Proponent: Acala Foundation 12zgSMDwF5xpzcksvEdDzcSFouFNroXGRffgnhogSk1kR7iS

Requested: 100,000 DOT

Short description: This submission proposes a payment by Polkadot Treasury to cover maintenance, development, and hosting of open source projects (ORML, Chopsticks, and Subway) built by Acala team.

Scope: All the host cost and work done that was not covered by past treasury proposals till end of 2023 for those projects:

• ORML: https://github.com/open-web3-stack/open-runtime-module-library
• Chopsticks: https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/chopsticks
• Subway: https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/subway

Previous treasury proposals:

All the work covered by previous treasury proposals are considered out of scope in this proposal.

• ORML development and maintenance between Jan 2022 and Oct 2022: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/202
• Retroactive funding for ORML maintenance Nov 22 to Apr 23 https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/290
• Retroactive Funding for Chopsticks Development until Mar 23 https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/252

Background

Acala team is always trying to improve the developer experience for the Polkadot ecosystem. From our development experience, we are identifying bottlenecks, and then creating open source solutions to solve the bottlenecks. As a result, we created the most used community pallet library: ORML, and an essential development tool for Polkadot developers: Chopsticks. Subway is the latest addition to our open source projects. It can significantly reduce the operation cost of running RPC nodes, improve security of RPC infrastructure, and provider better user experiences. Both ORML and Chopsticks are being used by many parachain teams, and there are many other teams are currently evaluating Subway.

This proposal is asking for 100,000 DOT to support Acala team to cover the development work and hosting cost (e.g CI machine and related devops work). This will help Acala team to continue development and support effort of those projects. We will also be able to prioritize the feature requests and support requests raised from the community.

Project Details

Open Runtime Module Library / ORML

https://github.com/open-web3-stack/open-runtime-module-library

ORML is the most commonly used community pallet library outside of polkadot-sdk. It offers many essential pallets including multi token support, NFT, XCM and many more. It is used by 20+ parachains and has been audited multiple times.

An incomplete list of work done since last treasury proposal:

• Upgrade polkadot-sdk version
• Publish to crates.io
• orml-parameters pallet
• Support NFT XCM

Chopsticks

https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/chopsticks

Chopsticks offers the ability to fork mainnet into a local devnet for testing and development purpose. It is used by many, if not all, parachains, multiple dapp teams, as well the Polkadot Core Fellowship members. It is a must-have tool for Polkadot developments.

An incomplete list of work done since last treasury proposal:

• Be compatible with new polkadot-sdk version
• Browser support
• Persistent mode and follow mode
• ESM and CJS support
• Performance improvements
• Child storage and offchain worker support
• Libp2p support PoC
• End-to-end testing helpers

Polkadot Decoded 2023 talk about Chopsticks and Subway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UowOAK9R6aQ

Subway

https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/subway

Subway is a JSON RPC Gateway built with Substrate and Ethereum RPC in mind. It is the only open source middleware tool available that supports Substrate JSON RPC. Subway offers rate limiting, cache, merge identical subscriptions, stale upstream rotation, APM integration and many more features. It is an essential tool to build and operate an RPC infrastructure.

Subway is currently used by all the public RPC endpoints hosted by Acala Foundation for Acala and Karura. It has been running smoothly for more than half a year and has significantly reduced the RPC cost as well as reduced latency and unplanned outages for users.

Compare to the numbers provided by Parity, with the help of Subway, Acala Foundation is able to operate the RPC nodes with ~1/5 of the hosting cost and serving ~1.7x amount of the requests.

An incomplete list of features implemented:

• Support Substrate JSON RPC
• Support Ethereum JSON RPC
• Rate limiting by connection and/or IP
• Response caching
• Merge identical subscriptions
• Stale and erroneous upstream rotation
• APM integration
• Response override
• WebSocket and HTTP

Cost Breakdown?

A breakdown is not included, but could be provided if requested. The main reason it is not created yet because it is very time-consuming to create such breakdown. Furthermore, we would like to emphasize that the proposed amount is not directly related to the cost and therefore a cost breakdown should not be necessary to evaluate this proposal. On top of that, ORML and Chopsticks are the most used community built open source project in the ecosystem and therefore the expectation is that the payout amount should be directly proportional to the impact been made to the whole ecosystem. While we would like to let the community decide the payout amount, the tipping system simply does not work (as we have never received any tip from Polkadot treasury). Therefore, we decided to make a request with a number just to initiate the process, and then making adjustments based on the feedbacks.

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Updates for Breakdown

Note

As community have requested for a breakdown, I am including a quick impact assessment breakdown to help people to estimate the impact of the work completed.

I am expect people to use this to help them to come up their own number of the fair value of this proposal, and then compare with the request amount, vote aye if request amount is lower, nye if request amount is higher. It will be helpful if people can post their idndepenlty accessed value as additional data point for collective value assessment. Note: this methodology should apply to all treasury spending proposals.

It is easier to evaluate the impact of the product as whole, rather the incremental updates, so I will focus on the whole product. Given that some of the work are already been paid by treasury, so the fair value for this proposal should be the difference between the whole product, subtract amount that have been paid, which are 14126 DOT ($69150) + 14038.3892 DOT ($74600) + 17051.9708 DOT ($113000).

Only provided estimations for each items. It should be possible to talk with every parachains to gather their usage to create an accurate assessment.

Impact Assessment Breakdown

ORML

It will be fair to say without ORML, parachain teams will spend a lot of time building pallets doing similar things. One example we observed is the transaction-pause pallet that have at least 5 different implementations created by different team. ORML allow parachains to use high quality, audited, and well maintained solution. On top of that, dApp developers and wallet developers can access functionality with a same interface (e.g. XTokens) and that significantly reduces integration time.

• Development and maintenance hours saved by allow parachian teams to reuse ORML instead of develop their own solution
• Estimation: 10 parachain each use 2 pallets from ORML and each pallet takes 80 hours of development and 5 hour per month for maintenance
• Per parachain: 160 hours and 10 hours per month
• Total hours (with 10 parachains): 1600 hours and 100 hours per month
• Total $ (with $150 hourly rate): $240,000 one time cost and $15,000 per month
• By reusing a same repo, the audit cost can be saved.
• Estimation: 10 parachain each and each audit take $10,000
• Total $ (with 10 parachains): $100,000
• By reusing a same pallet, dApp and wallet integration time can be saved.
• Estimation: 20 dApps and wallets and each saves 40 hours of integration and testing
• Total hours (with 20 dApps and wallets): 800 hours
• Total $ (with $100 hourly rate): $80,000

Chopsticks

Chopsticks significantly reduces the time required to setup testing environment. Without Chopsticks, it will take multiple hours to setup a multichain networks to perform XCM testing. It is also hard to maintain such networks (e.g. Rococo). And the outcome is still not great as the testing environment is significantly different than real environment.

Without Chopsticks, it takes non-trivial amount of work to replicate a testing environment to debug an issue. With Chopsticks, it takes less than 2 minutes.

Chopsticks is the only tool can be used to dry run governance proposals with XCM execution. It has been used by Polkadot Core Fellowship to verify proposals. It is the only tool can be used to perform full end-to-end XCM compatibility tests for new runtime releases.

• Testing time saved by using Chopsticks
• Estimation: 20 parachain teams or dApp teams or wallet teams each saves 20 hour per month on setup, operate, and replicate testing environment
• Total hours (with 20 teams): 400 hours per month
• Total $ (with $100 hourly rate): $40,000 per month
• Bug prevented by Chopsticks or Chopsticks powered tests (e.g. this and this)
• Estimation: 20 parachains and relaychain and 1 significant bug per year. It is not possible to determine a fair price of the value to prevent a bug. But think about this, how much should treasury to pay to prevent broken XCM bug that will lock assets worth millions for a week? I will put $3,000 per month here just as an estimation
• Total $ (with 20 parachains): $60,000 per month
• Time saved by be able to dry run XCM proposals. Joe Petrowski will be the best person to ask for input about this.
• Estimation: 5 complex proposal per month across the ecosystem and 2 hours to verify and 10 people to perform the verification
• Total hours: 100 hours per month
• Total $ (with $200 hourly rate): $20,000 per month
• Debugging time saved by Chopsticks. Basti could be a good candidate to provide input on this as I know he is using Chopsticks to debug some XCM issue on Rococo and system parachains.
• Estimation: 20 parachain and relaychain teams, 2 dev per team, 10% of time saved
• Total hours: 640 hours per months
• Total $ (with $200 hourly rate): $128,000 per month

Subway

It is easy to measure the impact of Subway. From real numbers compared between Parity and Acala, Subway can reduce the RPC node cost by ~8x. With 20 parachain and relaychain teams with on average of $10,000 per month RPC hosting cost per team (reference 1, 2), Subway is able to save ~$8000 per team per month, or $160,000 per month in total.

Sum

• ORML: $420,000 and $150,000 per month
• Chopsticks: $248,000 per month
• Subway: $160,000 per month
• Total: $420,000 + $558,000 per month
• Impact for 6 months: $3,768,000

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EDIT: Cost breakdown

CI host

All of ORML, Chopsticks and Subway are using Github Action as CI tool with self-hosted runner. The CI infrastructure is shared with other projects and therefore only a fraction of the hours and hosting costs are included here.

Hours:

• Devops: 100

Cloud host:

• $100 per month

ORML

Hours:

• Management and planning: 20
• Development: 180
• Support and troubleshooting: 40

Chopsticks

Hours:

• Management and planning: 40
• Research: 160
• Development: 1600
• Upstream contribution: 40
• Documentation, support and troubleshooting: 100

Subawy

Hours:

• Management and planning: 40
• Research: 80
• Development: 800

Total hours: 3200

Hourly cost: $100 to $300 depends on the position