Summary

Proponent: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Beneficiary: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Contact Details: 

Subsquid Labs GmbH

6300 Zug, Switzerland

mf@subsquid.io 

Context:
This is a revised proposal, informed by the community feedback on our previous submission: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/1668

Short description:
Maintenance and operation of public SQD Archives for Polkadot, and related parachains during Q4 2024.

These archives are essential public infrastructure that provide developers, explorers, wallets, and parachain teams with free access to historical and near real-time data.

In direct response to community feedback, we have significantly reduced engineering costs, recalculating from the actual $100/hour rate we paid to the community-aligned $27/hour benchmark. This ensures the request is lean, efficient, and aligned with Treasury expectations, even though SubsquidLabs already absorbed the higher real costs.

Treasury funding is strictly dedicated to public archives and open-source tooling that serve the Polkadot ecosystem. Our commercial offering, SQD Cloud, is entirely self-funded and operates independently. Importantly, the infrastructure costs presented here cover only the data pipelines required to serve free public archives; they do not include or subsidize cloud hosting costs for commercial clients. 

Requested amount:
$164,840.20 (a reduction of $143,863.80 from our previous request).

Archive raw data for Polkadot specific chains: Archive Infrastructure metrics - October, November, December 

Previous successful proposal: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/1526

Motivation

Why Public Archives Matter

Public SQD Archives are a cornerstone of Polkadot’s data infrastructure. They:

• Eliminate the need to run costly indexing nodes or custom infra.
• Provide high-uptime, scalable access to Substrate events, extrinsics, storage items, and EVM logs.
• Support onboarding of new projects and parachains by making access to on-chain data free.

Beneficiaries of the archives include:

• Wallets & Explorers: Talisman, Fearless Wallet. 
• Governance Tools: Polkassembly.
• Parachain Ecosystem Projects: Polimec, Apillon, Phala, Hydration, InvArch.
• Infra Partners: ChainSafe (Multix multisig and more), LimeChain (maintainer of Giant Squid API).
• NFT & DeFi Projects: RMRK, KodaDot, Stellaswap, Polkawarriers, Evrloot.

 

Without these archives, developers would face higher costs, slower onboarding, and greater friction at a time when adoption should be accelerated.

Work Delivered in Q4 2024

• Infrastructure Scaling – Expanded archive capacity to handle higher data volumes.
• Squid SDK Enhancements – Added new Substrate pallet support (including Revive), and improved error-handling mechanisms for uninterrupted indexing.
• Network Growth & Decentralization – Increased active worker nodes by 40% (from 1,139 in October to 1,600 in December), strengthening resilience.

Interested in a detailed breakdown of how we improved Polkadot? See a breakdown here [Subsquid Labs PR History Contribution to Polkadot Q4 2024] 

Measurable Outcomes for Polkadot Specific Chains:

• Archival data stored grew from 11.35 TiB → 11.68 TiB.
• Network scaled to 1,600 worker nodes storing ~900 TB of data.
• Archives served ~10 TiB of data in Q4.
• 2.3M archive requests successfully processed.
• Peak daily transfer: 382.57 GiB (Oct 5, 2024).

Statistics and Data

Over the course of Q4 2024:

• Served a total of 11,668,177,888,249  (~10.06 TiB) of data from substrate based chains.
• Served 2,336,249  archive requests from substrate based archives.
• The highest daily total data transfer recorded for Substrate was 382.57 GiB within a single 24-hour period (2024-10-05).

Cost Breakdown

Community-Aligned Model: 

In response to community feedback, we have restructured our cost model to ensure it is lean and aligned with Treasury expectations. Engineering expenses were originally covered at real market rates of ~$100/hour across three full-time engineers. For this proposal, we have recalculated them at the community benchmark of $27/hour, and reduced the scope to the equivalent of one full-time engineer.

This adjustment demonstrates our commitment to long-term collaboration with Polkadot and ensures that the majority of this request reflects infrastructure costs required to maintain public archives.

The result is a significantly leaner and more transparent request, with a total of $164,840.20 for Q4 2024.

Raw data can be seen here

Here is a summary of the running costs for Archives, in a tabular format:

Service	Cost	VAT 8.1%	Subtotal
Compute Engine (GCE)	$92,630.90	$100,134.00	$100,134.00
OVHCloud	$28,419.03	$30,720.97	$30,720.97
Networking	$2,963.02	$3,203.02	$3,203.02
Kubernetes Engine (GKE)	$436.23	$471.56	$471.56
Cloud Storage (GCS)	$63.21	$68.33	$68.33
Cloud SQL	$396.38	$428.49	$428.49
Cloud DNS	$18.01	$19.47	$19.47
Cloud Logging	$13,506.84	$14,600.89	$14,600.89
Cloud Key Management Service (KMS)	$2.99	$3.23	$3.23
Artifact Registry	$336.01	$363.23	$363.23
Engineers & Maintenance*	$12,960.00	$14,009.76	$14,009.76
Total			$164,022.96

Updated contribution costs: 

Service	Cost / h	Quantity	VAT 8.1%	Subtotal
Revive pallet support	$27.00	16.00	$466.99	$466.99
Indexing efficiency upgrades	$27.00	6.00	$175.12	$175.12
Product management	$27.00	3.00	$87.56	$87.56
Project management	$27.00	3.00	$87.56	$87.56
Total				$817.24

Conclusion

Here SQD seeks retroactive funding for Q4 2024, covering the costs of maintaining public archives that were already delivered and used by the ecosystem.

• We have reduced engineering rates to align with community expectations.
• We have kept commercial and public services separate, ensuring Treasury funds only support open-access infra.
• We have already delivered the work, at higher actual costs, but request only this lean, community-aligned amount.

Supporting this proposal ensures that Polkadot builders and users continue to benefit from free, reliable, and high-performance indexing infrastructure, strengthening adoption and ecosystem growth.