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How do you personally discover services available in the Polkadot ecosystem?
Project Summary
Chain.Love is a Booking.com–style marketplace for the Web3 infrastructure.
Used by developers and AI agents, it enables discovery, comparison, and access for infrastructure services (APIs, CPU/GPU compute, dev tools) via a single UI and API.
Our mission is to make blockchain services accessible, transparent, and reliable by providing networks, providers and developers with a unified hub for discovery, comparison, and consumption of Web3 services. We empower ecosystems to grow faster by reducing fragmentation, increasing trust, and enabling fair competition among providers.
A deeper story-telling dive into why the project is important and also a comparison with the existing solution is available at the Discussions tab
Problem-solution set
Problem
Web3 infrastructure is fragmented and inefficient. Developers building on new blockchains face a messy and time-consuming process when setting up services they depends on:
• Developers struggle to discover and compare infra by price, limits, features, and performance. The process is manual and time consuming
• Each chain documentation links to different SDKs, APIs, bridges, wallets, faucets, oracles, and other tools — all with their own docs, pricing, limits, and formats. More information about how this affecting the Polkadot ecosystem is available here.
• Every developer has different needs: some care about uptime, others about speed, privacy, programming language adoption, specific API methods, or regional access. But today, finding the right provider means digging through scattered resources and testing everything manually.
Solution
Our Toolbox layer is aligning the incentives. It acts as a single, trusted hub where developers can discover all available options and compare providers side-by-side:
• Devs get single UI/API to find, compare, and access all services for all networks. They may also leverage performance monitoring and load balancer as a service to achieve higher quality of the Polkadot's APIs.
• Providers get aggregated demand and lower customer acquisition cost
• Automatic fisherman-like verifications designed to verify the existence of the providers and the quality of their services
Costs justification
There are 3 main cost drivers:
- Engineering time — core marketplace development and performance module tuning, including initial configuration and testing aligned with Polkadot ecosystem parameters (API setup, validation, and benchmarking).
- Maintenance time — ongoing work required to ensure high availability and reliability of the Chain.Love service.
- Documentation, open-source database population, and developer engagement — maintaining and expanding public documentation, contributing to the initial dataset and its regular updates, actively participating in community channels (chats, forums, and other ecosystem venues), monitoring ecosystem development, proactively updating information about newly emerging services, and encouraging developers to contribute to the open-source database.
Milestones
Milestone 1
Amount (DOT): 5000
Timeline: within 1 week
Milestone description:
Developers want to be able to easily discover, compare and access service in the Polkadot ecosystem. They need verified, structured, comparable, visually-represented datasets when discovering web3 service providers. For that developers need a place where I can discover, compare and purchase Web3 servces. They can't rely on documentation alone, because once one decide to build on Polkadot, the questions one need to answer immediately become practical and comparative than the documentation may answer, namely:
- Is there an SDK/library for the programming language I'm planning to write on?
- Where to get free tokens? Which faucet are reliable? Do they provide enough funds for me? Will I need to perform the KYC?
- Is there a wallet that is compatible between all the network I plan to deploy on?
- Which oracles, RPCs, bridges do exist, and which have usable free tiers?
- Is there a company performing security audits?
- How do I compare all these options in a big ecosystem side-by-side without visiting 10 sites and reading inconsistent docs?
Today, there is no neutral, structured, up-to-date answer to these questions in the Polkadot ecosystem. The reality is described at the Discussions tab.
As a part of this milestone we deploy a life installation of Chain.Love Toolbox. A real-life example on how one looks inside of the Polkadot-based network - Astar - can be seen here: https://astar.chain.love
Deliverables
1) https://polkadot.chain.love toolbox
2) Embeddable Toolbox widget ready for inclusion in the Polkadot docs or any ecosystem pages (optional). Example: https://chain-love.gitbook.io/chain.loves-toolbox/features/widget-for-docs/example-of-our-widget
3) At least 5 (or maximum existing) providers listed per every existing category that matches the Polkadot ecosystem (currently there are 13 categories: apis, explorers, oracles, bridges, sdks, faucets, analytics, wallets, platforms, ramps, security, storages and other services; a number of categories is constantly increasing)
4) (Optional) New categories added where relevant to the Polkadot ecosystem
5) AI-powered search fully operational on Toolbox that returns relevant and consistent results for user queries. Why usual AI is not fitting here is described at the Discussions tab
Milestone 2
Amount (DOT): 5000
Timeline: within 3 months
Polkadot ecosystem deservers to see a real-time adoption and usage metrics of the solutions, that were bootstrapped using the grant funding. As a part of this milestone we will publish public real-time MAU analytics dashboard and will dedicate efforts to bootstrap the usage of the Toolbox in the Polkadot ecosystem. As well, we will continue our efforts on increasing the overall Toolbox adoption as an industry standard.
Deliverables
1) A growth of at least 25% MoM active usage is achieved for the first 3 consecutive months
2) Toolbox uptime ≥99.9% since launch
3) Developer feedback loop live (GitHub Discussions, Polkadot forum, or equivalent)
4) A set of patches in the existing Polkadot documentation proposed to include Chain.Love as the information source.
Milestone 3
Amount (DOT): 10000
Timeline: 12 months+
During the support phase that will last at least a year, and likely more (roadmap to full self-sustainability can be found at the bottom of this page) we will keep updating the Chain.Love database of the Polkadot ecosystem, improving the marketplace and encouraging regular developers to contribute into the open-source database of Polkadot ecosystem services
Deliverables
1) Regular database updates (at least 2 per month) with at least half of the contributions being done by external contributors. At least 15 unique contributors, with at least 30 pull request merged from them, updating information about the Polkadot ecosystem.
2) ≥3 top developer-requested features shipped based on community feedback
3) Monthly and quarterly updates summarizing progress, and a comprehensive maintenance report at the end of the 12-month period.
4) (optional) new categories added to better represent Polkadot ecosystem
Project success metrics
We believe that the key success criteria for this project is it becoming fully self-sustainable and supporting Polkadot ecosystem for years ahead. For that we need to keep increasing our adoption, and developing a distinct unique features, such as the one described later in this proposal in the Roadmap section.
As for the adoption part, we have a structured plan on how to attract more users and make our product more visible, namely:
1) Search indexing – provider pages and comparison pages (“RPC A vs RPC B”, “Best free Polkadot oracles”) indexed by the search engines similarly to Versus-style sites.
2) AI ingestion – MCP / structured access so LLMs pull fresh web3 services data instead of hallucinating.
3) Docs integration – we have an open-source widget that is basically a light embeddable version of Chain.Love that you may include into your network documentation.
4) Providing additional functionality on top - monitoring and load balancer as a service. Also, developing a transactional marketplace will solve a problem of services being scattered too much. The roadmap to it is described below.
5) Developers motivation - we believe that no matter how much we try we will not be able to keep up with the pace of changes in the such a rapidly developing ecosystem as Web3. This is why we’ve realized, that the path to succeed here - is to motivate those working with the chains - developers - to contribute into our database. For that purpose we’ve made it open-source, and for that purpose we are running a reward program, giving tiny, but stable[coin] rewards to those contributing. We are maitaining a balance by not providing too high bounties (and yet providing tangible ones) to ensure we attract visioners, not bounty hunters.
6) DevRel alignment – positioning Chain.Love as a complement to official docs, not a replacement. This approach has already been positively validated with DevRel teams and developers across multiple ecosystems (Arbitrum, Algorand, Filecoin, Flare, Sonic, Somnia). Here are the few examples of ecosystems posting about us:
-Arbitrum
-Filecoin
-Algorand
-Chainbase
Additional criterias include:
- High uptime of over ≥99.9% since launch
- Proven MAU growth trend with public analytics
- Alive community that submits PRs and suggest new features to implement.
Roadmap
Chain.Love team currently runs more than 15 live installations across multiple blockchain networks, serving over 1,000 real monthly active users (developers). We live off the initial investment from Protofire DAO, as well as a number of grants and recurring clients:
- $20k+ MRR
- Customers : Filecoin, Arbitrum, Somnia, Fuse, Algorand
- Grants received: Filecoin Foundation, Arbitrum DAO
- Winner of EigenLayer Hackathon, validating reliability module
To become fully self-sustainable we are in progress of transition to becoming a transactional marketplace. For that, we develop and OpenAPI specification (so providers can integrate with the Chain.Love in an automated way) and a x402-based system (so user purchases can be done automatically). The scope and the proposed butdget of this proposal, for now, remains on addressing the service discoverability problem (why this is a problem can be seen at the Discussions tab), however, should there be interest from the ecosystem in bringing the x402-payments to the Polkadot ecosystem, we would be very interested in collaborating and contributing in that direction.
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