Risk Labs Retroactive Funding and Future Development

Author: Kevin Chan Status: Proposal Related Discussions: Risk Labs Funding Proposal for Growth, Expansion and Across v3

Summary:

The Risk Labs foundation is requesting 50,000,000 $ACX for retroactive funding and future development of Across protocol. Across is now a recognized leader in the cross chain interoperability space. The cross chain interoperability space continues to be competitive; however, Across remains a leader and is well positioned to capture many new opportunities. Risk Labs would use these ACX tokens to establish strategic partnerships and to incentivize developers and contractors. Tokens used in this way will include terms that restrict them from being sold for at least 2 years.

Motivation:

It has been almost a year since the last funding proposal from Risk Labs. The purpose of that proposal was to help fund the development of Across v3, but Risk Labs delivered much more than that. Over the last year Risk Labs has contributed to the following Across protocol achievements:

• Across launched V3 - a full interoperability protocol that utilizes intents for fast value transfer and chain abstraction
• Across supports 13 different chains and is still rapidly expanding
• Across delivers the fastest bridge fill times with transfers between L2s completing in seconds
• Across has completed over $11.8B of bridge transfers since inception and currently averages around $25MM of volume per day
• Across consistently battles for the #1 spot in bridge volume according to DeFiLlama
• Across has built strong relationships and partnerships with well respected teams such as Uniswap and Optimism
• Across’ success is recognized widely across Web3 - the $ACX token price has almost 10x since last year and top tier exchanges such as Coinbase have listed the token

Across protocol has become more than just a bridge. It has opened up its intents based architecture which will allow any Web3 projects to bring in their own order flow and utilize Across’ settlement system. ERC 7683, a standard for cross chain intents developed by Across and Uniswap, will help unify relayers and solvers to power this intents based ecosystem. This will deliver a seamless and intuitive experience for end users as it abstracts away the complexity and time constraints of bridging. This is where the future of cross chain interoperability lies and will be a key focus for Across protocol going forward.

Risk Labs is requesting retroactive funding for the research and development efforts that led to last year’s success with Across protocol. Funding received will be used to continue the growth of Across. The cross chain interoperability space continues to be competitive; however, Across remains a leader and is well positioned to capture many new opportunities. Future development includes, but are not limited to the following:

• Establish an even larger and more diverse set of relayers by building on and promoting the ERC 7683 standard - this will deliver unparalleled transfer speeds and empower Web3 projects to build chain abstracted dApps

• Expand to many more chains which includes non EVM chains such as Solana

• Grow the number of projects utilizing Across Bridge and Across protocol as a whole by making the integration process easy and seamless

• Acquire more strategic investors (major investors will be announced soon, but more will follow if this funding proposal passes)

All of these developments will bring more volume and revenue into Across protocol. Risk Labs is requesting 50,000,000 $ACX tokens for retroactive funding and future development. Risk Labs would use these $ACX tokens to establish strategic partnerships and to incentivize developers and contractors. Risk Labs will ensure that in any agreement where there is a transfer of ownership of tokens, whether onchain or offchain, these tokens will clearly have restrictions that prevent the sale of the tokens for at least 2 years.

Specification & Implementation:

To fulfill this funding request, the Across DAO will need to vote for and execute this proposal using oSnap. $ACX token holders will vote through Snapshot and the proposal will include the exact transfer transaction that will send 50,000,000 $ACX to the Risk Labs multisig address on mainnet (0x8180D59b7175d4064bDFA8138A58e9baBFFdA44a). If the vote passes, anybody can propose to execute this transaction and a 3 day dispute window will be open to UMA’s optimistic oracle to verify the validity of the transaction.

Voting:

A "yes" vote sends 50,000,000 $ACX from the Across DAO treasury to Risk Lab's multisig address on mainnet (0x8180D59b7175d4064bDFA8138A58e9baBFFdA44a). Risk Labs will use these ACX tokens to establish strategic partnerships and to incentivize developers and contractors. These tokens will not be sold for at least 2 years.