Infrastructure Builders Program Bounty
Summary:
The IBP, a collective of independent infrastructure service providers, aims to become the main ecosystem RPC and 'IT department' by providing infrastructure related services to the Polkadot ecosystem and all parachains. The unique design of the IBP creates a globally distributed and resilient ecosystem service provider. By offering RPC services to parachain teams we want to make it more lucrative for new projects to build on Polkadot and existing teams to purely focus on building.
The program is a specialized initiative to enhance the decentralized infrastructure of the Polkadot and Kusama network. It establishes a resilient, globally distributed setup for the core infrastructure services. All services are deployed on infrastructure owned by its members, removing value extraction by unnecessary intermediaries.
!Note!:
The requested amount is set up as a bounty with 5 Polkadot native curators where costs are only paid retroactively. The charge of the hereby stated proposal only occurs in the case of full Polkadot adoption where the scale of deployment would mean:
- >1140 RPC nodes (across 15 datacenters)
- >37 Billion requests a month (across relay and parachains)
RPC services are all paid retroactively for delivered services monthly by USD value.
See the Full Proposal here
Comments (7)
Proposal Passed
Summary
0%
Aye
0%
Nay
Aye (116)0.0 DOT
Support0.0 DOT
Nay (3)0.0 DOT
Because this is forecast to cover parachains comprehensively, we support this bounty wholeheartedly. There is a strong track record from everyone involved, and there is almost no risk of failure. We would not support this if it did not cover parachains comprehensively. But because it does, we feel very strongly about this working successfully especially with a bounty model. My only concern is that people who object on the grounds that light clients + smoldot should replace RPC should be heard, and that we don't turn RPC into a DOS/QWERTY keyboard type situation when true resilience is supposed to come from that instead. Those people are correct and should be listened to sooner rather than later, with a sense of urgency. I hope we don't have a RPC / IBP industrial complex getting in the way of that future. AYE
@Colorful Notion
Thank you for your vote!
Regarding light clients, the IBP is fully aligned with the ecosystem's future goals and wants what's best for Polkadot. For example, IBP members are required to run bootnodes for free, which are (among other things) required for light clients to establish connection with the network. From the 13 entities running bootnodes on Polkadot, 11 are the currently active IBP members.
There is also a little misconception regarding light clients: As of now, light clients can only be used for fetching the current state and it is not possible to be used for historical data. While it will eventually be supported (as mentioned by a fellowship member here), even then we will still need people to run archive nodes. Currently we believe this feature could enable more participation with consumer hardware due to the nature of its design by anyone from home, which would reduce costs. Still, those people would also need to be compensated in some way for their services and the IBP would like to enable this, perhaps through its own collective with a subtreasury in the future. We will create a proper proposal once those features are reality.
We also strongly believe that the formation of an "RPC industrial complex" is not possible due to the design of the bounty and our curators selection, whose interest are those of the network and not of the IBP members.
I truly cannot express enough how much support I have for the IBP bounty, its members, and their processes. Having had the opportunity to engage with the Paseo Testnet, I witnessed firsthand the exceptional quality and dedication of each member. The stability provided by validators, collators, and RPC was impressive, but what really stood out was their immediate and enthusiastic willingness to offer support whenever necessary. Furthermore, during the launch of Paseo, the IBP proved their commitment to optimizing costs by providing market prices for infrastructure that were not only competitive but also highly advantageous.