Polkassembly - Subsquid - Public data indexing Infrastructure for Polkadot and Kusama (Q1 2023) #1811

Proponent: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Beneficiary: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Contact Details: Subsquid Labs GmbH, 6302 Zug, Switzerland - mf@subsquid.io

Short description: Ongoing development and maintenance costs for public Subsquid Archives and the Giant Squid API

Archive raw data: Archive Infrastructure Metrics - January, February, March

Giant Squid raw data: Giant Squid Infrastructure Metrics - January, February, March

Requested DOT: 32281.38 DOT + 11007.34 DOT = 43288.72 DOT = $ 216,443.6

Previous proposals: https://kusama.subsquare.io/treasury/proposal/280

Motivation

A) Archives

Archives are an important piece of Polkadot and Kusama data infrastructure provided by Subsquid. They provide access to on-chain data in GraphQL format for all major parachains on Kusama and Polkadot, with more chains getting support as the ecosystem grows. They are being used as a data source for Squids and for efficient data exploration and ad-hoc queries. An up-to-date list of Archives is kept in a public Archive Registry.

All archives can be accessed and queried via an web intuitive GraphiQL interface and are often used as developer friendly replacement of a block explorer.

For example, here’s a query for the last ten transfers on Kusama blockchain run against the Kusama Archive endpoint.

Over first Quarter of 2023 we've provided a free public data indexing service for ~94 Substrate blockchains (some archives have been dismissed, new ones have been added), so that everyone interested in the projects can publicly access indexed data on Substrate Events, Extrinsics, Storage Items and EVM logs. Here are projects (parachains and mainnets aiming for future parachains slots) we currently support:

kusama
polkadot
moonbase
gemini_2a_testnet
rococo
khala
astar
moonriver
crust
moonbeam
karura
equilibrium
shiden
kilt
bifrost
statemine
aleph_zero
heiko
acala
robonomics
aleph_zero_testnet
calamari
kintsugi
parallel
shibuya
phala
sora
basilisk
statemint
interlay
litmus
origin_trail
bitcountry_pioneer
integritee
clover
picasso
altair
bifrost_polkadot
centrifuge
hydradx
subsocial
efinity
tanganika
t0rn
cere
litentry
composable
bajun
invarch_tinkernet
amplitude
imbue
foucoco
phala
dorafactory
pichiu
kabocha
darwinia
gmordie
snow
frequency_testnet
peaq
elysium_testnet
gear_testnet
reef
collectives
frequency
pangolin
myriad
elysium
ternoa
soonsocial
crab
myriad_testnet
polkadex
kylin
reef_testnet
tidechain
pendulum
hashed
joystream
gear_testnet
darwinia_2
mangata_x
mangata
polymesh
nodle
reef_testnet
automata
lagoon
crust_shadow
agung
kico
gemini_3a_testnet
mars

B) Giant Squid
Giant Squid is a set of open-source GraphQL APIs built with Squid SDK and maintained by Subsquid Labs. The APIs cover the most commonly used data for Pokadot, Kusama and a growing list of major parachains and is used by explorers (such as Calamar) and wallets (e.g. SubWallet).

The Giant Squid currently consists of two families of endpoints outlined below. The API endpoints for each network and the current status are available at the Status page.

Explorer API. The endpoint URLs follow the convention https://squid.subsquid.io/gs-explorer-${network}/graphql. Support queries on:

Blocks
Events
Extrinsics
Calls

Statistics API. The endpoint URLs follow the convention https://squid.subsquid.io/gs-stats-${network}/graphql. Support queries on:

Validator/Collator data
Account balances
Staking statistics
Nomination pools statistics
Transfers statistics
Extrinsic statistics

Achievements

Launched Giant Squid as a public API service for the community to explore relay and parachain statistics
Powering ≈ 360 projects in Q1 2023 ( ≈ 500 as of May 2023) including substrate and evm
Deployed new archives, expanding the list of available networks to 95 (increasing by 200%)

Statistics and data

Over the course of Q1 2023:

Served a total of 162,509,254.3 (~162.5 million) queries to the substrate based archives in Q1 2023
Served ~54m monthly archive requests for substrate based archives and ~ 400m monthly archive requests in total including EVM Archives
The highest daily total responses have been 2.3m in a single 24 hour period for substrate and 12.3m including EVM Archives
The daily queries confirm a growing trend, only partly due to the deployment of new Archives (which initially are not very busy)

Giant Squid is a new service, and has been launched in mid-January, here are two charts showing its quick adoption by the community, as an index of its success:

Costing

This proposal includes the combined costs for running Giant Squid and Archives for Polkadot, Kusama and their Parachains,which amounts to a total of 43288.72 DOT. Raw data for Archives can be seen here. Raw data for Giant Squid can be seen here.

The proposal is submitted towards the Polkadot treasury. Here is a summary of the running costs for Archives, in a tabular format:

Giant Squid running costs:

You can read the full report here.