This proposal closes 7,138 spam bounties on Asset Hub Polkadot created
by exploiting a low BountyDepositBase (~0.002 DOT). The Treasurer origin
calls bounties.closeBounty() on each, slashing proposer deposits to Treasury
and freeing on-chain storage.
Full details, methodology, and call structure: https://hackmd.io/@dhirajs/HJCkrtDRWe
This proposal requests $392,500 USDC to fund the operational costs of the Paseo testnet for H1 2026. This is the first Paseo funding proposal denominated in stablecoins, made possible by the newly deployed multi-asset bounty pallet. The remaining DOT balance in the existing bounty (~38,946 DOT) will be returned to the Polkadot treasury upon transition.
For full proposal details, including scope of work, quarterly budget breakdown, SLOs, and curator information, see the full proposal.
Note: This is a resubmission of referendum 1878. The original contained a technical error in the metadata field of the call data.
This proposal requests funding to renew the Snowbridge bug bounty programme, which expired on 16 April 2026. Snowbridge secures ~$35M in TVL and processes $10M–$20M in monthly volume - a vulnerability could result in catastrophic loss of user funds and severe reputational damage to the Polkadot ecosystem.
The previous programme, run on HackenProof for one year, was funded by the Snowbridge team out of their own milestones. It received over 500 submissions, of which approximately 5 were valid findings that led to fixes ($22,300 paid out with Hackenproof, $15,000 paid to a security report logged before the Hackenproof programme). The programme must be renewed to ensure proper security coverage.
The total request is $355,000, covering 12 months of bug bounty operations.
The bug bounty covers all Snowbridge on-chain code (Ethereum contracts and Snowbridge Polkadot on-chain code) Scope can be viewed at our Hackenproof programme: https://hackenproof.com/programs/snowbridge-on-chain-code
| Severity | Description | Reward |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Direct loss of user funds, consensus bypass, unauthorized minting/burning | $30,000 – $75,000 |
| High | Temporary freezing of funds, griefing attacks with material cost to users | $6,000 – $20,000 |
| Medium | Non-critical logic errors, state inconsistencies that don't risk funds | $2,000 – $5,000 |
| Low | Informational findings, gas optimizations, minor code quality issues | $200 – $1,000 |
The programme will continue on HackenProof, which hosted the previous year's programme.
Bi-yearly reports to the community on:
| # | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bug bounty reward pool (12 months) | $250,000 |
| 2 | HackenProof platform fee (12 months) | $5,000 |
| Total | $255,000 |
The reward pool covers payouts for valid findings. In 10 months, we will liaise with the Treasury to determine plans for the next year of Snowbridge and unspent funds will either carry-over into the next year's pool or be returned to the treasury. The pool must be large enough to credibly incentivize security researchers to investigate critical-severity vulnerabilities. Should the reward pool be depleted before the 12 month period, the programme will be paused until a top-up proposal passes Treasury governance.
Running a bug bounty is not passive. The previous year's programme received over 500 submissions, the vast majority being false positives (estimated 99%). Each submission requires investigation and triage, ideally within 24 hours. Valid findings require additional time for root cause analysis, fix development, testing, and deployment.
This workload is increasing due to LLM-generated submissions, which are higher volume but lower quality - still requiring human review to identify the rare valid finding. We are working on setting up triage automations, which will help manage the increasing volume but will not eliminate the need for human review.
| # | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Triage, investigation & resolution | $100,000 |
| Total | $100,000 |
| # | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bug bounty fund (reward pool + platform) | $255,000 |
| 2 | Triage and response engineering | $100,000 |
| Total | $355,000 |
Snowbridge is Polkadot’s trustless bridge to Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem, providing critical infrastructure for liquidity and users moving between the two ecosystems. Over the past year the bridge processed ~21,000 transfers, maintained $10M–$20M in monthly volume, and generated 14,100 DOT in revenue for the Polkadot Treasury (view dashboard).
During the previous funding period the team delivered Snowbridge V2, reducing bridging fees by up to 90%, enabling arbitrary contract execution, and launching support for Base, Optimism and Arbitrum.
This proposal funds the basic maintenance and operation of the bridge for the next 12 months. The total request is $364,200 for 12 months, significantly smaller than the previous proposal.
Snowbridge is Polkadot’s common good trustless bridge to Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem.
Over the past two years it has become core infrastructure for cross-ecosystem liquidity, enabling users to move assets between Ethereum (and recently Base, Optimism and Arbitrum) and the Polkadot ecosystem without trusted intermediaries.
Statistics about the last year:
Snowbridge had two main goals for 2025, besides running a secure bridge:
Our team has delivered on this promise, slashing bridging fees for our users by at least 80%, and reducing latency where possible.
Our review of the last year can be viewed at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UY1-Ju5WvAlYM4gv8NbSJh7Rurdpu8zZOrs5Fv8d7Io/edit?usp=sharing
This proposal covers the scope of 2 full-time equivalent engineers (FTE). The core team commits to ensuring that two team members are allocated to the project at all times, regardless of the individual availability of specific team members.
Since software continuously evolves, ensuring Snowbridge continues to run securely and smoothly is by no means a passive task. Our team works on maintaining Snowbridge every day by investigating security reports logged through our bug bounty, ensuring our off-chain components are compliant with on-chain changes, such as updating our relayers and indexers when runtime upgrades occur. Our team is always on call for potential issues with transfers or user support.
Success metric: Snowbridge continues to run as a high availability and secure service.
As part of Snowbridge’s trustless architecture, the Ethereum light client on BridgeHub needs to be compliant with the Ethereum consensus spec. About twice a year, Ethereum undergoes hardforks that changes the format of consensus updates. Our team needs to be proactive and update:
Ethereum’s latest upcoming hardfork, Gloas, is expected to enact within the next 6 months. Heze is expected before end of this proposal, between H2 2026 and H1 2027.
The reason will monitor bridge availability during office hours, ensure relayers are running and providing consensus updates in a regular cadence.
Since Snowbridge is deployed on BridgeHub and AssetHub, runtime upgrades affect our off-chain infrastructure, and requires our team to update chain metadata in our indexer, gas estimator and sometimes UI and relayers.
The bug bounty fund is addressed in a separate proposal.
For a detailed review of the past year’s work, see Year In Review 2025/2026.
The total ask is $364,200 covering the period from May 2026 to April 2027.
| # | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 full-time developers ($9,417/month each × 12 months, $60/hr) | $226,000 |
| 2 | Technical lead reviewer ($2,000/month × 12 months) | $24,000 |
| Total | $250,000 |
The two developers handle all ongoing Snowbridge development and maintenance work. The technical lead reviewer is our main Solidity expert, providing architecture oversight, code review and internal security audits over any Solidity changes.
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Ethereum hardfork support (Gloas, Heze) | On-chain light client updates, relayer updates, proof generation changes, testnet coordination, Chopsticks testing, runtime upgrade release, governance proposals |
| Runtime upgrade compatibility | Update off-chain infrastructure (indexer, gas estimator, relayers) when BridgeHub/AssetHub runtime upgrades land |
| Relayer operations | Monitor and maintain consensus relayers, debug relay delays, handle stuck transfers |
| SDK and e2e test maintenance | Keep the Snowbridge SDK and end-to-end test suite up to date — required for verifying bridge correctness on every change |
| XCM handling improvements | Ad-hoc improvements related smarter XCM construction, for better error handling, etc. |
| Security audit follow-ups | Address any security findings that our team receives (we sometimes receive ad-hoc findings via email) |
| Polkadot SDK contributions | Ongoing upstream contributions to the Polkadot SDK for Snowbridge-related code |
| Task | Hours |
|---|---|
| Ethereum Hardforks | 700 |
| Gloas hardfork (light client updates, relayer changes, proof generation, testnet coordination, Chopsticks testing, runtime release, governance proposal) | 350 |
| Heze hardfork (same scope as Gloas) | 350 |
| Runtime Upgrades (~6/year) | 450 |
| On-chain changes that impact Snowbridge, updating of tests | 200 |
| Update off-chain infrastructure per upgrade (indexer metadata, gas estimator, relayers) | 250 |
| Relayer Operations | 350 |
| Consensus relayer monitoring and fixing compatibility issues with onchain code | 200 |
| Relayer optimizations to reduce infra costs | 150 |
| Solidity & Gateway Updates | 350 |
| Gateway contract updates for BEEFY changes | 100 |
| Solidity code review and internal security audit (technical lead) | 250 |
| SDK & End-to-End Testing | 450 |
| SDK updates to stay compatible with runtime and contract changes | 200 |
| End-to-end test suite maintenance and new test coverage | 250 |
| Infrastructure & DevOps | 600 |
| Lodestar node upgrades and maintenance | 150 |
| Westend/Paseo testnet infrastructure | 250 |
| Self-hosted indexer maintenance | 200 |
| Incident Response | 400 |
| Bridge incident investigation and resolution | 250 |
| Security finding triage (ad-hoc reports) | 150 |
| Unforeseeable feature and Improvement requests | 450 |
| Total | 3,750 |
Our team has done significant operational cost cutting over the past year, eliminating or self-hosting services that were previously paid for. We remove third party dependencies where we could and moved to self-hosting, to save on costs. We’re also only asking the treasury to cover infrastructure related to core bridge operations and consensus - not off-chain products, message relayers, frontend nor ancillary services.
Total core infrastructure costs are $64,200 annually.
| # | Item | Annual |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beefy light client on-chain costs (Ethereum gas) | $35,000 |
| 2 | AWS (Lodestar node for consensus updates, Paseo and Westend infra, Sepolia node, Indexer for monitoring) | $26,500 |
| 3 | Github | $2,000 |
| 4 | Testing gas fees | $700 |
| Subtotal | $64,200 |
| # | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Engineering | $250,000 |
| 2 | Company margin (20%) | $50,000 |
| 3 | Core bridge infrastructure | $64,200 |
| Total ask | $364,200 |
Our budget has been kept minimal, focused on core bridge infrastructure, consensus costs and engineering costs that are far below market rates. In order to remain competitive, it’s important for our staff and business to have security for our runway, and so we’re asking for a single up front payment covering the year’s runway of $364,200.
ℹ️ Please view the counterpart proposals:
This proposal is for the global deployment of a progressively decentralized archive RPC network for the Paseo testnet and its system parachains. Please view the detailed forum post for the complete background of the initial deployment for Polkadot Asset Hub and Coretime.
DeServe is:
This proposal requests $11,719.00 as the first payment, half of the first three months, to bootstrap the global rollout of all Paseo services. Subsequent payments will be requested via 3-monthly retroactive proposals, alongside full transparency reports covering expenses, performance, and request analytics.
The following X posts document DeServe's first days of deployment:
Over the first two weeks of deployment, DeServe has served over 500 million requests, and is currently serving >36M requests/day.
Live request analytics are available at the public dashboard.
| Chain | Archive RPC | ETH RPC | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paseo Relay Chain | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
| Asset Hub | ✅ | ✅ | To be deployed |
| Coretime | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
| Bridge Hub | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
| Collectives | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
| People | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
DeServe delivers the lowest latency among all major Polkadot RPC providers, verified via Compare Nodes, a global RPC performance inspector.
| Comparison | Continents | Regions |
|---|---|---|
| DeServe vs IBP | 5/6 | 18-20/26 |
| DeServe vs OnFinality | 6/6 | 25/26 |
| DeServe vs Dwellir | 6/6 | 24/26 |
| DeServe vs LuckyFriday | 6/6 | 24/26 |
Full benchmark runs:
IBP is currently the only other provider offering a global geo-steered RPC service, making it the most appropriate reference for cost comparison.
Note that IBP operates on a 2N redundancy model, while DeServe operates on a single-instance model with rapid failover through backups, as detailed in the Monitoring & High Availability section.
Given the current cost constraints of the Polkadot ecosystem, we find that single instance per location with backup mechanisms in place should be sufficient under a highly responsive load-balancing system. DeServe’s current setup monitors endpoints every 15 seconds, immediately removing any unreachable endpoint from the pool.
IBP costs for Paseo are taken from the same billing view as the Polkadot and Kusama figures.
| IBP | DeServe | |
|---|---|---|
| Paseo Relay Chain | $17,428.10 | $3,486.00 |
| Asset Hub | $5,101.06 | $1,020.00 |
| Ethereum RPC | $538.30 | $107.00 |
| Bridge Hub | $4,002.82 | $800.00 |
| Collectives | $4,002.82 | $800.00 |
| Coretime | $4,002.82 | $800.00 |
| People | $4,002.82 | $800.00 |
| TOTAL | $39,078.74 | $7,813.00 |
| vs. IBP | - | 80% cheaper |
Our cost model is illustrated in detail in the initial forum post. DeServe also provides GeoDNS services for free as part of the package, whereas IBP charges $1,200.00/month for this service. DeServe also comes without curator payments, which add further overhead to bounty-based programs. IBP curator payments add approximately $3,400.00/month in additional overhead (reference).
Labour costs for the current alpha phase are excluded from this proposal and covered by Helikon. As DeServe matures, operator labour costs will be standardized through protocol governance.
Submerge is a data and compliance platform for Polkadot SDK chains, currently in development by Helikon. Submerge has received treasury funding and is behind schedule. Its two main components, Crystal (a chain indexer), Mycelium (a cross-chain indexer), along with their APIs for all supported chains will be delivered before any further on-chain submission for DeServe.
Helikon is a Polkadot-native infrastructure and software development collective based in İstanbul. A regular contributor to the Polkadot ecosystem at both the development and governance levels since late 2020:
ℹ️ Please view the counterpart proposals:
This proposal is for the global deployment of a progressively decentralized archive RPC network for Polkadot and its system parachains. Please view the detailed forum post for the complete background of the initial deployment.
DeServe is:
This proposal requests $24,112.00 as the first payment, half of the first three months, to bootstrap the global rollout of all Polkadot services. Subsequent payments will be requested via 3-monthly retroactive proposals, alongside full transparency reports covering expenses, performance, and request analytics.
The following X posts document DeServe's first days of deployment:
Over the first two weeks of deployment, DeServe has served over 500 million requests, and is currently serving >36M requests/day.
Live request analytics are available at the public dashboard.
| Chain | Archive RPC | ETH RPC | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polkadot Relay Chain | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
| Asset Hub | ✅ | ✅ | Live |
| Coretime | ✅ | - | Live |
| Bridge Hub | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
| Collectives | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
| People | ✅ | - | To be deployed |
DeServe delivers the lowest latency among all major Polkadot RPC providers, verified via Compare Nodes, a global RPC performance inspector.
| Comparison | Continents | Regions |
|---|---|---|
| DeServe vs IBP | 5/6 | 18-20/26 |
| DeServe vs OnFinality | 6/6 | 25/26 |
| DeServe vs Dwellir | 6/6 | 24/26 |
| DeServe vs LuckyFriday | 6/6 | 24/26 |
Full benchmark runs:
IBP is currently the only other provider offering a global geo-steered RPC service, making it the most appropriate reference for cost comparison.
Note that IBP operates on a 2N redundancy model, while DeServe operates on a single-instance model with rapid failover through backups, as detailed in the Monitoring & High Availability section.
Given the current cost constraints of the Polkadot ecosystem, we find that single instance per location with backup mechanisms in place should be sufficient under a highly responsive load-balancing system. DeServe’s current setup monitors endpoints every 15 seconds, immediately removing any unreachable endpoint from the pool.
The compared numbers below are taken from IBP dashboard billing view.
| IBP | DeServe | |
|---|---|---|
| Polkadot Relay Chain | $48,399.18 | $9,680.00 |
| Asset Hub | $10,166.34 | $2,035.00 |
| Ethereum RPC | $538.30 | $107.00 |
| Bridge Hub | $6,377.54 | $1,275.00 |
| Collectives | $5,046.02 | $1,010.00 |
| Coretime | $4,785.22 | $958.00 |
| People | $5,046.02 | $1,010.00 |
| TOTAL | $80,358.62 | $16,075.00 |
| vs. IBP | - | 80% cheaper |
Our cost model is illustrated in detail in the initial forum post. DeServe also provides GeoDNS services for free as part of the package, whereas IBP charges $1,200.00/month for this service. DeServe also comes without curator payments, which add further overhead to bounty-based programs. IBP curator payments add approximately $3,400.00/month in additional overhead (reference).
Labour costs for the current alpha phase are excluded from this proposal and covered by Helikon. As DeServe matures, operator labour costs will be standardized through protocol governance.
Submerge is a data and compliance platform for Polkadot SDK chains, currently in development by Helikon. Submerge has received treasury funding and is behind schedule. Its two main components, Crystal (a chain indexer), Mycelium (a cross-chain indexer), along with their APIs for all supported chains will be delivered before any further on-chain submission for DeServe.
Helikon is a Polkadot-native infrastructure and software development collective based in İstanbul. A regular contributor to the Polkadot ecosystem at both the development and governance levels since late 2020:
This Referendum is canceled. Please (continue to) vote Nay.
A new version incorporating the feedback received here is up for vote: New Proposal
Voters have become increasingly cautious, making it harder for projects to gain approval for their proposals. Our project introduces a clawback mechanism to significantly reduce risks to the Polkadot Treasury. By implementing this safeguard, we aim to lower financial exposure and provide voters with peace of mind to confidently approve funding for impactful projects.
With our tool, a group of decentralized treasury guardians is incentivized to oversee scheduled payouts and intervene when necessary to protect the Treasury.
Key features of our proposal:
We are passionate about leading the charge to de-risk the Treasury, enhance its efficiency, and better align the interests of token holders and proposers. We eagerly look forward to collaborating with the Polkadot community and new + existing ecosystem teams to achieve these goals.
Read our full proposal here.
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