Proponent: ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP

Date: 12th July 2023

Requested: USD $62,110.28 (KSM value will be calculated using EMA7 rate here on day of lodging on-chain)

Short description: Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for Kusama and Statemine.

Raw Data: Kusama Data Q2 2023

Full Proposal: Kusama Q2 2023 Treasury Proposal

Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (April, May and June 2023) we've provided a scalable free public API service so that everyone can access public pools of managed Kusama and Statemine nodes. This provides the following three outcomes:

Grow the ecosystem by reducing the barriers to entry to access a high performance nodes
Help scale existing projects in the ecosystem by providing infrastructure services that can be depended on
Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we've made Github issues based on behaviour we've observed)

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 Kusama's Q1 treasury proposal of $281.90.

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 Kusama API service has:

Served almost 2 billion (1,962,258,944) responses
Accumulated over 31,000 GB of data egress
The highest daily total was over 42 million responses in a single 24 hour period for Kusama alone
Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 10 million responses each day
Statemine had over 130 million (132,310,628) API responses in the period
All time totals for Kusama is 42,881,996,808 (over 42 billion) since November, 2020
At the end of this period the 90 day uptime on Kusama and Statemine was 99.93% and 100% respectively

Costings

This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for Kusama and Statemine. The total combined running cost is USD $62,110.28 - raw data is here.

For breakdown of costings and more information, read the full proposal here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHIh9fcqbhiDz0tqAFTaxm2-zU56XK_3CpM0r_CcvvU/edit?usp=sharing