Proposer: OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Polkadot/Substrate community. Our mission is to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp. 

Proponent: 12mRyiCp9zdh1wEVW5gLLiFBxDPKks72rRXmSupyEK3VAMLf

Date: 18th July 2023

Requested: 12,455.0830 DOT (USD $66,485.23 )

Short description: Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint, Collectives, Westend, and Encointer.

Full Report: Polkadot Q2 2023 Treasury Proposal

Raw Data: Polkadot Data Q2 2023

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Original Motivation

As Polkadot's largest and most cost efficient infrastructure provider, over the last 3 months (April, May and June 2023) we've provided scalable free public API services for Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, Collectives, and Encointer. These services have the following three outcomes:

• Grow the ecosystem by reducing the barriers to entry to access a high performance nodes, and to allow development teams to focus on innovation rather than running infrastructure

• Help scale existing projects in the ecosystem by providing more stable infrastructure services that can be depended on to scale

• Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how nodes are running, what calls are causing errors, and where traffic is originating from

Background on our RPC Service

Since inception in November 2020 we have made a large number of improvements to our Ultimate API service focussing on three key areas; performance/reliability, providing more value from our Ultimate API service, and cost optimisation.

Performance/Reliability

OnFinality is operationally striving for a minimum of 99.99% reliability, which means less than an hour of downtime each year.  We proudly display and share our 90 day uptime statistics for each network publicly here.

We have invested hugely into a team dedicated to optimising our application gateway and caching layer to ensure that we provide the fastest possible service for our customers. We run clusters in 5 different regions (North Virginia, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Australia) and across 3 different cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Alicloud) to ensure that we are fault tolerant to any single region or cloud provider ceasing service.

Providing more value from our Ultimate API service

For customers that do sign up for paid API keys, we've been adding more and more features to provide a better experience. Geolocation insights provide statistics about where in the world communities are to help influence decisions around where to expand infrastructure and to view the effectiveness of regional BD initiatives.  We can also now automatically upsize the storage on nodes to prevent the risk of any downtime.

Finally, in Q2 of 2023 OnFinality launched Trace API support which was a huge enhancement allowing unprecedented visibility for dApp builders. Trace API captures and records vital information otherwise not available through regular RPC methods and extrinsics (such as complete XCM transfer records and complete list of balance changes). These APIs are essential in order for developers like Polkaholic to parse and understand XCM transactions.

Cost Optimisation

OnFinality is very conscious about providing a strong level of support for Polkadot/Kusama at an extremely competitive price. Cost saving measurement has been a significant focus on behalf of our customers, with advanced rate limiting controls implemented. We can, for example, rate limit each client on a burst and sustained basis and based on the request methods that they are calling (e.g. each state_traceBlock request is rate limited 45x more than chain_getBlock), read more about these advanced rate limiting tools that we've developed here.

Meaning that we can continue to provide generous public API endpoints for over 40 different networks for common-good applications, but restrict access to high volume users that abuse this free service. We've been able to manage our costs significantly on behalf of our customers as a result. 

We've developed and shared our approach towards service sustainability, with the introduction of a 'Paid API Revenue Share Discount' scheme. In this scheme OnFinality pools the revenue from customers that pay for higher API pricing plans and distributes this revenue pool to partners that currently pay for and own each API endpoint proportionally based on the number of paid API requests that go to that API endpoint. The scheme was introduced in Q1 of 2023 and resulted in a discount to Polkadot's Q1 treasury proposal of $396.90.

Our cost optimisation efforts were validated in Q1 as we had the lowest cost per million responses across all of the major RPC providers that lodged a proposal to the Polkadot treasury. You can see how our costs compared to other RPC providers in the ecosystem during Q1 here.

Service Details

During Q2 of 2023, we've made a number of new improvements to our Ultimate API service that address performance/reliability, features, and costs.

Additionally, we are proud to have delivered some key service enhancements that benefit the Polkadot ecosystem in the last quarter. This includes:

• Launched Trace API allowing unprecedented visibility for dApp builders. Trace API captures and records vital information otherwise not available through regular RPC methods and extrinsics (such as complete XCM transfer records and complete list of balance changes). These APIs are essential in order for developers like Polkaholic to parse and understand XCM transactions.

• Geographical Insights - API key owners can view statistics about where in the world your community are to help influence decisions around where to expand infrastructure and to view the effectiveness of regional BD initiatives

• Clarify our IP address handling - OnFinality does not, and will never, correlate or link specific wallet addresses to the IP address or request origin making the RPC request

• Added support for a number of new networks, including Anmol, HydraDX, Equilibrium, as well as Osmosis, Evmos, Harmony, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fuse, DFK Chain, Celo, and Klaytn from outside the ecosystem. OnFinality is a new one stop shop for all of your RPC needs from multiple ecosystems.

• A variety of improvements to our health metric collection tools and automated recovery scripts to ensure our 99.9% SLA is exceeded.

• Scale improvements to our team, processes, and systems to allow us to provide this same service to any  substrate team

Our customers are building cross-chain wallets, running some of the largest block explorers, and are indexing multiple networks - they've all benefited from these API access restrictions, improved monitoring, and the larger number of supported Polkadot chains. You can always see live data on our API service on our public status page.

Between 2023-04-01 and 2023-06-30 our Polkadot API service has:

• Served a total of 3.4 billion (3,474,556,577) responses

• Accumulated over 44,000 GB of data egress 

• The highest daily total was 71 million responses in a single 24 hour period for Polkadot only

• Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 32 million responses each day

• Westend had over 209 million API responses in the period

• Statemint had over 70 million API responses in the period

• Encointer  had over 33 million API responses in the period

• Collectives had almost 50  million API responses in the period

• All time totals for Polkadot is 100,645,546,952 (100 Billion) since November, 2020

• At the end of this period the 90 day uptime for Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, Encointer and Collectives was 100%, 100%, 97.23%, 99.99%, 99.94% respectively

Costings

This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, Encointer and Collectives. The total combined running cost is USD $66,485.23 - raw data is here

For breakdown of costings and more detail, read the full report here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V5S1OPGe7IM91MceJxnWIMTpti9g2SFJ7nsp3c7ryIo/edit?usp=sharing