This treasury proposal aims to retro-actively cover the first 28 person days of completed work on implementing privacy sidechains for any substrate based chain. This benefits Polkadot and Kusama relaychains but also all their parachains and even solochains - without the need to change a single thing in their runtimes!

Detailed Proposal asking for 39’961 USD

Previous Discussion Thread

Blog post about why privacy matters and our longer term vision

brenzi's presentation at Polkadot Now India 2023 [video, 12min] brenzi will present this tech at decoded '23 as well

Why should the treasury fund this?

Our offering is non-excludable, meaning we can’t limit this offering only to paying customers. So there is a free-rider issue at play: Once we release our privacy-sidechain solution, everyone can use the code to run their own sidechains, even multiple sidechains for a single parachain are possible and user fees are paid in the parachains’ native token, not TEER. Integritee invests in this important use case but will be met by competitors who just fork the code as soon as the business case works out. This is a very good thing for decentralization - but must be financed.

So, the question is not a generic “shall parachain teams get funding from the Treasury to build what they would build with VC funds anyway?”. What we offer is not a product on our parachain itself which we charge TEER for (see fee details in proposal document): We offer an L2 solution for anyone to deploy - anywhere. The question we’re asking with this proposal is, therefore: “Do you want this privacy product to be available by the end of the year for Polkadot, Kusama and their parachains, or not?”