Proposer: OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Polkadot/Substrate community. Our mission is to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp. 

Proponent: 12mRyiCp9zdh1wEVW5gLLiFBxDPKks72rRXmSupyEK3VAMLf

Date: 31 August 2023

Requested: USD $54,862.00 (DOT 12,153.7439)

Short description: Ongoing & advanced costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure in Q3 (July, August, September) for Polkadot, Statemint, Collectives, Westend, Encointer, Bridgehub Polkadot and Bridgehub Westend. 

Full Report: Polkadot Q3 2023 Full Treasury Report

Raw Data: Polkadot Data Q3 2023

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Why are Public RPC Services Needed in Polkadot

RPC services are critical to growing the Polkadot ecosystem by reducing the barriers to entry to access high performance nodes, and to allow development teams to focus on innovation rather than running infrastructure. Without them innovation may slow in Polkadot, as developers incur real costs to find and secure access to scalable and reliable public endpoints.

Wallets, indexers, governance tools, and other applications that we take for granted rely on these free public endpoints to power their applications, and without a diverse set of RPC providers, the Polkadot community will become more centralised and at risk of outages.

OnFinality's RPC Service

As Polkadot's largest and most cost efficient infrastructure provider, we provide scalable free public API services for Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, Collectives, Encointer and have recently added Bridgehub Polkadot and Bridgehub Westend

Since our inception in November 2020 we have a long track record focussing on three key areas; performance/reliability, providing more value from our Ultimate API service, and cost optimisation.

Performance/Reliability

OnFinality is operationally striving for a minimum of 99.99% reliability, which means less than an hour of downtime each year. We are the only RPC provider to guarantee this with actual financial penalties (see appendix A). We proudly display and share our 90 day uptime statistics for each network publicly here.

We have invested hugely into a team dedicated to optimising our application gateway and caching layer to ensure that we provide the fastest possible service for our customers. We run clusters in 5 different regions (North Virginia, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Australia) and across 4 different cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Alicloud, and our own dedicated hardware) to ensure that we are fault tolerant to any single region or cloud provider ceasing service.

Providing more value from our Ultimate API service

For customers that do sign up for API keys, we've been adding more and more features to provide a better experience. Geolocation insights provide statistics about where in the world communities are to help influence decisions around where to expand infrastructure and to view the effectiveness of regional BD initiatives.

OnFinality is the only provider with Trace API support, a huge and essential enhancement allowing unprecedented visibility for dApp builders. Trace API captures and records vital information otherwise not available through regular RPC methods and extrinsics (such as complete XCM transfer records and complete list of balance changes). These APIs are essential in order for developers like Polkaholic and Parity's data team to parse and understand XCM transactions.

We've recently added support for 14 more Polkadot parachains as well as Osmosis, Evmos, Harmony, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fuse, DFK Chain, Celo, and Klaytn from outside the ecosystem. With over 100 supported networks, OnFinality is now the largest RPC provider worldwide (in terms of networks supported), and our ongoing expansion helps to bring more and more developers  into the Polkadot ecosystem.

Cost Optimisation

OnFinality is very conscious about providing a strong level of support for Polkadot/Kusama at an extremely competitive price. In Q2 as we had the lowest cost per million responses across all of the major RPC providers that lodged a proposal to the Polkadot treasury (source).

Cost saving measurement has been a significant focus on behalf of our customers, with advanced rate limiting controls implemented. We can, for example, rate limit each client on a burst and sustained basis and based on the request methods that they are calling (e.g. each state_traceBlock request is rate limited 45x more than chain_getBlock), read more about these advanced rate limiting tools that we've developed here.

We continue to provide generous public API endpoints for over 40 different networks for common-good applications, while restricting access to high volume users that abuse the free service funded by this treasury.

We've developed and shared our approach towards service sustainability, with the introduction of a 'Paid API Revenue Share Discount' scheme. In this scheme OnFinality pools the revenue from customers that pay for higher API pricing plans and distributes this revenue pool to partners that currently pay for and own each API endpoint proportionally based on the number of paid API requests that go to that API endpoint. The scheme was introduced in Q1 of 2023 and recently resulted in a discount to Polkadot's Q2 treasury proposal of $1,364.38. The discount for Q3 will be calculated at the end of the quarter and applied to the Q4 treasury proposal.

Service Details

In the last 3 months (2023-05-01 and 2023-07-31) our Polkadot API service has:

• Served a total of 2.7 billion (2,678,938,975) responses

• Accumulated over 41400 GB of data egress 

• The highest daily total was 66  million responses in a single 24 hour period for Polkadot only

• Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 21 million responses each day

• Westend had over 207 million API responses in the period

• Statemint had almost 80 million API responses in the period

• Encointer  had over 32 million API responses in the period

• Collectives had over 50  million API responses in the period

• All time totals for Polkadot is 101,260,668,321 (101 Billion) since November, 2020

At the end of this period the 90 day uptime for Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, Encointer and Collectives was 100%, 100%, 99.66%, 99.99%, 99.99% respectively. You can always see live data of our API service on our public status page.

Costings

We are using a fixed price to allow us to bill in advance and to simplify the administration of this proposal, as well as provide cost clarity to both parties. This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, Encointer and Collectives for all of Q3 plus Bridgehub Polkadot and Bridgehub Encointer for August and September.

The total combined running cost is USD $54,862.00 — thanks to our ongoing cost optimisation efforts, this is considerably less than requested in Q2.

For breakdown of costings and more detail, read the full report here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gml3w_sHxiE-XEM4oQv-lGG0Erf6NubPqkCVyRZRSmM/edit?usp=sharing