Thank you to all council members for their participation and the feedback on the proposal, and to the Interlay team for the presentation and answering questions! As a short debrief, Let’s point out the main concerns of the Council regarding the overall proposal. The Council main reservations are related to:

1. Competing liquidity pools between Kusama and Polkadot and competition between similar tokens if the project gets access to two common good slots: one on each network. Some Council members stated that as independent networks but working to a higher end, Polkadot seems to be the right place for this project.
2. Differentiation between networks, protecting the Kusama community and allowing them to experiment in their own way.
3. Using limited resources (in this case, common-good slots) in the most efficient way possible: allowing a fair distribution in the overall ecosystem.

The Interlay team addressed these concerns with a proposal focusing on what they called “InterBTC”: one BTC Bridge for the overall ecosystem, starting on Kusama Network and migrating later (upon decision of the governance mechanisms) to Polkadot.

The team addressed the 4 main questions they are looking to answer from the Council in this respect:

1. Common good slot on Kusama, taking into account the Polkadot Council signalled in favour of this on Polkadot Network
2. Maintenance coverage by the Kusama Treasury
3. Bootstrapping and subsidies for relayers and vaults from the treasury
4. Governance design and ideas on a separate council, including composition and decision-making mechanisms

After the presentation, Councillors focused their questions mainly on the possibility of a migration (from Kusama to Polkadot) and the additional uncertainty regarding this, the risk of introducing the project on Kusama and the effects this might have for the community, and the potential inefficiency in requesting a common good slot in both chains (the concern of “limited resources”) by one project. Below, some comments from Councillors and community members to take into account:

• “To us (Polkascan Foundation) a common good slot and treasury funded subsidies for PolkaBTC on Polkadot makes sense (…) There is an ongoing discussion in & between the Polkadot & Kusama communities regarding the relationship between the two networks. It is our (Polkascan Foundation's) opinion that Kusama and Polkadot share a similar goal, which is the success of Polkadot. In our opinion Kusama exists to serve the goals of Polkadot and Kusama is taking relatively higher risk so Polkadot won't have to. To us this is a clear division of labor between the two networks and this creates a symbiotic relationship.  So the choice at hand for the Kusama Council is really a strategic choice which requires close coordination with the Polkadot Council. I'd like to echo Joe's concerns regarding the timeline and addition risk and complexity of a Kusama deployment and migration.”
• “One argument I heard for the 'rushed' deployment on Kusama, is a worry about competitiveness between the PolkaBTC Common Good chain and other BTC-Bridge competitors getting traction on the commercial parachain slots then that could be managed/mitigated by higher subsidies perhaps. Perhaps the Polkadot Council could double down on the commitment to support your project through the package deal. There will not be more than one BTC Bridge in a common good parachain. A common good chain would be able to compete with commercial competitors based on simple economics.”
• “Launching on Kusama seems to offer a huge amount of additional uncertainty regarding an eventual migration from Kusama to Polkadot. I feels somewhat rushed to launch on Kusama first. Why not simply wait for a common good slot and subsidies on Polkadot”
• “I don't want to discourage an entire class of application on Kusama - and I do agree that the public good slot and subsidy being a package deal makes sense - I just don't know if it makes sense in the context of multiple potential experiments to subsidize one specific experiment. But I do commend that treasury funding could mean you do not have to invent an additional new token to incentivize this”
• “Kusama feels like AIM and PolkaDot like FTSE100 as an ecosystem. Both are vital and both require deploying to both networks. I may be wrong but Kusama with current parachain auction schedule may have a number of parachains/parathreads/Dapps by the end of the year while PolkaDot maybe only have half a dozen but of institutional size If not deploying on both Kusama and PolkaDot how smooth this experience will be for Defi/Dapps hosted on Kusama with different blockchain specs (block time etc) between Kusama and PolkaDot?”

More questions and comments were made during the conversation, most of them were replicated in the live discussion and can be reviewed on the video.

• Link to the video: HERE
• Link to Interlay’s slides: HERE

This post is open for all council members and the community to leave your feedback and questions, to keep working on this proposal: let’s take this as a first step to make amendments to the proposal looking at Council’s and community concerns, thinking about the symbiotic relationship between Kusama and Polkadot.