Tldr;

• OnFinality has a proven track record providing RPC API support for 68 substrate networks
• To help cash-starved parachains through the winter, we propose funded complete support for the entire Polkadot ecosystem - this will cover the existing 38 Polkadot parachains
• Each parachain network will be allocated US$620 of base funding each month for this service which will be held by OnFinality to explicitly provide the service. In our experience, this is the average funding that we require to provision, run, maintain, and monitor a basic service for each small network. Unused prorated amounts will be refunded at the end.
• Historic data has shown us that this should be sufficient to serve up to 5 million daily API responses with careful rate limiting and DDOS protection. 
• For the few larger networks that exceed these requirements (e.g. Polkadot's RPC endpoint), those sovereign parachains will be responsible for all costs above the base $620 funding.
• We will also start working with other ecosystem infrastructure providers to work on a more sustainable long term solution

Background and Problem Statement

As Polkadot’s largest and most cost efficient infrastructure provider, since November 2020 we've provided access to dedicated node support and free public API service for over 68 networks in the Polkadot / Kusama ecosystems. We’ve always made it our goal to provide complete support for the entire Polkadot ecosystem. For RPC API services, historically we have sought funding from the sovereign parachain teams themselves for funding the ongoing operating expenses of these services. However, as the crypto winter has hit hard, many teams are no longer able to fund core public good services like public RPC endpoints.

This has a detrimental effect on applications that serve the Polkadot ecosystem (many of which are our customers). Wallets (e.g. Talisman and Nova), explorers (e.g. Subscan and Polkaholic), account tools (e.g. Sub.ID), indexers (e.g. Subsquid and SubQuery), governance applications (e.g. Polkassembly and Subsquare), and thousands of other applications in each ecosystem struggle to find reliable, performant, and SLA supported RPC API endpoints for many smaller networks.

“If we had some public good service that helps grass root teams it would be a tremendous help for teams such as ours” - Imbue

This is causing a divide in our ecosystem between highly funded parachains that can survive the winter, and new emergent chains that are struggling to get started - we’re seeing first hand that the number of growing new parachains in Polkadot is stalling.

Proposed Solution

We’re requesting globally accessible and equitable funding from the treasury to cover a basic RPC API service (full archive and trace node support included) for all active Polkadot and Kusama parachains to provide immediate relief until we can set up a Parachain Infrastructure Bounty.

This proposal will cover US$620 of base funding each month for each parachain’s API service. To start with, we budget that there will be 38 parachains that take us up on this offer (all parachains with an active lease will be eligible). The total combined running cost for each month is estimated at USD $23,560.00 - all inclusive of capital and operating expenses, administration time from OnFinality DevOps, onboarding costs, backup costs, and all other monitoring and right-sizing by our team.

Longer term solution

“Teams need to coordinate/negotiate with all sorts of partners (block explorers, rpc node providers, wallets, other parachains). This slows down innovation for Kusama.” - Interlay

Multiple parachains have privately and publicly affirmed that one of the biggest challenges is dealing with all the tertiary providers needed to run a production parachain (RPC nodes, block explorers, indexers, governance pages, wallets integrations and more).

We propose that in the long term, we create a new “Parachain Infrastructure Bounty”, that provides basic public services for all active parachins for both ecosystems. The aim is to make the ecosystem more harmonious, unify processes and tools, speed up development progress, and will help all new teams get started.

But setting this bounty up and communicating with the large number of stakeholders will take a long time. At this stage, we expect at least 5 RPC providers, 4 wallets, 3 block explorers, 2 indexers, and 2 governance tools will want to be party to this bounty if it encompasses all “public good infrastructure”.

As a result, in order to establish precedent, and to provide quick pain relief to all parachains next week, our view is to proceed with the current immediate solution now.

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Please read the full proposal here including a collection of feedback and discussion from community members here