Fellow Polkadot Community Members:
On behalf of the Lucky Friday team, please let me start by apologizing for not posting this one week ahead of time per the DF program parameters. Although aware of this condition, I personally lost track of it due to being so focused on our recent DV delegation, spearheading internal meetings around OpenGov, getting team members to vote via the bot, providing feedback as requested, etc.
That said, we have been working for some time on our MVP, StakePad, the institutional focused UI that will allow our customers to seamlessly stake or boot up their own validators nodes. As of right now, only our EVM based version is running, but we hope to use these grant funds to help defray the cost of implementing a Substrate version that will allow institutional players with funds in custody to stake their DOT and/or KSM via our single, simple UI.
Moreover, we would like to use this new functionality to help bolster other community nodes, specifically 1KV operators who could then potentially segue into the active set. This will help the overall security and decentralization of the network by steering stake to smaller operators rather than giants such as P2P or Coinbase Cloud.
We are putting finishing touches on the application now as it is due today, and I will edit this post to contain the link once we have the document in its final form to be submitted to W3F.
Please feel free to add questions or comments below, as we will try to incorporate it before our submission in about 10 hours or so.
Thank you in advance for your time and attention in this matter!
Best,
Phunky and the Lucky Friday team 