Community discussion: stewarding important Polkadot tools/dApps after recent shutdowns

Ecosystem
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Over the last few weeks, with the pause on W3F grants and a shift in how ecosystem support is expected to flow through the treasury, it feels like Polkadot is entering a new phase. Not necessarily a negative one, but certainly a different one.

During this period, we’ve seen several Polkadot tools and applications being paused, sunset, or shut down. In most cases, these decisions are completely understandable. Teams move on, funding models change, and priorities evolve.

As the ecosystem’s support and funding landscape changes, this feels like a good moment to reflect on which tools and applications are simply too valuable to be left unattended, even if their original teams have stepped away.

We wanted to ask the community:

Are there any Polkadot tools, applications, or developer infrastructure that have recently been shut down or left without active maintainers, but that you personally feel are important to keep alive?

This could be:

  • developer tooling
  • infrastructure services
  • libraries with real downstream usage
  • applications that solved a real problem but no longer have an active team behind them

For context, we at ChainScore Labs are interested in offering stewardship for a small, limited set of high-priority projects, where there is alignment.

We’re an engineering firm that has been part of the Polkadot ecosystem for years. Our work includes DotRing, actively developing a JAM client (Tessera), and creating multiple tools around JAM such as SDKs, a playground IDE, and explorers.

By stewardship, we mean the practical, ongoing work required to keep projects healthy and usable:

  • maintenance, upgrades, and bug fixes
  • reviews and CI health
  • security and dependency checks
  • releases and general responsiveness

Before proposing anything concrete, we want to listen and understand:

  1. which shutdowns have actually hurt builders or users
  2. which tools people are quietly missing
  3. which components are now in a “no one owns this anymore” state

The goal is not to take over projects or change their original direction, but to help ensure that critical pieces of Polkadot’s stack remain reliable as the ecosystem’s support models evolve. Any stewardship would be done transparently, with community input, and without changing the original spirit of the project.

We’d really appreciate hearing from builders, maintainers, and users who have felt the impact of recent shutdowns, or who are concerned about something important being quietly left behind.

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Turtle by velocity labs is a good DEX aggregator or cross-chain swap app, also shutting down.

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You don’t need permission or opinions to fork an important unmaintained project and revive it. You can just go ahead and do it. If you don’t know which projects are vital and should be kept alive, then you’re probably not a user of these software, therefore you may not be on top of what’s really going on in Polkadot.

You ask:

Are there any Polkadot tools, applications, or developer infrastructure that have recently been shut down or left without active maintainers, but that you personally feel are important to keep alive?

If you don’t understand that it is you to whom you should be asking this question, then answering it and solving problems, then you’re probably not getting why treasury management in Polkadot ended up having to transition to a “next phase”. You don’t “ask the community”. You “are” the community and you solve your own problems. Go do real work and solve problems instead of wasting your and time here running after community cheer for your next grant/treasury proposal.

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@kukabi Nobody here is confused about how forks works, incase you’ve not worked around any - thats not how established tools or projects evolve. What you’re missing is the difference bw random forks and actual stewardship. Forking without understanding usage, dependencies, and downstream impact is how you waste months keeping the wrong thing alive. If that concept feels new, it explains a lot and I understand your concern.

In case you didn’t read above - we’re not asking for grants/proposal; we’re offering our time looking to connect with projects and teams that need to be maintained for the ecosystem. No, we don’t all the toolings and dApps that are shutting down and used by people we don’t know. If you already know which tools are vital, name them. Otherwise, nobody here wants performative arrogance from the cheap seats.

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Hi @prasad,

I have to say I’m pretty perplexed by your messages.

First, please know that @kukabi is a very well-respected builder and long-time contributor in the Polkadot ecosystem. He’s also someone who recently stepped up and helped rescue Multix. He isn’t being arrogant here, he’s pointing the obvious: how can you credibly offer “stewardship” if you don’t seem to have a clear picture of what’s actually happening on the ground?

For example, you mention “abandoned” tooling like PJS. Do you understand the actual issues with PJS today, and what “stewarding” it would really entail? Concretely:

  • What’s your plan to migrate it to the newer JSON-RPC APIs?
  • How do you plan to deal with its type registry?
  • What’s your approach to fixing all its leaky abstractions?
  • Can you make it compliant with extrinsic v5?
  • What’s your plan to make it compliant with the new createTransaction interface?
  • How will you handle versioned signed extensions?

Anyone who has had to work deeply with that codebase will tell you the same thing: the healthiest path is likely to formally deprecate it, announce a clear sunset date as soon as possible, and invest heavily in helping its users move to modern alternatives.

So what kind of “stewardship” are you proposing to get us there? How would it be financed? And what makes you confident you have the know-how to lead it, if you can’t yet provide a basic analysis of the situation?

I have to say that this situation reminds me of what happened not that long ago when the W3F asked LimeChain to do something similar… :person_facepalming:

Otherwise, nobody here wants performative arrogance from the cheap seats.

To be candid: I was going to try to help you, but after seeing how you spoke to @kukabi for stating the obvious, I don’t feel like spending time educating you.

Good luck with the stewardship pitch. It’s possible that the new overlords of OpenGov will fell for it and even fund it. However, what we need right now isn’t rhetoric, it’s people who can step up, understand the technical reality, and do the work.

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Exactly the kind of discussion I wanted to have, to understand the projects within the ecosystem which are important and needed stewardship.

I’m not sure why anyone would get arrogant towards it.

Go do real work and solve problems instead of wasting your and time here running after community cheer for your next grant/treasury proposal.

Even if not us, just having a discussion around what tools are critical could help other builders who can contribute take up meaningful work. Again - we’re not asking for funding, just opening a discussion around recent events. I don’t wish to continue this hostile thread, I’ll leave it open if anyone has anything meaningful to share.

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What is wrong with what he asked? I’m probably the most anti-social person here, but even I can see the point of this post: we are losing apps and tools that people actually use. They are simply trying to engage the community to see what is most important, and the reply they got is “you should just know.”

That makes no sense. Can we move past the idea that every time someone wants to help, we default to assuming they are just looking for OpenGov funding? I can’t say that isn’t the goal here, but we really should be more welcoming. People have lives; they shouldn’t be expected to have a 360-degree view of what’s going on at every level of Polkadot at all times.

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