Hey everyone!
We are excited to share our progress with regards tor the DeFi Infra and Tooling Bounty. Together with the Bounty curators, last week we submitted our first child bounties that went through the our Bounty’s internal voting process:
Project Name: KuCoin
Type: Centralized Exchange
Deliverable: Asset Hub integration with support for USDT deposits/withdrawals
Child Bounty Size: $63,000 USD
Ecosystem Benefit: One of the goals of this bounty was to incentivize infrastructure providers like CEXs and On/Off Ramps to support Asset Hub with their services. This has several benefits to Polkadot including the improvement of accessibility to our ecosystem, specifically for stablecoin liquidity in the form of USDT and USDC. KuCoin is one of the leading CEXs , providing the Polkadot ecosystem with a significant number of users.
Status: The integration was completed back in March 2024 with the official announcement HERE. The bounty wasn’t active back then, thus Velocity Labs funded the initiative, in order to expedite production. This child bounty was awarded to Velocity’s official wallet, reimbursing the funds previously spent. Proof of the payments to KuCoin was provided to the curators before the vote.
Project Name: Ramp Network
Type: On/Off Ramp
Deliverable: Asset Hub integration with support for USDT, USDC and DOT deposits.
Child Bounty Size: $60,000 USD
Ecosystem Benefit: Similar to the one mentioned above for KuCoin but with the added benefit that Ramp will be supporting more assets. Ramp Network provides its users with easy ways of onramping from fiat to crypto in a simple and cost efficient way. Although CEXs provide cheaper alternatives, Onramps are able to offer a diverse set of payment options. In addition to that, Ramp has committed to working on the integration of Asset Transfer API into their systems to be able to offer direct-to-parachain on-ramps. They are currently in talks with both Polimec and Moonbeam to enable these. Velocity Labs will be supporting them in order to continue expanding their reach.
Ramp would be the first service provider to enable these userflows finally materializing the Asset Hub vision while abstracting it away from the user and providing infra providers with a scalable way of supporting the ecosystem without having to integrate each parachain independently. We’ll be providing more updates as Ramp communicates them to us.
Status: This was delivered and announced back in April (announcement HERE) with the direct-to-parachain on ramps still pending development.
Project Name: Zapper
Type: DeFi Explorer
Deliverable: Integration of 4 EVM parachains (Astar, Hydra, Moonbeam, Acala, Hydration) into their Zapper platform.
Child Bounty Size: $118,000 total, split into 3 deliverables. This specific child bounty is for MS1 which was $5,000.
Ecosystem Benefit: Zapper is one of the most widely used Portfolio Management and DeFi explorer tools in the Ethereum ecosystem. They provide on-chain events related to DeFi (memecoins, DEXs, NFTs) in a human-readable way while adding a social component to the experience: through Zapper, you can see what “whales” or high profile accounts are doing. Although they have firstly kept their chain support limited to Ethereum Mainnet and the main L2s, they have now decided to branch out. Having Polkadot parachains being exposed in Zapper will provide an exposure to user bases that wouldn’t otherwise be aware of activity within Polkadot. This will create the opportunity for the initial supported parachains to acquire new users from the Ethereum world. Pending on the success of this integration, Zapper committed to making a follow-on proposal for other non-EVM parachains in the future.
Status: Zapper are currently doing both technical and product research on each of the mentioned parachains to scope out what dApps and events will be exposed in their webapp. This is a part of the first milestone, corresponding to the submitted child bounty. The rest will follow upon completion and attestation by Velocity Labs.