Proposed by:
Requested amount:
0 DOT

#1266 · Apillon Milestone 3 Proposal: Core Integrations and Service Enhancements for Polkadot Ecosystem Growth

Project Details

⧓ Apillon, the leading Web3 development platform for Polkadot — Apillon.io

Proposer: Matjaž Sobočan, CEO

Execution estimate: 8 months

Requested allocation: 809,600 USDT

Proposal Overview

  • POP Network: Pre-made, verified generic ink! contracts
  • KWIL: Decentralized database infrastructure
  • CESS: Streamlined storage process for sensitive data
  • Prosopo: Web3 Captcha
  • Improvements of existing features:
    • Embedded wallets UX and customizability
    • IPNS enhanced, transformed into a standalone service
    • NFT Wizard for mobile and general revamp of the feature
    • Unique Network’s expansion of the token-creation functionalities
    • Vercel Templates for increased visibility of Polkadot’s projects
    • Security Audit request after Milestone 2

⧓ The full Apillon Milestone 3 Proposal

Revised Apillon Proposal for Polkadot Treasury - Milestone 3

Following extensive community feedback on our previous discussion post (#2520), which highlighted Apillon’s enterprise ambitions, we’re introducing an updated approach for Milestone 3 of the Apillon platform. Conversations with ecosystem stakeholders (Permanence DAO, ChaosDao, Opengov.watch, and others) provided critical insights that shaped this revision. While our Salesforce Web3 Cloud integration remains an exciting future possibility, it became clear that this element took focus away from the foundational goals of Milestone 3. To address this, we have removed Salesforce-related components and dependencies from this proposal, refocusing on the core infrastructure and service improvements that Apillon is uniquely positioned to deliver.

Before jumping to M3, check out our Embedded Wallet Ad:

Our Core Objectives for Milestone 3

Milestone 3 focuses on two fundamental achievement areas:

  • New Service Integrations
  • Enhancements to Existing Services

This structured approach centers on supporting developers and enterprises with robust, user-friendly tools, which reduce Web3 adoption barriers and enable no-code/low-code solutions. Through new integrations and streamlined, enterprise-oriented templates, we are committed to expanding the accessibility and utility of Polkadot parachains and Apillon’s capabilities.

Why Vote Aye?

With this refined proposal, we believe Apillon is set to drive meaningful growth and innovation within the Polkadot ecosystem:

⧓ Strengthening Core Integrations – Our expanded partnerships with Kwil, CESS, and POP provide developers access to decentralized databases, encrypted storage, and INK! smart contracts, enhancing versatility and usability for the entire community.

⧓ Enterprise-ready Templates – Refining Simplets into targeted, use-case-focused products to streamline deployment and customization for large-scale clients.

⧓ Enhanced User Experience – With continuous UX and Developer Experience improvements, Milestone 3 addresses user feedback to deliver a seamless experience.

⧓ Supporting Open-source Growth – Ready-made open-source tools, such as GitHub auto-pull integrations and Vercel templates, incentivize community adoption, making Web3 more accessible.

⧓ Commitment to Security – Ongoing third-party audits strengthen Apillon’s security, reinforcing developer and enterprise trust within the Polkadot ecosystem.

Moving Forward

This proposal aims to provide a clear path to achieving the ambitious goals of Milestone 3, with a transparent focus on building strong foundations within the Polkadot ecosystem. By concentrating on core improvements and integrations, Apillon is positioned to drive sustainable growth and facilitate future enterprise partnerships. We will bring the Salesforce integration forward in a separate proposal, ensuring that it undergoes community review independently and doesn’t jeopardize the primary goals of Milestone 3.

We want to make the reasoning behind the new Apillon’s Polkadot Treasury Proposal as comprehensive and transparent as possible. We will do our best to provide additional explanation and information you might require.

Previous treasury reports: Apillon Milestone 1 Proposal Recap, Apillon Milestone 2: Deliverables and Outcomes

Read more
StatusApproved
56%Aye
Aye (122)
16.15M DOT
Nay (159)
12.27M DOT
Decision28 / 28d
Confirmation7 / 7d
0.0%0.34%
0.0%Support Threshold
0Support Threshold
Support(0.28%)
4.16M DOT
Issuance
1.51B DOT
Vote
SpectraCryptoVerse

On behalf of Polkadot Hungary DAO:

We appreciate the effort and initiative behind Apillion’s proposal. However, after careful consideration, we have decided to vote Abstain on this request. While the proposal showcases engagement metrics, these appear to primarily reflect participation from engagement campaigns. Unfortunately, such metrics do not demonstrate long-term retention or meaningful contributions to the ecosystem.

We encourage the team to refine their approach and propose a smaller-scale initiative with clear, measurable objectives that can effectively demonstrate how your product is driving more users for the ecosystem. Showing evidence of user retention and genuine ecosystem participation would strengthen the case for future funding.

Thank you for your work, and we look forward to seeing an updated proposal.

Hi @Matjaz 

Thank you for your response and for sharing your feedback. We really appreciate the effort you put into addressing our points.

After an internal discussion, we've decided to maintain our Abstain vote. This decision stems from how our voting process is structured—when there are differing opinions within the team, the default approach is to abstain to reflect that diversity of thought.

We’d like to encourage the Apillon team to share more regular updates in the Polkadot forum or other public channels. This would provide great opportunities to engage with the community, share progress updates, outline your plans, and gather feedback for upcoming proposals. In the long term, this could also help address many of the questions raised by us and other commenters.

Additionally, it would be fantastic to see your users represented in forum discussions and proposals. Since your project is built for their benefit, their insights and feedback are incredibly valuable and would further strengthen your case for support.

We believe in the value and potential of your project, but greater transparency and consistent communication would help us feel more confident in casting an Aye vote in the future.

Thank you again for your efforts and engaging with us!

MatjazNov 21
SpectraCryptoVerse

On behalf of Polkadot Hungary DAO:

We appreciate the effort and initiative behind Apillion’s proposal. However, after careful consideration, we have decided to vote Abstain on this request. While the proposal showcases engagement metrics, these appear to primarily reflect participation from engagement campaigns. Unfortunately, such metrics do not demonstrate long-term retention or meaningful contributions to the ecosystem.

We encourage the team to refine their approach and propose a smaller-scale initiative with clear, measurable objectives that can effectively demonstrate how your product is driving more users for the ecosystem. Showing evidence of user retention and genuine ecosystem participation would strengthen the case for future funding.

Thank you for your work, and we look forward to seeing an updated proposal.

@SpectraCryptoVerse 

First of all, thank you for our initiative appreciation and for going over our proposal.

Before going into details, the Milestone 3 is generally a technical proposal with specific technical deliverables, and not a marketing /growth proposal; so it should also be judged from this specific point of view.

  1. We executed an incentivisation campaign experiment, where users had specific tasks that needed to be executed to earn a reward - each task resulted in an underlying transaction on Polkadot and this is the data most of the people have focused on at the moment
  2. The campaign exploded beyond all internal projections, netting tens of thousands of users, it is baffling how this can become a negative factor in an opengov vote.
  3. After reviewing the long term value (M2 negotiations), we have committed Apillon that the next Incentivisation campaign we execute will reward only live, production grade projects (projects that deploy their solution using Apillon and have a domain name pointed to our Hosting)
  4. For the next incentivisation campaign we are planning to calibrate to quality instead of quantity, and we have waited to deliver all features from M2 to prepare this campaign

Now that the incentivisation campaigns are unpacked with facts, lets look at the rest of deliverables (non milestone related or opengov funded):

  1. We are receiving between 40-70 new users daily from google ads and SEO efforts, specifically on the Web3 Storage service
  2. With these newly acquired users, we actually do see long-term and meaningful commitment of users - we showcased our transactions, and it is very clear CRUST transaction activity is not only a constant, but it reached all time high during this quarter and it even beaten the incentivisation campaign stats
  3. While we have several services implemented and keep promoting all of them, the only metric under our control is "traffic generation" and we are working really hard on that. After a user lands on our website, we have a 20% conversion rate (where registration is the conversion metric). After that, each user approaches each service using the logic of "supply-demand". Here we are heavily dependent on the success of the underlying project or chain and their ability to establish their brand as a trusted brand to use in development.

The text above isn't here to convince you that all our services have long term user engagement, they don't, but it is also certainly not true we do not have users with long term engagement, in fact, our transactions show we have quite a lot of long term engaged users, specifically in one service where PMF is proven.

Now, we do respect an opinion of asking for smaller amounts of money from opengov in several tranches, but there are several open questions on our end for this specific idea:

  • A typical cycle in opengov takes a team 1.5 months (2 weeks of preliminary posts on forum and 30 days of voting). Not only that, most of the DAOs do not engage with proposals in the forum preview stage, instead they give feedback once the vote is live and the team has committed their plan). That said, running a team of 15 people with this kind of uncertainty is simply impossible on a specific scale we are running.
  • We are running on this scale because, besides development, we are the only project that does heavy SEO, Google ads, Twitter for over 20 months, where each success is actually accounted for 12 Polkadot projects we have in place
  • We never touched the marketing bounty or financed any of non-development assets and or advertising in our company from opengov, instead this is our own financial stake in the relationship
  • We open-sourced our project as a long term commitment to Polkadot - this was part of the consensus we reached with opengov Community on Milestone 1
  • We implemented a generous freemium plan for all new users, which directly price dumps on our competitors as part of the consensus on M2 proposal
  • We delivered all that was promised, and the opengov community is fully aware of our size and scale, so there should be no question of whether we will rugpull with the larger sum, so what exactly does cutting the M3 into smaller tranches bring into the relationship?

Now, because you are a DAO of experienced people from Polkadot and we respect your opinion. Given the facts just presented, does this affect your opinion in any way?

At the end of the day, the question is: Does your team believe the stack, people and all resources we have can bring benefit to Polkadot in the long term.

Köszönöm szépen!

On behalf of Polkadot Hungary DAO:

We appreciate the effort and initiative behind Apillion’s proposal. However, after careful consideration, we have decided to vote Abstain on this request. While the proposal showcases engagement metrics, these appear to primarily reflect participation from engagement campaigns. Unfortunately, such metrics do not demonstrate long-term retention or meaningful contributions to the ecosystem.

We encourage the team to refine their approach and propose a smaller-scale initiative with clear, measurable objectives that can effectively demonstrate how your product is driving more users for the ecosystem. Showing evidence of user retention and genuine ecosystem participation would strengthen the case for future funding.

Thank you for your work, and we look forward to seeing an updated proposal.

Apillion team has been shipping well and meeting their committed timelines and completing milestones. We support this proposal.

Nov 13

Dear @Matjaz ⧓,

Thank you for your proposal, and joining us on a call to discuss your proposal. Permanence DAO supports the Apillon team and commends its efforts, however our vote is NAY for this proposal. As we commented under your discussion post, we suggest the following for the Apillon team:

  • Limit the budget to $250K over a 3-month period.
  • Deliver a target number of running applications in different verticals built on Apillon services, built by Apillon's current builder base.
  • Onboard a target number of end-users to those applications.
  • Develop a marketing/business strategy in contact with the marketing and business development teams in Polkadot to turn the end-users into paying costumers.

These suggestions were formed after a thorough review and discussion of the proposal in light of the information shared on the call. Some members also expressed concerns about the proposal’s focus.

Kind regards, Permanence DAO

MatjazNov 12

Hi @1haHsRuCUCkbkPRmSrnfP8ps6cTaR2b5JCU5uNPUbxsVPbf

*Long post warning*

Here are some objective facts which are true for the Apillon case that not everyone is aware of (we have been building in the ecosystem for the past 2.5 years, and not every proposal can start with the historic breakdown due to the current length sentiment on the opengov).

  1. Apillon is a team of 15 people delivering a product exclusively for Polkadot. Our team is split into the following departments: development, marketing, growth and product - we are stating this because in order for anyone to understand our opengov requests, it has to be put in scale of understanding what Apillon provides for Polkadot.
  2. Today, Apillon is supporting 11 Polkadot projects on its platform, production ready. Now, what you have to understand is we don't just integrate different chains, instead, we rewrite the logic to build on those chains without needing to understand what the parachain or other Polkadot project does in the background. Delivering 11 integrations like that with the speed of delivery we are currently working with, takes a large team (which we talked about in the first bullet).
  3. Besides development, Apillon has an established stack of the following:
    • Traffic generation via Google Ads, Twitter Ads, SEO (all actively happening for the past 2 years)
    • Polkadot organised events (we organised over 11 real life events with cumulative of 700+ participants)
    • Business Intelligence stack - actively monitoring the user onboarding and establishing a funnel that slowly pushes users to paid users Try entering “nft metadata storage” into Google and see the SEO is in place.
    • Try entering “embedded wallets” - feature released a month ago, and we are already on the first page
  4. In the Milestone 1 and Milestone 2, Apillon has committed to providing Freemium plan, with a substantial package in Freemium, allowing our users to achieve fully fledged dapps without payment - this was a consensus we reached with opengov community in Milestone 1 & 2, putting Apillon in a position to become onboarding funnel for Polkadot. If you look at our pricing (for example storage) we are price dumping on our competitors (like Pinata) and at the same time we are actively advertising on “decentralised metadata storage” - this is just one example of end to end user onboarding we are doing
  5. Apillon is Open source as well as passed 2 code audits during our development period. Open sourcing Apillon is also a consensus reached between Apillon and opengov community, directly removing the “conflict of interest” from the Apillon side.
  6. Apillon operates as a Saas company, allowing developers to build and deploy, without the need of having tokens for underlying parachains (Apillon does that automatically in the background, so this puts us in a position to really understand the transactions and where the action is)
  7. There are no features on Apillon where Apillon could generate revenue without affecting Polkadot transactions

I have included a link to the screenshots of proof to the abovementioned statements: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n4uWJEDgH5l9GSJRpjizHftCgs2HVgL1/view?usp=sharing

Now, lets look at these facts from the standpoint of “What is polkadot getting out of it”

  • We are the only project in the ecosystem for which we can say: “Every new user for this project is a new user for Polkadot” - yes, if a developer joins apillon today and touches any of our services in a freemium plan, we are generating transactions on Polkadot, this is the initial standpoint
  • We are the only project that can promote themselves and directly affect 11 Polkadot projects in the background We are the only project in the ecosystem that can say: If we succeed and scale, so does Polkadot.
  • We are open source, so whatever happens with the core team in the future, all code that was financed from the opengov remains accessible to anyone to use
  • We are operating in a non-profit manner over our Freemium plan, with a sole purpose of building a strong user base which is directly Polkadot user base. Being non-profit means generating no profit, yet this is a consensus reached with the community.
  • Our non-development departments and activities are financed from our pocket

Lastly, your idea about the airdrop is not only good, but we already executed it. So instead of just airdropping our token to random wallets, we have generated an incentivisation campaign back in march which resulted in over 130.000 registered users which created projects, where over 40.000 projects generated at least one transaction on Polkadot. Now, keep in mind that, we do have a clear growth funnel and user emails, so we are keeping the users engaged as new features are popping out.

The post is getting really long, due to the fact that the team of 15 people delivered a lot in the past 2 years, there is more to be said of what we are delivering for Polkadot ecosystem, but the main point remains: we have removed all conflicts of interests between apillon and Polkadot community and we can essentially say that if Apillon succeeds in the future, so will Polkadot.

A quick summary of what is currently on Apillon:

  • Integrated CRUST parachain and turned it into Web3 Storage and Web3 hosting - utilising IPFS in the background
  • Integrated PHALA parachain and turned it into Web3 Compute with support for Rust based smart contracts that get executed in unstoppable way on Phalas TEEs
  • Integrated KILT parachain and used it to provide DID based email attestation, signup and sign in component, ready to be used by developers in their dapp
  • Integrated Moonbeam EVM chain - enabled seamless deployment and management of NFTs, ERC721, ERC20, ERC1155 Integrated Astar/Sonium parachain - enabled seamless deployment and management of NFTs, ERC721, ERC20, ERC1155 + WASM based smart contracts
  • Integrated Subsocial - enabled Web3 chat deployment with a few clicks and direct integration to the target dapp over few lines of code
  • Integrated Acurast - turned it into Web3 cloud functions - a decentralised backend, capable of running Nodejs logic, enabling developers to rely on a decentralised backend!
  • Integrated Dwellir an existing RPC provider and acting as a reseller of RPC services under Apillon
  • Integrated Subsquid - an existing Indexing provider, and acting as a reseller of Indexing services under Apillon

Other notable Apillon features:

  • Automatic payments - Apillon provides a multichain development environment, where a dapp can utilise several services in a synergistic manner. Each user action on any of the services is executed as a transaction on chain, resulting in GAS fee payments requirement. Apillon solves this pain point for developers, so developer do not need to keep positive balance on hot wallets of multiple different chains, instead, developers can subscribe over Stripe and scale seamlessly.
  • Multi user development platform - Each project can be shared with other team members so it is possibl to develop as a team
  • Github Compatiblity - Use GithubActions for automatic deployment of your dapp to Apillon Web3 Hosting
  • Accounting per action - each API call, deployment or any action on apillon is accounted for and charged in credits to the project owner Full Open sourced
  • Passed 2 code and security audits, next audit pending till end of 2024
Lily_Mendz

Hello! I have some questions and comments:

What are the projected maintenance costs once these improvements are implemented, and how do you plan to cover them in the future?

Are there long-term plans to reduce reliance on the Polkadot Treasury and achieve financial self-sufficiency? If so, what strategies are you considering implementing (e.g., transaction fees, subscription models)?

How do you plan to measure and improve user experience and adoption among developers? Have you conducted user studies or community surveys to identify necessary improvements?

Are you not going to include a marketing plan for Apillon? I think it's essential to attract new users, with plenty of tutorial videos and a greater presence on social media. I once read that "the most well-known wins over the best," and it's very true, so please keep that in mind.

@Matjaz 

AYE Sir!

Nov 10

It appears that your team has already raised 171,450 DOT ($900,113) for milestone 1 + 91,663 DOT ($481,230) for milestone 2, totaling 263,113 DOT raised thus far (~$1,381,343 USD at the current DOT price of $5.25), is this accurate?

And now you are asking for an additional $809,600 USDT?

When will these requests end?

More importantly, what is Polkadot getting back from these investments, specifically in terms of equity stake, for funding your company will millions of dollars? Traditionally this level of investment would require you give back equity to the investors who are taking on such risk, which in this case, is the Polkadot community.

An airdrop to active participants in the Polkadot community would make a lot of sense in this instance imho, especially given the large amount of funding you are seeking (after already raising a relatively large amount).

NFTXCMNov 6

Apillon is making strong progress and is on track to become indispensable in the ecosystem.

MatjazNov 2
muddlebee

I read the proposal docs, but couldn't find any metrics/KPIs how it is adding value to the Polkadot ecosystem? Can you please clarify?

Hey @muddlebee !

Nice to read from you again :)

Thanks for checking out the proposal docs!

Since our last proposal, we’ve added close to 40,000 new builders who are diving into Polkadot’s tech, largely because of how easy we’ve made it to get started. Below are some key metrics showing the activity that’s running through Apillon onto the various parachains.

Now that Coretime is live, this activity means parachains need to buy Coretime to run on the relay chain, creating real value for the ecosystem. Hope this gives a clearer picture of how we’re contributing to Polkadot’s growth! Let us know if you have any more questions.

Thanks!

 

MatjazNov 2
Lily_Mendz

Hello! I have some questions and comments:

What are the projected maintenance costs once these improvements are implemented, and how do you plan to cover them in the future?

Are there long-term plans to reduce reliance on the Polkadot Treasury and achieve financial self-sufficiency? If so, what strategies are you considering implementing (e.g., transaction fees, subscription models)?

How do you plan to measure and improve user experience and adoption among developers? Have you conducted user studies or community surveys to identify necessary improvements?

Are you not going to include a marketing plan for Apillon? I think it's essential to attract new users, with plenty of tutorial videos and a greater presence on social media. I once read that "the most well-known wins over the best," and it's very true, so please keep that in mind.

Hey @Lily_Mendz !

Happy to answer your questions :)

Maintenance Costs and Treasury Reliance:
Apillon is committed to building an open-source SaaS platform, and while we currently rely partially on the Treasury to support our generous freemium model, this is essential to attract developers to the Polkadot ecosystem with competitive rates compared to providers like Thirdweb, Moralis, and Alchemy. As we convert enough freemium users into paid users, our goal is to sustain the freemium option independently of Treasury support.

Path to Self-sufficiency:
Our plan is to achieve self-sufficiency within 1-2 years through subscription-based revenue. As our user base grows, we’ll refine our pricing plans to remain competitive and financially sustainable.

User Experience and Adoption:
We’re dedicated to improving UX and adoption through continuous monitoring, including tracking user sessions via Hotjar to understand drop-offs and improve the experience. We also engage our community through Q&As and our governance portal, where developers can suggest features and guide future updates.

Marketing Strategy:
We have a robust marketing pipeline, though it falls outside the scope of this proposal and will be funded via a marketing bounty. We’re continually enhancing our SEO, running ads on Google and X, and attending major events like WebSummit in Lisbon, where we’ll have a booth and keynote. Additionally, we produce and share tutorial videos on social media to inspire new projects on Apillon.

Hope this clarifies things! Happy to provide more details if needed :)

Hello! I have some questions and comments:

What are the projected maintenance costs once these improvements are implemented, and how do you plan to cover them in the future?

Are there long-term plans to reduce reliance on the Polkadot Treasury and achieve financial self-sufficiency? If so, what strategies are you considering implementing (e.g., transaction fees, subscription models)?

How do you plan to measure and improve user experience and adoption among developers? Have you conducted user studies or community surveys to identify necessary improvements?

Are you not going to include a marketing plan for Apillon? I think it's essential to attract new users, with plenty of tutorial videos and a greater presence on social media. I once read that "the most well-known wins over the best," and it's very true, so please keep that in mind.

I read the proposal docs, but couldn't find any metrics/KPIs how it is adding value to the Polkadot ecosystem? Can you please clarify?

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