Is there a better way to discover Web3 services in the Polkadot ecosystem?

Ecosystem
1

Preamble

Hey, everyone.

It’s, I think, my 3rd attempt to do things right and get some feedback from the Polkadot ecosystem. I have an active referenda at the moment about the solution I’m proposing that should bring good to the Polkadot ecosystem. However, I got an advise to post here, if I want to get an actual feedback, so here I am.

A clearly explained “no” is better than silence, because at least you know why you are failing.

Fable

Problem statement

So, let me start this with a simple question.

How do you personally discover services available in the Polkadot ecosystem?

While doing my research I came up with polkadot ecosystem website that is being run by lvweb3. Don’t treat it as a promotion, please, I need to describe the existing solution to ask if there is an actual better way.

So, there are things that I definitely like and do not like about this page, namely:

Pros:

  1. It is open-source. In an active community having an open-source documentation is a total must-have. Otherwise you are going to simply drown in following many updates that are happenning in the tools for the ecosystem

  2. lvweb3 have been around Polkadot ecosystem for a couple of years now, and probably he gains trust of the Polkadot ecosystem, which can be clearly seen by the voting last year with more than 78% of voters voting in favor of issuing a grant.

  3. Multi-language, so people can find information useful in their language, although I see that the portal is not fully translated and suffers from constant language switching when navigating through different pages.

  4. The website is fully dedicated to the ecosystem. This approach is having it’s own pros and cons, of course.

Cons:

  1. How do I actually compare anything there? Like, when opening polkassembly I wanted to know if any of the wallets I’m already having is actually supporting both EVM networks and Substrate ones, just not to install yet-another-wallet-that-I-will-forget-soon, but can I do that? Or, when I’m thinking about developing a dApp - I want to check which of the RPC providers are having limitations, and what are these limitations really?

  2. Are there at least links to these providers, so when I’m googling I’m not getting into a scammy website?

  3. The last update was several months ago and some of the tools were not updated for much longer. Can we say that all the data stays the same when it comes to months of work? The problem is essentially lack of incentive for anyone to go and update this page beyond a lvweb3 man supporting it and a few contributors who appears around once a year.

The last point is not made to do any harm, but rather to ask a question - what incentive does one have to participate and keep all the documentation up to date? Keeping the documentation up to date will always be “an expense” for the ecosystem. And that is the problem we are aiming to solve.

What do I propose?

As a part of a team of a name that I can’t name because otherwise it will probably be considered a promotion and deleted again, I have been working on a platform that can be described as a “marketplace” of Web3 services. It’s key component is called “Toolbox” - a place to discover, compare and access different services available over the ecosystem. Here is the example from the Polkadot ecosystem network, where we have our solution already:

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The points I’ve addressed above we are covering in the following way:

  1. We build it on top of the open-source database.

  2. We keep our contributors motivated - every adjustment that brings value to the ecosystem is paid according to the established set of rules (aka “Database population grant program”).

  3. We launch a subdomain that is dedicated to the ecosystem, with no network-switcher, so no “user leak” occurs here.

  4. We have a fully-functional search, filter and side-by-side comparison across categories

  5. We have been noted and trusted by a number of major ecosystems. I would attach examples of the tweets here, but probably the post will then get banned again.

  6. We are not only verifying all the links in our database, we have also periodic automatic checkers that update all the outdated links and remove deprecated projects

  7. We have a working AI search that helps users to get answers in their natural language. To clarify - regular AI is not as good because it does not have our database as an information source. And AI is only as good as its sources. Web3 service data is fragmented, non-standardized, and changes frequently. As a result, generic AI answers about RPCs, pricing, limits, or features are often outdated or simply wrong.

Try for yourself! Imagine you are an engineerthat wants to build adApp… on Ethereum. You don’t have much money, but your app will be super RPC call-intensive. Now, try asking any AI you know on what is a cheapest RPC provider on Ethereum from the query fee perspective. I can predict the answer more or less, since we used to run these tests dozens of times: “Absolutely! Here are the top-3 providers on Ethereum with lowest access fee as of <CURRENT_MONTH> 2026!” And then it will give you a list of 3 random provider names and their hardly comparable query fees, while proofing it with an article written back in 2023.

Our AI is based on our database, providing an actual up to date information, and we plan to build an MCP server that will be an all-in-one Web3 MCP collection.

Now. Of course, the money have to come from somewhere, right? In our team we are not only having our own runway, but we already secured more than $20k MRR (monthly recurring revenue) by selling side services (such as RPC, Indexing, Performance monitoring, Advertisment, etc.), and we are aiming to make a big leap towards becoming a transactional marketplace.

Roadmap: Transactional marketplace

We want providers to be able to “plug-in” their solutions and sell them in a fully automated mode via an OpenAPI standard we are currently developing.

That part is being under construction as we speak. We are actively looking for an ecosystem that may be interested in funding/investing into its development, to secure a flow of purchases through the ecosystem’s native token. It’s a bigger investment, but also a much bigger outcome once real transactions start flowing.

Summary

We would love to deploy our solution to Polkadot, and I’m curious here whether you see the value in such a solution?

There are three possible modes:

  • a discovery / comparison layer (Toolbox) - it can be a quid pro quo, with us deploying it even for free in exchange for an active promotion inside of the ecosystem;
  • same Toolbox, but as a paid servce - with all the SLAs and hard guarantees of regular updates from our team. For that we already have a referenda, and I’m asking all of you interested in our solution to come and support us.
  • a fully-featured services marketplace

I’m very curious whether either of these aligns with the current interests and priorities of the Polkadot ecosystem.

I’m not going to leave here any links, so the post is not getting banned, but shall you want to see how that would look in real life - it is all perfectly searchable, we are doing our best to keep it that way.

Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to read this. Any feedback — positive or negative — is genuinely appreciated.

Looking forward to your thoughts,

Arsenii

P.S. I’ve removed all the external links and I hope this post looks way less about self-promotion, I’m fully focusing on how I want to improve Polkadot ecosystem. Please don’t ban it again :saluting_face: