Maintenance deliverable: Public maintenance report for months 5/6.
| Milestone | Development (EUR) | Maintenance (EUR) | Milestone total (EUR) | Milestone Total + VAT (EUR) | Milestone Total USDC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M1 — Elections witnessing + maint. (mo 1–2) | 26,000 | 60,000 | 86,000 | 102,340 | $116,667 |
| M2 — Paseo testnet + maint. (mo 3-4) | 16,000 | 60,000 | 76,000 | 90,440 | $103,101 |
| M3 — CCM revive & extrinsics + maint. (mo 5–6) | 55,000 | 60,000 | 115,000 | 136,850 | $156,009 |
| Total | 97,000 | 180,000 | 277,000 | 329,630 | $375,777 |
Payment structure. Funds are requested in USDC on Asset Hub for cost predictability, with a USD EUR conversion rate of 1:1.14. Each milestone amount development and bundled maintenance together is released only on delivery and acceptance of that milestone and its public maintenance report. Final on-chain USDC amounts have been converted based on the EUR/USDC exchange rate at the time of proposal, and Chainflip Labs will take the price risk on the forex rates over the expected 6 month period.
VAT. As there is no billable entity involved, we will have to also add 19% German VAT in order to cover the end user VAT that we will have to pay.
| Milestone | Months (from enactment) | Deliverables Target |
|---|---|---|
| M1 — Elections witnessing + maintenance | 1–2 | ~July 2026 |
| M2 — CCM revive & extrinsics + maintenance | 3–4 | ~Sept 2026 |
| M3 — Paseo testnet + maintenance | 5-6 | ~November 2026 |
Targets are best estimates; any material delay will be flagged promptly in the public discussion thread, consistent with treasury reporting norms. Because maintenance is bundled into deliverable-gated milestones, a delay in any development milestone defers its associated maintenance spend rather than accruing a standing cost.
It is very likely we will complete the milestones much faster than these timelines would suggest, but we will delay requesting payment until the maintenance period associated with these have also been concluded.
Chainflip operates as a live protocol with an existing user base, integrations, and revenue from protocol usage; the Polkadot integration is part of that ongoing operation rather than a one-off deliverable. The team intends to keep the integration maintained beyond this funding period as part of normal protocol operations, and will assess any future maintenance request against actual upstream demands at that time.
All software developed under this proposal is open-sourced (Apache 2.0, matching existing Chainflip repositories) so that anyone can review, reproduce, and build on it. Any narrowly proprietary operational tooling (e.g. internal updates to the team's own operated web-stack) is out of scope and not funded here; it is not required for the open-source deliverables to function, although we will also have to make changes to the propriety software to keep it in line with the new protocol functions.
Chainflip Labs GmbH — Berlin, Germany. The team built and shipped the original 2024 Polkadot Asset Hub integration to mainnet and operates the validator, witnessing, and monitoring infrastructure today.
We are 23 people in total and have been working on this protocol and within the substrate ecosystem since 2021.