This treasury proposal is Between the Polkadot Council and MIDLDEV OÜ, a company registered in Estonia with registry number 14973249, commonly known as MIDL.dev.

Service description

1. A functioning infrastructure to provide usable blockchain database snapshots for the Polkadot network, to the benefit of node operators and validators,

2. New snapshots at least once per day. Snapshots are filesystem dump of the Polkadot node storage backend file, of variety RocksDb, of type pruned, with a depth of 1000 blocks, compressed in 7z format, that can be used by validators to quickly spin up or restore their infrastructure,

3. A website frontend at polkashots.io with relevant metadata and download links, including a permanent link that always redirects to the most recent snapshot,

4. Best effort incident and problem management,

5. Redundant implementation setup which allows for continuity, seamless upgrades and basic disaster recovery & contingency management.

6. Make snapshots available on IPFS and pin them for 3 days

Context

The website polkashots.io has been operational for 6 months now and providing Polkadot and Kusama pruned snapshots for validators. It has had excellent uptime. It is currently the only provider for this service. It is very frequently mentioned in the Validator Lounge Matrix channels and there are youtube videos referencing them. It is beneficial to the ecosystem by providing a path for validators to quickly and safely recover from a storage failure or migrate their operations.

Evolution over time

Shall substrate/polkadot add support for a useful native snapshot format, the platform will switch to providing these formats instead of a filesystem dump.

Shall substrate/polkadot implement a “warp sync” technology or any other technology, if this technology results in centrally managed snapshot services no longer be the most expedient way of starting or recovering a validator node, this agreement will expire and the service will cease.

Operational expenses

The labor cost is 1000 EUR/month including 2 engineers in 2 different time zones. The cloud cost varies and is currently estimated at 300 EUR/month.

Funding request from Polkadot treasury

MIDLDEV OÜ will make funding requests to the Polkadot treasury every 6 months:

• The first request will cover the period January-June 2021. The future requests will cover post-paid funding of operational expenses, for the previous 6 months.

• Operational expenses consist of labor costs of 1000 EUR/month plus the cloud costs with a 50% markup. Cloud costs include costs of operating the node, storing the files and operating the website frontend.

• We will be operating the polkashots service in a dedicated Google Cloud project (or equivalent in a different cloud provider) for accurate metering and pricing.

• This proposal is for Polkadot, we submitted an equivalent proposal for the Kusama network

Budget

| Cost item                             | Monthly cost             |
|---------------------------------------|--------------------------|
| Labor                                 | 1000 EUR /mo             |
| 150% Cloud costs (estimate)           | 450 EUR /mo              |
| Total (monthly)                       | 1,450.00 EUR /mo         |
| Total (bi-annually)                   | 8,700 EUR bi-anually     |
| Exchange rate DOT/EUR                 | 17.34 EUR (20.666 USD)   |
| Total base price in DOT (bi-annually) | 501.730                  |
| Slippage + conversion fee 5%          | 25.087                   |
| Proposal (DOT)                        | 526.817                  |

Payment conditions

• to calculate the price, we use Subscan's 30 avg tool at the day of submission:

  • Polkadot: https://polkadot.subscan.io/tools/charts?type=price

  • Kusama: https://kusama.subscan.io/tools/charts?type=price

• Trading-slippage will be taken into account by adding a 5% surplus to the DOT base-price

• Proposal should be approved to cover the upcoming 6 months, not the 6 months of work done before.

• Work will start upon approval.