This proposal seeks funding to create and publish weekly reports for Polkadot’s P2P network (prior forum discussion here ). The ProbeLab team, which has incubated at Protocol Labs for many years, has extensive experience with libp2p and has contributed significantly to libp2p over the years.

The team is focusing on network-layer measurements with the majority of the results published at: https://probelab.io. In alignment with this endeavor, the grants for this project will be facilitated through the Open Impact Foundation*. OIF is committed to supporting ProbeLab in their efforts and depend on this funding to enable their valuable work in enhancing network transparency and efficiency for the Polkadot ecosystem. 

• The data to produce Weekly Reports are collected using ProbeLab’s Nebula Crawler.

• A detailed description of what Weekly Reports show can be found in this forum post.

• A sample weekly report for the Polkadot network can be found in this GH repo.

Cost The ProbeLab Team has set up and been gathering results for the Polkadot network for over 12 months. The infrastructure cost has so far been covered by the ProbeLab team. Going forward, the ProbeLab team can only continue crawling the network if we have support from the Polkadot community.

Cost:

The cost associated with the services for the weekly reports are as follows:

• One off setup fee: $20k to have results on https://probelab.io

• The difference between this cost and the $5k mentioned in the forum post is that the price has been referring to reports posted on GH, where plots are static. In the meantime, we’re migrating everything https://probelab.io where plots are dynamic (several extra options built in when generating plots with plotly - see already existing results at probelab.io compared to the sample Polkadot report in GH).

• Monthly cost: $2.5k (billed annually at $30k)

What is included in the fee:

• running and covering the cost of the infrastructure,

• maintaining and updating the tools and infrastructure as needed (e.g., dependency updates and database maintenance),

• an expert from our group will inspect the results on a weekly basis and flag any “notable” items that need further attention.

• posting the weekly report together with any “notable” items in the Polkadot forum of preference.

The responsible person to answer technical queries related to this proposal is @yiannisbot. The ProbeLab team can be reached through the contact details given at: https://probelab.io/about 

*Open Impact Foundation is short for Open Impact Foundation PCC, a charitable foundation based in Liechtenstein that focuses on the support of digital public goods and hosts the libp2p Core Cell.