TL;DR: Asking for 17,776 HOLLAR for the Neckwork stack, which is 2,222 a month from August 2026 to March 2027. Two of the eight months are retroactive. Nothing in here is a plan, it's all running.
Neckwork is the indexer behind hydration-explorer.neckwork.net. Since August it also sits under app.hydration.net. The old indexer couldn't keep up once blocks went to 2s, so between Aug 14 and 28 the app moved trade history, DCA, money market events, charts and stats over to Neckwork, and the old one was retired in early September. Whatever the app shows you about the past is coming from here now. The team has also been using the data to answer harder strategic questions, not just to fill the UI.
The explorer does the usual blocks, extrinsics and accounts, but the point of it is the activity layer. Every action on every pallet gets classified into what the user actually did, and then there are tags, portfolio history, verified EVM contracts and OpenGov with live tallies. On top of that sit protocol dashboards for revenue by stream, HDX supply and unlocks, HOLLAR peg and the HSM, plus a security page for circuit breakers, fuses and Wormhole backing. Telegram and push alerts. Uniswap v3 pools and ICE intents were indexed the week they shipped. There's a token-gated Data API for external devs and an MCP server so agents can read the chain. All open source, one docker compose up to self-host.
Subscan asked 10,194 HOLLAR for H2 2026, about $1,699 a month, and got voted down in #384. That was ~20k a year for a generic explorer, and the old indexer cost something to run on top. Neckwork covers a lot more ground than Subscan ever did for Hydration, and it's ours. Nobody can reprice it or buy it out from under us. Subsquare is another 9,000 a year (#401), which stays for now. Governance is a big part of how Hydration runs, 230 referenda in the last twelve months and 210 of them executed, so it makes sense to spread the tooling around that too.
One dedicated server runs the whole thing. A dedicated archive node (2 TB) feeds the indexer, there's a second indexer as fallback, and the bits that can't be rebuilt from chain are backed up nightly. The database holds 14.8M blocks and 325M events, about 3.7 TB decoded. Over the last 30 days that's roughly 3M requests across explorer, API and charts, and ~13k distinct clients a month on both the explorer and the API. ~390 commits since the end of July.
2,222 HOLLAR a month. Slightly above what Subscan wanted, except this covers the explorer, the app's data layer, ongoing development and someone who picks up when things break. I'm keeping it low on purpose. I'm invested in Hydration and I'd rather this sets a benchmark than a market rate. I'm also not billing the build. The clock starts August 1, which is when the app started depending on it. So Aug and Sep retro (4,444) and Oct 2026 through Mar 2027 (13,332). In March I'll post what shipped and ask for the next six months. If Hydration usage takes off before then and the stack has to become properly redundant and geo-distributed, I'll take the liberty of putting up a separate ref for that rather than padding this one.
This is a chance to do treasury spending the way it should work, paying for something that's running and used rather than for a promise. And it's infrastructure Hydration owns instead of rents. Open source, self-hostable, a foundation that analytics, monitoring and security tooling can build on.
Neckwork is a tool that reads and shows what happens on the Hydration blockchain. It is asking for money to keep running.
In short: pay for a real, working tool that Hydration owns instead of rents.
Threshold
Threshold