Funded High Performance Public Infrastructure for the entire Polkadot Ecosystem (OnFinality)
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.
The initial proposal is for July's cost only
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.
Comments (10)
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It's a wrong direction for relay chain treasury to support all para chain rpc services. Some para chains will fall into disuse. Most para chains are commercial. Polkadot will die of feeding these commercial ones which can not even afford basic rpc service.
Everyone in the Polkadot ecosystem should vote YES on this proposal. Polkadot's current health depends on parachains and future health depends on parathreads. We at Colorful Notion (developers of polkaholic.io) depend on Onfinality in part for its RPC + Trace services to support our ecosystem-wide indexing (substrate-etl) and multi-chain block explorer (Polkaholic.io), which we also attempt to deliver for the entire ecosystem for all parachains now and parathreads in the future.
We believe onfinality's short-term proposal should be replaced ASAP with one or more Infrastructure bounties (e.g. for a Polkadot Data Alliance) to ensure a competitive set of RPC providers, wallets, block explorers, indexing/data warehousing + governance tools as “public good infrastructure”. These providers should be paid to provide a set of BASIC services that focus parachains entirely on product development and growing their user base.
These Infrastructure Bounties should not take months to develop and should be approved this summer and be aimed towards a parathread future this year.
For me, conduit.xyz is an extremely well-put together offering from the Optimism stack and has a VERY low barrier to entry -- you can spin up a L2 Devnet in 3 minutes complete with most of the things you need now and a plan for what you could want in the future.
The lack of sense of urgency on having a competitive offering should be taken VERY seriously: Every single infrastructure provider is being forced to go where the users are and innovate there. A lower barrier to entry from other ecosystems will not only result in L2 Chain builders building elsewhere, but the same infrastructure providers (ourselves included) increasingly developing their innovations on a stodgy old EVM stack.
We love substrate and the idealism of the Polkadot community and hope we can work together in a well-coordinated healthy ecosystem that can have a faster growth rate than the other L1/L2 ecosystems.