We at the Moonbeam Foundation are aware that many Moonbeam community members continue to be deeply impacted by the Nomad bridge hack on August 1, 2022. It’s hard not to be affected by an incident of this size, and the reverberations have been felt across the entire ecosystem. This has been a blow to teams, users, and many other Moonbeam community members. People are hurting and we wanted to take this opportunity to express our sympathy for all those directly or indirectly affected.
We, like the rest of the community, are closely following Nomad’s public communications for visibility into recovery efforts, and we hope for a speedy and fair resolution to this horrible incident.
At the same time, we’ve been focusing on ways the Moonbeam Foundation can help Moonbeam be stronger and more resilient moving forward. We don’t have all the answers yet, but we wanted to share some of our initial ideas.
Commitment to Infrastructure Providers
The Nomad incident has made it ever more clear that the ecosystem will be stronger with more infrastructure providers, including bridges, for users and developers to choose from. And that continued support and development are needed to make sure teams building on Moonbeam have the security infrastructure and tools they need to offer services that are as safe as possible.
One of the main tools the Foundation has to support the ecosystem is grants. While there is already an impressive set of infrastructure and security tools integrated with Moonbeam, continued development is necessary. The grants program will prioritize security-related tools, infrastructure, audit services, and other related integrations. If you are a team developing a protocol on Moonbeam and are in need of security infrastructure or service support, please submit a grant application.
Expedited Governance Expansion
A second key set of actions is expanding protocol governance to increase the role of the community in key decision making. The community is in the best position to decide which projects to support. While we all eagerly await Polkadot’s governance v2 modules (which will facilitate more direct token holder voting on a wider variety of decisions), these issues are important enough to warrant interim solutions.
These interim solutions are still being explored but may include:
- Expanding the grants committee to appointed community members,
- Creating a Treasury Council with appointed community members to vote on Treasury spends, and
- Setting up signal voting to make it easier for community members to express opinions on off-chain decisions.
It will ultimately be up to the Moonbeam community as to what interim solutions are implemented.
The Foundation is actively working on finalizing updated transparency reports for Moonriver and Moonbeam, which will also disclose all grant recipients.
These activities reflect the Foundation’s continued desire to involve the broader community in key network activities through governance as Moonbeam continues to build. This can be seen in the release of the deep-dive on governance-driven safety measures like Maintenance Mode.
Continued Growth and Innovation
While we work on rolling out these initiatives, we are also faced with the reality that Moonbeam must push forward. The ecosystem should strive to grow as fast as possible, and we must continue to support our ecosystem as it rebuilds.
New projects continue to launch on Moonbeam. These teams need support, and the Moonbeam Foundation is dedicated to supporting these new teams in the same way that previous teams have been supported. Despite the challenges, the ecosystem continues to expand at an impressive pace, which can only help hasten Moonbeam’s recovery.
And, as always, Moonbeam continues to aggressively build and pioneer new capabilities. Moonbeam has been one of the projects leading the charge on XCM, most notably with the introduction of XC-20s (now in use by multiple parachains), a new XCM transactor that allows smart contracts on Moonbeam to access functionality on the Polkadot Relay Chain, and the ongoing XCM-to-EVM proof-of-concept that would allow other parachains to trigger function calls on Moonbeam smart contracts. This will push XCM interactions far beyond basic token transfers and help realize Gavin Wood’s vision of true cross-chain interoperability.
The Nomad incident has been a tremendous hit to our community and has impacted some individuals more so than others. Especially for those of you more directly impacted, know that we are grieving with you. We continue to engage with community members on Telegram and Discord, fielding their questions and noting their feedback. While we may not have all the answers, we are continuing to work to get more clarity and provide details where we can. As always, we’ll provide any updates across all Moonbeam social channels when we have them.
Lastly: THANK YOU. The Moonbeam community continues to be incredibly strong, patient, committed, and supportive. We are seeing many teams reaching out to support other teams, and community members helping to support other individuals who were affected. This is very much part of what makes the Moonbeam community so incredible. We continue to listen and learn from you. In the end, Moonbeam’s success will be driven by your efforts, your enthusiasm, and your unwillingness to give up.
Let’s continue to forge a path forward, together.
