SnowBridge, a trustless cross-chain bridge designed to link Polkadot with Ethereum, is seeking approximately $6 million in DOT tokens funding from the Polkadot community.

The firm’s proposal stated that the funds are intended to ensure Snowbridge’s long-term success, align the team’s incentives with the Polkadot community, and provide financial guarantees for the bridge’s users.

Treasury proposal

According to the proposal, SnowBridge is seeking 999,568 DOT, equivalent to $5,797,500. The fund includes an immediate payment of 191,379 DOT (approximately $1.2m) and a two-year vesting of 323,275 DOT (nearly $1.9 million).

Additionally, 161,637 DOT ($937,500) will be paid out over three months. The remaining 53,879 DOT ($312,500) will be disbursed monthly from September 2024 to February 2025.

SnowBridge stated that the funding aims to enhance user insurance and maintain the bridge for future growth and adoption. It added:

“This proposal finalizes the payments for our 2024 completed engineering milestones, operating costs, and team incentives. It also introduces additional incentive alignment controls and medium-term insurance guarantees for the bridge.”

Notably, this request follows the completion of the two-week test period for the Ethereum-Polkadot bridge. The bridge uses first-party signatures from validators on both networks, ensuring transparency, permissionlessness, and auditability. The first version supports ERC20 asset transfers, with plans to include arbitrary messaging in the future.

Meanwhile, Colorful Nation, a Web3 ecosystem agent, advised SnowBridge to prepare some sort of insurance fund in case the platform was exploited. It stated:

“The world has seen dozens of bridge hacks and obviously the ‘voidspend’ mechanism should be used in the tragic event that the bridge has some vulnerability.”

The firm also noted that the proposal should be coupled with “compelling liquidity incentives to bring Ethereum assets (WETH, WBTC, …) over to Polkadot.”

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Polkadot’s governance is currently mulling over a proposal to activate SnowBridge, a cross-chain bridge designed to link the Polkadot blockchain with Ethereum.

A cross-chain bridge essentially serves as a decentralized application (DApp), streamlining asset transfers between blockchains to enhance token utility by fostering cross-chain liquidity.

Market observers have highlighted the significant role SnowBridge would play in enabling Polkadot’s ecosystem to tap into Ethereum’s extensive DeFi landscape.

The SnowBridge proposal has garnered substantial support from the community due to the potential benefits, t, with all cast votes currently in favor of its implementation. If approved, SnowBridge is slated to go live in 28 days.

What is SnowBridge?

SnowBridge is one of the many bridges under development within the Polkadot ecosystem. This initiative, a collaboration between Snowfork and Parity Technologies, aims to revolutionize the movement of Ethereum assets into and out of Polkadot.

Currently, bridging ERC-20 tokens into Polkadot necessitates using bridges reliant on third-party signatures. While this method is standard in Web3 ecosystems, it poses limitations for Parachains and dApps on Polkadot due to its impact on their trust model.

SnowBridge offers a solution through a trustless model that relies solely on signatures from first-party Ethereum and Polkadot validators. It operates on BridgeHub and is poised to enhance cross-chain interaction between Polkadot and Ethereum.

SnowBridge has been in development for some time and was deployed on the Polkadot parachain testnet Rococo in January 2024. Subsequently, developers utilized it to transfer assets between the Ethereum Sepolia testnet and AssetHub on Rococo, with ERC-20 tokens initially being the sole supported asset type.

Since its deployment, several updates to SnowBridge have been implemented based on thorough testing and audits conducted by the team and security firms.

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