I think the community would be far more interested in supporting this proposal, or an iteration of it, if you were to consider going open source. This from the point of view of the community for a moment. Giving a bunch of money to a company that can unilaterally decide how things work and could disappear at any point (for any number of reasons) doesn't make very much sense.
Further, it didn't seem like what you are describing qualifies as a DEX. A DEX needs to be open source and run by multiple parties. Otherwise we have a centralized bridge. Not DeFi.
You can decide for yourself which route you want to go, of course. Centralized closed-source or decentralized open-source. Either way, I think the community will want to support you in this endeavor. Just that going the first route doesn't seem like something that is supposed to be funded by the DHF, but it can be funded by the service fees you charge.
Right exactly. @vsc.network is already building a fully decentralized Bitcoin wrapping bridge that is both trustless and fully open source. It seems quite suspect that they'd keep it closed source and not able to be audited.