June 18 Updates:

We've been speaking to various stakeholders and taken note of the comments above. We’d like to share a few updates and changes to the proposal that we believe address concerns and align our team’s efforts with growth and TVL creation for Polkadot. The updates fall into three areas:

1. Growth and Value Creation

To date, our roadmap has blended engineering and BD. Going forward, we’re shifting focus primarily toward growth and ecosystem value creation to increase Polkadot TVL.

We’ve published an updated roadmap highlighting concrete growth initiatives:

👉 https://www.notion.so/snowfork/Snowbridge-s-Plan-for-World-Domination-210296aaabef80edaa90dc9426375f68

With the upcoming launch of Snowbridge V2, we also commit to connecting Snowbridge with all major Ethereum L2s — including Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Unichain, and more — for seamless messaging and asset transfer with more high-liquidity ecosystems.

2. Cost Model & Incentives

Costs

A common theme in feedback was cost transparency — here's a breakdown:

• 2024 Costs: ~$2.2M
  • Covers a 5-person team, travel, infrastructure/relayers/gas, audits, software, and legal/admin/payroll/accounting company margins.
• 2025 Projections: Similar costs, focused on growth engineering, developer advocacy, and ecosystem support.
• Longer-Term: We expect to gradually downsize into maintenance/support mode at < $1M/year, and even lower once the Polkadot Hub / Bridge Hub merge matures. The long-term cost to the treasury should be minimal unless further growth is pursued — which would be optional.

Incentives

Proposal Breakdown ($5M):

• $1M: Milestone Vesting (this is for work already completed 2 years ago, still vesting due to us agreeing to a 2-year vesting period)
• $300k: Failed payment
• $3.7M: Long-term incentive funding

The 2025 incentive ask is effectively $1.5M over and above our base costs.

We believe this is fair: the incentive structure was set 4 years ago, passed via multiple governance votes, and was based on concrete deliverables — notably, integrations across the ecosystem. The goal was 9; we did heavy B2B marketing and BD work and we’ve delivered 24+, and aided in wider Asset Hub and XCM adoption efforts.

Snowbridge also ranks #2 in TVL across all Polkadot protocols, second only to Hydration.

While ~$60M TVL is just a start, we’re aligned with the community in pushing that higher this year. Reducing pre-agreed and achieved incentives at this stage would feel like a rug pull — but we're committed to making things work and believe the shift to growth focus reflects that.

3. Comparisons and Context

We’ve also seen questions about how our funding compares to others:

When Snowbridge began, other bridge projects were raising $10M+ with token upside in the tens of millions. We had similar offers — but chose instead to build Snowbridge as a public good, foregoing tokenomics and focusing on light-client integrity and Ethereum interoperability, which we believe serves Polkadot best.

Closer to home, Hyperbridge raised ~$6M, and their 20% team token allocation is likely to result in $10M+ total with even a modest token market cap.

Note: We do fully support Hyperbridge. We share a belief that well-funded core infrastructure efforts are still positive-sum for the ecosystem and we’re simply highlighting this to provide context for our proposal ask, which remains in line with or even below market norms for teams delivering comparable value.

Let us know if any parts require further clarification. We're committed to aligning our work with the network's needs and believe this proposal represents a reasonable and mutually beneficial path forward.

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Original Post

Full Proposal: https://snowfork.notion.site/Snowbridge-2025-2026-Milestone-Payouts-1f2296aaabef803391dde2cfba18a7d6

Overview

Snowbridge (https://app.snowbridge.network/) has now been live for almost a year, running successfully with no on chain issues and zero on chain downtime. It’s the longest running and most complex public goods project in the Polkadot ecosystem outside of Parity itself and since launch has become critical to the Polkadot ecosystem.

Snowbridge is the only fully trustless bridge in the ecosystem - meaning it is both fully governed by Polkadot itself and fully owned by the Polkadot Treasury as a system that can facilitate further growth and value flow into the treasury.

(For a deeper dive into Snowbridge’s purpose and value to the Polkadot ecosystem, see the “Purpose” section in our original funding proposal)

Since our launch, we've seen:

• Total Value Locked (TVL): ~$63M
  • Top Assets: MYTH, KILT, TBTC, AAVE, WETH, ETH, wstETH
• Ecosystem Integrations: ~24 different integrations with parachains, wallets, apps, and other services across the Polkadot ecosystem. We’ve detailed all of these in the full proposal, but they include:
  • Helping Mythical launch their parachain, bridging over all their ERC20 tokens
  • Hydration integration with plans for their upcoming incentive program.
  • Major efforts towards Polkadot hub, integrating with Asset Hub and driving adoption of Asset Hub along with support in developing wallet integrations
  • Collaboration on design of XCMv5 and supporting XCM adoption in general.
  • StellaSwap integration and their newly launched liquidity program

We’re also expecting a burst of additional TVL soon, as some new key assets and stablecoins will soon launch on Hydration and other chains.

Year in Review and Purpose of Proposal

Our team has continued to ship tons of features and improvements for Snowbridge over the last year including significant cost and performance improvements, developer tooling for integrations and a major re-architecture into Snowbridge V2 for much improved arbitrary messaging support.

Our original proposal was in 2022, where our team and the Polkadot community agreed upon an expected milestone payment plan and incentives for the long-term project. This led to the successful development and launch of Snowbridge, and our follow up proposal last year kicked off those milestone completion payments which have been unlocking monthly over the last year.

This proposal covers the next year of spends for the final 12 milestone payments and team incentives from June 2025 to June 2026. It also renews the insurance and bug bounty programmes that we put in place last year for further incentive alignment.

Our team has continued to deliver improvements over and above those in our milestones and we’ve become involved in a myriad of efforts that have brought significant value to the wider Polkadot ecosystem beyond just for Snowbridge. This proposal reviews our past year and suggests a continued roadmap with growth plan efforts for the coming year.

We'd also love to get early feedback from the community with regards to our future plans and opinions on how Snowbridge should continue to grow and evolve in ways to bring the most value to the Polkadot community - our team is committed to keep delivering value and if any further ideas come up for our roadmap, we'd love to consider them!

Payment Overview

Total amount: 254,064 DOT and 4,062,500 USDC (~5M USD, based on the current Coingecko price of 4.10, with a 10% buffer for slippage), broken down into:

• Milestone completion bonus:
  • 21,172 DOT unlock per month from June 2025 to June 2026. Total 254,064 DOT (based on $937,500).
  • Covers our final 12 months expected payouts for completed engineering and launch milestones
• Successful operation incentives:
  • 156,250 USDC & 156,250 USDT unlock per month from May 2025 to June 2026. Total 4,062,500 USDC.
  • Covers our final 13 out of 21 months payouts. (based on the schedule agreed upon in our original proposal for longer term success in maintenance and development work on the bridge)
• Insurance and Bug Bounty: The above milestone and operation incentives will also be allocated to be used for bridge insurance and bug bounty payments until they unlock.

Beneficiary Address: 129Uxho5oKBz6js8dwjoQLzLjYsEs4ZLBtS7KRotQbunVNfP