Background

Over the past few months OnFinality has been investing heavily in improving it’s API service infrastructure for both customers and partners (including the Polkadot treasuries). This has provided more features to consumers of the API, better load balancing, and infra updates to reduce our costs for hosting your service to the treasury by 40%.

We have just released a new set of API service plans that go above and beyond our standard public service with higher rate limits and unlimited request numbers. We believe these pricing plans are extremely competitive compared to other RPC providers out there in the market.

These changes are designed to allow us to transition to a more sustainable future. Previously, The Polkadot Treasury has funded the API service for Polkadot, Westend, and Statemint and this has provided the community with free access to reliable and scalable Enhanced RPC infrastructure that has allowed them to build amazing dApps. The ecosystem has benefited from over 121 billion API responses over the lifetime of your service for Polkadot, Kusama, Rococo, Westend, Statemine, and Statemint.

Options for Consideration

At the moment there is somewhat unrestricted access on public API endpoints. We are now moving towards a better cost model where you will share the costs for your service with customers that are paying for high API pricing plans.

To encourage this though, many of our parachain customers are migrating to a model where we put in place lower rate limits for the public API endpoint. Users in Polkadot have become accustomed to free RPC infrastructure so this transition may take some time - but we believe it is necessary to ensure that our ecosystem is sustainable.

Just to be clear, we can continue as is with the treasury funding a near unlimited API RPC endpoint for the purpose of ecosystem growth.

Some customers have even requested significantly lower rate limits for their network endpoints and we are happy to comply (where it would be near impossible to run a production application on a public endpoint). Note that these rate limits only apply to public API endpoints (not ones with an API key) and we can whitelist domains such as polkadot.js so key public good apps are not impacted. Note that these rate limits only apply to public API endpoints (not ones with an API key) and we can allowlist domains such as polkadot.js so key public good apps are not impacted.

Summary

Just for clarity, this is just a proposal for what OnFinality can do to our public common-good service that we provide to the treasury. We have had this discussion already with the 41 other networks that we support with mixed decisions taken (rate limit or none). It is ultimately up to the treasury to decide on what to do here, or maintain the status quo.

I'm looking for an open discussion around what does the treasury see for the future of public common-good infrastructure.

If it’s “we expect to fund public commons good infra for the foreseeable future” then we should stay with the status quo. But if its “we expect that public common good infra should start to finance their own operations” then we need to transfer cost from the treasury to the community, and we can potentially do that by transferring costs to high volume users.

Full description and writeup here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wyZT2nyzYJRINeSKT0luZHuVUxl26eGLaTdglusxu1Y/edit?usp=sharing