Polkadot Ethereum Bridge: SnowBridge Seeks $6M in Funding

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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