Proposal to make Alpaca secure a Polkadot Parachain Slot Lease

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Posted on behalf of Deezer7, aka “The Deez” on Alpaca’s telegram group

Summary
Make Alpaca secure a Polkadot parachain slot lease

Abstract
Gain immense publicity among the Polkadot / Kusama crowd & pontentially tap into the vast grant schemes associated with it

Overview
Let’s clarify some terminology first

What is a parachain slot lease? : Polkadot has a scarce ressource; Parachain slots. Any project obtaining one of them can essentially plug their parachain into the Polkadot relay chain and benefit from shared security standarts.

What is a parachain slot auction? Parachain slot leases are granted to anyone bidding the highest amount of DOT in a Dutch candle auction. To bid, DOT has to be locked for 2 years. The project with the highest amount of DOT bids, gets a parachain slot lease for 2 years. After 2 years, DOT is returned to anyone bidding.

Proposed plan of action:

  1. Register a paraID (this is some substrate developer stuff that i have no idea about. Resources linked here)

  2. Contact dotsama (Polkadot & Kusama) newsletters for free publicity

  3. Register a crowdloan for the parachain for max publicity, or just do the parachain auction without a crowdloan and just directly go for winning the slot.

  4. Bid $10 in DOT → Win a parachain slot lease for 2 years

  5. Now we have gained a ton of publicity for alpaca among one of the most thriving blockchain communities (yes i know, prices are rekt there as well)

After winning the slot lease, we are left with many options.

Either we leave it at that and just gained the publicity, or we actually do things with it.

To keep this on the short side, let me list some ideas on how to get developer time/ funding from Dotsama projects.

There are tons of parachains that are wanting to become viable DeFi chains. The number of dapps and their TVL is somehwat lackluster. That is why there are tons of grants that are promising a ton of money for people to develop on their chains.

Parachains can communicate via XCM, therefore building one chain can easily integrate dapps on other chains.

If alpaca integrates their dapps/chains they would probably shower us with money.

I’m sure that Sam can look at this stuff and have an idea whether this is worth pursuing.

Acala Grant program

Moonbeam Ecosystem Grant

Web3 Foundation Grant

Polkadot Treasury (They either have to fund stuff or burn parts of their treasury allocation)

I am well connected in the dotsama space and can easily make intros to all major players.

Tl;dr:

Alpaca should obtain a parachain slot on Polkadot for free publicity and then explore whether it is viable to build on that fundament.

Motivation:
Get a ton of free publicity through either a marketing stunt. Optionally make good use of the parachain slot that is basically free to obtain.

References:
You can check on the status of ongoing parachain slot auctions here. At the time of writing, no project is competing for a slot, hence any project that would do so, would win.

6 Likes
2

good idea keep do it！

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In my experience, almost all of these ecosystem grants are false marketing. No one sues them for not doing what they say so they say whatever they want to attract people, but I haven’t seen a single one fulfill their promises beyond early days Polygon. Having said that, I’m not familiar with these or the DOT ecosystem. I’ve personally thought their cross-chain vision is too functionally-oriented instead of UX-oriented. It’s not a direction anyone on our team has expressed interest in. I suppose the best question would be how much have parachain slots actually leased out for recently.

1 Like
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The next slot will be leased for $70 by the looks of it.

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I actually think it will be unproductive
There is a chain there that is EVM compatible (Moonbeam) and that should be enough for Alpaca…
Alpaca is not a chain project… it is a Smart Contract project

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I think Deezer’s idea was predominantly about whether the press coverage and therefore marketing associated with the slot outweighs the bidding costs of $70-100

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I can have the marketing team look into it.

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Yep - would definitely be worth doing a flash assessment if they have capacity :slight_smile:

9

We researched this but the marketing coverage isn’t much and the cost of the latest sale was still like 1 million according to our researcher

10

agree. alpaca is not a blockchain. just deploy on top of Moonbeam. Parachains have big costs for a reason. Also consider that in case of a parachains you would need a change in tokenomics or to release a new token as incentive to people participating on the parachain auction. Maybe a simpler approach would be to deploy on EVM compatible parachains and if it gains traction explore other options within dot ecosystem. I am not sure it is wise to invest time/$ to go all-in on rust/parachains dev, new token release and so on right now