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 (3)
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.
Dear Polkadot community, a summary of my objections:
— $300 / month / system parachain might seem reasonable for running a collator, it becomes a very large total amount if a team collates for multiple parachains. In the replies, they agreed to this but "would leave this discussion for later" and "even though $ 100 / month is reasonable, we will fix the amount later"
— What is the urgency to push through this amount? There is no activity on these parachains.