Hello Polkadot community,
We want to share an important update about the direction of Paseo and the changes coming with our next proposal to Polkadot’s governance.
A bit of context
Paseo began in late 2023 as part of Parity’s decentralization effort. It replaced Rococo, the previous Parity-maintained testnet, with a network maintained 100% by the community. Over these two and a half years we have onboarded close to 90 community parachains, with more added recently.
One of the network’s most significant achievements has been running its infrastructure in a fully decentralized way, supported by some of the most important actors in the ecosystem, both then and now. Much of the service has been coordinated by a Core group of three companies, Portico, R0GUE, and Zondax, each responsible for different functions: network administration, maintaining stability, and managing resources coherently.
It is also worth noting that all of this has been funded entirely by the Polkadot Treasury, with the backing of a community that has consistently voted in favor of our governance proposals.
How Paseo has evolved
Throughout this period we have seen major changes in the Polkadot protocol, such as the move from parachain leases to Coretime. Keeping a community-run testnet aligned with shifts of this scale, while preserving the stability that teams rely on, has been a constant part of our work.
Paseo’s first year was focused above all on stability. We followed the Polkadot Fellowship releases closely and kept stability as our main priority. At the same time, being a test network made Paseo a natural place to validate protocol changes before they reached production. Initially we tried to limit this kind of activity, but it became clear that the community and the Fellowship needed a decentralized network where they could run these tests before affecting production.
For that reason, starting in 2025 we relaxed our “keep Paseo fully stable and risk-free” premise so teams could test their work reliably. A good example was the migration of the staking system from the Relay Chain to Asset Hub, where we made everything available so the Fellowship could run the migration on Paseo ahead of Kusama and Polkadot. This is just one example of how the network’s purpose has shifted over time.
Expanding Paseo’s role
After the Web3 Summit and the exciting product suite announced by Parity Technologies, Paseo will extend its focus to support the next phase of Polkadot development. As these new products are open sourced and pushed into the community, the testnet should provide a safe, publicly accessible environment where developers can try them, experiment with them, and iterate on solutions before they reach production.
This is an important part of the upcoming restructuring. Paseo is being reshaped so its resources better match the new offerings coming to Polkadot, while continuing to serve the teams already building on the network. Community parachains will still be able to run on Paseo, and the network will remain available as a place to validate changes before they affect production environments.
We are restructuring
The Polkadot ecosystem is not static. We have seen the vision move from shared infrastructure and security toward a stronger focus on shipping products that can onboard end users. Paseo has evolved alongside these needs. Today there is less demand from parachain teams for dedicated cores, and the priority is now a more efficient architecture for running products through their testing and validation phases, while still preserving support for parachains that need a test environment.
We also cannot ignore the current price of DOT, which has a significant influence on the project. Until the multi-asset bounty made it possible to fund bounties in stablecoins, Paseo’s costs were covered entirely by DOT coming from the Treasury. Given current infrastructure demand and the current DOT price, it is clear that Paseo needs to reduce its resources and costs in order to operate more efficiently and to keep supporting this new, product-centered vision.
Moreover, feedback from the wider Polkadot community has confirmed this direction.
What is changing
A governance proposal will follow, including a redefinition of Paseo’s resources and operating procedures, with a focus on a smaller footprint, fewer cores, and a more efficient operation. At the same time, this change will make room for more developer-facing functionality as new Polkadot products become available for testing on Paseo.
Core allocation. The new target for Paseo is to maintain 20 cores, shared between the System Chains and community parachains. Until now we had enough cores to assign at least one core to each parachain. Given the reduction, our strategy is to use the regions functionality and assign six tasks per region. In practice, this means teams will produce a block roughly every 36 seconds. The System Chains, where this product infrastructure runs, together with new products coming from the community, will each be allocated three cores. This keeps parachain support available while aligning the network with its broader role as a testbed for the new Polkadot product suite.
Validators. These 20 cores will be supported by 60 validators, provided by Paseo’s current community of infrastructure providers.
RPC provisioning. A new responsibility for the bounty is the provision of RPC servers for the network. Until a few weeks ago these components were provided by the IBP as part of its Polkadot infrastructure bounty. As that provision has wound down, the Paseo bounty will now naturally need to cover these costs.
Decommissioning of System Chains. We will be decommissioning Collectives, Coretime, and Bridge Hub:
- Bridge Hub: we confirmed with the relevant teams that it is not being used by any bridge developers.
- Collectives: it has largely produced empty blocks, with no collective configured, since no team has requested a test environment to validate a collective setup.
- Coretime: it will no longer be needed on Paseo, since regions and cores can be configured directly on the Relay Chain by administrators with sudo access.
This decision applies only to Paseo and does not reflect any expectation about how production networks should be structured. It is an effort to be as responsible as possible within the budget that will be proposed, based on the usage we have observed for these chains on the testnet.
Network reset. Given the scale of this reorganization, and the fact that the network already carries a considerable state that no longer adds direct value today, we plan to begin Q3 with a network reset. The Relay Chain state would start from zero, while we preserve the state of Asset Hub, People, and Bulletin, the chains that hold data teams actively rely on and whose loss would significantly impact them. Teams should also be aware that the network may experience some disruption as part of this reset.
Shutting down the logging instance. In line with removing components that are not strictly necessary, we propose shutting down the logging instance that was meant to provide logs for traceability during incidents. This piece of infrastructure has not worked as we expected, and when logs or support are required, they will be provided by the operators at the time they are needed.
Core Team structure. The part of the budget not dedicated to infrastructure will also be reduced. This covers the people-hours required for maintenance, operations, development, tooling provisioning, monitoring, and general network support. The scope of responsibilities will remain the same, but this work will be coordinated with a lower overall cost.
Timeline and next steps
With these changes, we believe Paseo can continue to provide services to the whole community and, more importantly, give the necessary support to the new vision shown at the Web3 Summit. The network will become leaner and less costly to operate, while expanding its usefulness for developers who want to test the new products and build production-ready solutions in a safe environment.
We will aim to enact these changes as soon as possible, with a governance proposal for the next budget to be submitted in the coming days. At the same time, we are mindful that the current budget only runs until the end of Q2, and that Q3 will overlap with the period in which these changes are being applied. There will be no expectation for infrastructure providers to commit unpaid resources during this transition. Given these timing and budget constraints, the testnet could experience some short periods of downtime. If that were to happen, we will communicate publicly and transparently about timelines and any potential impact on its users.
We are grateful for all the support we have received throughout this time, and we remain committed to providing the best possible service to the Polkadot community.