Polkadot System Parachain Collators - Tips
Dear Polkadot community,
Collators on System Parachains are provided with minimal rewards for block production and small incentives in terms of transaction fees. This reduces incentives for Collators to act in a favorable manner and they may also be inclined to under-resourcing their hosts to save costs. Collators should receive funding for the provision of their services. Ultimately, this should be provided by the chain in a preferably sustainable manner. Implementation of such a system is a long-term solution. In the medium term, funding for collators can be provided by the respective Treasuries in the form of a bounty. This allows funding to be pre-allocated and independently managed.
Based on Kusama System Parachains Collator Bounty, and RFC-0007: System Collator Selection, this proposal is a short-term solution aiming to post-pay monthly operating costs of service providers until a more suitable solution (Bounty) is established.
The proposal aims to secure 6,075.79 DOT for Collators on the Polkadot System Parachains network for services delivered for the period of 2 months - 08-09/2023.
This discussion will be open for a period of one week before submitting the proposal onchain. We encourage the Polkadot community to review this proposal and provide any feedback or suggestions.
Thank you!
*Update 11/09: Parity Collators excluded from the funding proposal. Updated the document with new verified identities.
Comments (8)
Why do we now have to subsidize 14 collators for each system parachain? These parachains were doing well. What changed ? Collating isn't important for safety, so why have so many?
What do we know about addresses without identifiers? Do you consider it a problem if these are the same teams that have already publicly listed collators (and are candidates for this funding)?
Are there any statistics on uptime or block production for all of these collators over the entire funding period (also not just one point in time)? Do you find it OK to give a total amount of $300/month/collator just for registering?
Do you know the hosting platforms of these collators? In the interest of decentralisation, do you find it OK if many of them are on the same platforms? Or on cloud providers?
The $300/month/collator was based on self-reported data from the teams now receiving this funding. This seems like a conflict of interest even if that is from very respected teams.
There is huge potential for economies of scale here. Collating for 3 system parachains on polkadot does not cost the same as collating for just one. For example, do you agree that it is possible to only need one server and/or reuse the same tooling? Backup servers are also not needed since you are already funding 13 other collators as backup.
Conclusion: Do you think the remuneration is fair if a team collates for 6 system parachains (Polkadot and Kusama) and receives $1800/month for it? Additionally, if it registers an anonymous collator for each parachain, it could even get double that ($3600/month).
My suggestion: lower the funding to $100/month/collator. Teams were doing it before for free for the "common good" and the visibility. This amount will not let them loose money but also not be very profitable. That seems fair for a system (common good) parachain.
Hi @Fischer !
I think you have a fair concerns. I will try to address them.
Invulnerable Collators were previously provided solely by the chain’s development team (Parity). To reduce the centralization and to increase safety, some of the Parity invulnerable collators were replaced by the trusted node operators. The details on the selection of these was in this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H2T1Nx90HkSAYF_CaOPLG-o3LS7h_QAa2WLDdcSJMs0/edit
which accompanied the System Parachain collator bounty: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/bounty/20
The operational costs were also carefully estimated using the average of the operational costs reported by the node operators. The full discussion can be found here: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/1980
I can surely say for myself, and several other entites included in this proposal, that we all run above benchmark specs and 2 instances (main and backup) for each system parachain node we operate. The price for two dedicated servers per system parachain node (including maintenance) is above 300$ per month, f.ex. in my case.
I do agree, it is not OK to give a total amount of $300/month/collator just for registering, and this spending is not tailored like that. Performance of the nodes is monitored, and rewards are proportinally scaled to the block production for each node. Details on the distribuiton can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XWGigL0t0FQI9fL4I3Wg_W9wgXV4fXYrmn6Bo2eRv9A/edit#gid=329443407 If you analyse the spread of the block production (rewards) for last 4 months, you can easily conclude that all nodes are operating optimally and without significant amount of missed blocks.
I am not aware of any node operator having multiple nodes on the same common good parachain. And please keep in mind that there are perimissionless slots, with a bond amount necessary equal to 1000DOT.
ChaosDAO would like to provide the following feedback from our community. We offer this feedback voluntarily in the spirit of OpenGov, in order to help teams improve their proposals so we can all build the network together.
1. Some members commented that the request of $300 per month per systems parachain seems a reasonable cost for ensuring liveness of these system parachains.
ChaosDAO votes as a collective based on the results of our anonymous internal voting procedures. Our members are not required provide any feedback as to why they have voted in a particular direction. Similarly, to respect our members' right to anonymity, we will not be sharing names of individuals who have chosen to voluntarily provide feedback.
@ChaosDAO Thank you for the support and your understanding of the of the expenses associated with community-run infrastructure.