Proponent: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE Beneficiary: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Contact Details: Subsquid Labs GmbH 6300 Zug, Switzerland mf@subsquid.io

Short description: Ongoing development and maintenance costs for public SQD Archives

Archive raw data: Archive Infrastructure Metrics - July, August, September

Requested: $310,592.98

Previous proposals: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/1447

Motivation

A) Archives

Archives are an important piece of Polkadot and Kusama data infrastructure provided by SQD (formerly Subsquid). They provide access to on-chain data for public chains in the Polkadot ecosystem. They are being used as a data source for Squids and for efficient data exploration and ad-hoc queries. The Archives, as performant data sources of historical on-chain data, are critical to the operation of backend APIs run by major projects in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Popular Polkadot dApps and projects that depend on SQD include the following:

• Tanssi Network
• Talisman Wallet
• Polimec
• Polkassembly
• Apillon
• Hydration
• Giant Squid API (maintained by LimeChain)
• SubWallet
• FiDi
• KodaDot
• RMRK
• ChainSafe (in particular the Multix multi-sig, as well as other projects)
• Phala Network
• Stellaswap
• Polkascan

Since the beginning of 2024, SQD has transitioned to a paid model for supporting parachains. However, public chains continue to be available for free use. Throughout the Q3 of 2024, we provided a free public data indexing service for Substrate blockchains, allowing interested parties to access indexed data on Substrate Events, Extrinsics, Storage Items, and EVM logs. Below is a list of the public chains we currently support at no cost:

• polkadot
• kusama
• asset-hub-kusama
• asset-hub-polkadot
• bridge-hub-polkadot
• collectives-polkadot
• rococo
• westend

B) Contribution

During Q3 2024, we addressed real-world use cases that were highly requested by the community:

• Supported Substrate extrinsic v5, enhancing compatibility for newer Substrate-based chains.
• Updated squid templates to the new data decoder interface.

Achievements

Increase in Archival Data Demand and Infrastructure Scaling

During Q3’24, archival data demand increased approximately 3.6 times, from 3,265 GiB in Q2 to 11,713 GiB in Q3. We addressed the increasing demand for archival data by enhancing our infrastructure's throughput and redundancy through deploying archives to OVHCloud in addition to GCE, while also empowering our maintenance and engineering teams to support the expanded infrastructure effectively.

Decentralization of the SQD Network Enhancing the Polkadot Ecosystem:

In Q3’24, we continued to empower the SQD Network, driving forward our mission to strengthen the Polkadot ecosystem’s decentralization and resilience. By the end of the quarter, the SQD network had grown to include 1139 active Worker Nodes, securely storing 574TB of data and serving approximately 11TB of data per day. This expanding decentralized infrastructure enhances data processing and storage capabilities, delivering increased security, fault tolerance, and scalability for the Polkadot network.

Statistics and data

Over the course of Q3 2024:

• Served a total of 12,576,410,498,732 (~11.44 TiB) of data from the substrate based archives.
• Served 979,736 archive requests from substrate based archives.
• The highest daily total data transfer recorded for Substrate was 375.57 GiB within a single 24-hour period (2024-09-19).

Costing

This proposal encompasses the combined costs for running Archives for Polkadot, Kusama, and other public chains, along with the development contributions, amounting to a total of $310,592.98.

Raw data for Archives can be seen here.

The proposal is submitted towards the Polkadot treasury. Here is a summary of the running costs for Archives, in a tabular format:

Contribution costs:

We have recently released a strategic development report on Polkadot with a word count of more than 12,000 words. This report is a comprehensive report on the current situation, challenges, competitive strategies, and various solutions of Polkadot that we have provided after conducting detailed community research (including developers) and collecting materials, taking nearly one month. It has sparked extensive discussions within the Polkadot community, been reposted and read by many institutions, and has been recognized by the Web3 Foundation. If you are interested, you can refer to this in-depth report.  

The development report of Polkadot Ecology Research Institute for 2024/4 - 2024/9

The development report of Polkadot Ecology Research Institute for 2024/10 - 2025/3

In this proposal, we are applying for 12 months of operating funds, mainly for personnel expenses. This is also our 9th application to the Polkadot Treasury. You can check out our detailed proposal and find more information about us here, as well as comments from Polkadot builders on our work.

The amount of our application is not particularly large because it is mainly for the personnel expenses of the daily operation of the research institute. The business costs and travel expenses for our participation in various Polkadot activities have always been paid by ourselves. This has been the case in the past few years, and it will still be the case for this application.  

Please consider casting your valuable vote in our favor, and feel free to leave any questions or feedback in the proposal. We will be sure to respond promptly.

P.S. The reason we're applying for treasury funding instead of going through Market Bounty is primarily due to processing timelines. From our understanding, some teams have waited several months without receiving feedback through the Market Bounty channel. Since we're currently using our own payroll funds to support the team, we require a more expedited funding process to ensure timely salary payments and team continuity. Therefore, applying directly to the treasury represents our most viable option at this time.