Subsquid - Public data indexing Infrastructure for Polkadot and Kusama (Q4 2023)

Proponent: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Beneficiary: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Contact Details:

Subsquid Labs GmbH 6302 Zug, Switzerland

mf@subsquid.io

Short description: Ongoing development and maintenance costs for public Subsquid Archives and the Giant Squid API

Archive raw data: Archive Infrastructure Metrics - October, November, December

Giant Squid raw data: Giant Squid Infrastructure Metrics - October, November, December

Requested DOT: 37,174.81 DOT + 12,082.84 DOT = 49 257.65 DOT = $288,157.30

Previous proposals: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/372

Motivation

A) Archives

Archives are an important piece of Polkadot and Kusama data infrastructure provided by Subsquid. They provide access to on-chain data in GraphQL format for all major parachains on Kusama and Polkadot, with more chains getting support as the ecosystem grows. They are being used as a data source for Squids and for efficient data exploration and ad-hoc queries. An up-to-date list of Archives is kept in a public Archive Registry

The Archives, as performant data sources of historical on-chain data, are critical to the operation of backend APIs run by major projects in the Polkadot ecosystem (the list is not exhaustive):

• Polkassembly
• Talisman
• RMRK
• SubWallet (+ Giant Squid API)
• KodaDot
• ChainSafe
• Multix
• Phala dApp
• Subsocial + Polkaverse
• Stellaswap
• Beamswap
• Polkascan (+ Giant Squid API)
• Calamar (+ Giant Squid API)
• Moonsama/Exosama
• Reef
• Manta Wallet
• ZooDAO
• Zenlink

All archives can be accessed and queried via an web intuitive GraphQL interface and are often used as developer friendly replacement of a block explorer.

For example, here’s a query for the last ten transfers on Kusama blockchain run against the Kusama Archive endpoint

Over the fourth Quarter of 2023 we've provided a free public data indexing service for Substrate blockchains (some archives have been dismissed, new ones have been added), so that everyone interested in the projects can publicly access indexed data on Substrate Events, Extrinsics, Storage Items and EVM logs. Here are projects (parachains and mainnets aiming for future parachains slots) we currently support:

• acala
• aleph-zero
• aleph-zero-testnet
• altair
• amplitude
• astar
• bajun
• basilisk
• bifrost
• bifrost-polkadot
• bitcountry-pioneer
• calamari
• centrifuge
• cere
• collectives
• composable-finance
• crab
• crust
• darwinia
• elysium
• elysium-testnet
• equilibrium
• exosama
• foucoco
• frequency
• frequency-testnet
• gear-testnet
• gmordie
• hashed
• heiko
• hydradx
• integritee-network
• interlay
• invarch-tinkernet
• joystream
• kabocha
• karura
• khala
• kilt
• kintsugi
• kusama
• kylin
• litentry
• litmus
• manta
• matrix
• moonbase
• moonbeam
• moonriver
• moonsama
• myriad
• myriad-testnet
• origin-trail
• pangolin
• pangoro
• parallel
• peaq
• pendulum
• phala
• picasso
• polkadex
• polkadot
• polymesh
• reef
• reef-testnet
• robonomics
• rococo
• shibuya
• shiden
• soonsocial
• sora
• sora-testnet
• statemine
• statemint
• t0rn
• tanganika
• ternoa
• tidechain
• turing
• vara
• westend-collectives
• xsocial
• xx-network
• zeitgeist

B) Giant Squid

Giant Squid is a set of open-source GraphQL APIs built with Squid SDK and maintained by Subsquid Labs. The APIs cover the most commonly used data for Pokadot, Kusama and a growing list of major parachains and is used by explorers (such as Calamar and Polkascan) and wallets (e.g. SubWallet).

As of Q1 2024, Subsquid has sunsetted support for Giant Squid, with LimeChain taking over its further development, detailed in the proposal at https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/758

Achievements

• Enhanced Query Packing: Due to optimization and better filtering, archive queries have become more accurate and stable. Now, significantly fewer queries are needed to retrieve the necessary chain data, reducing the load on the infrastructure. It is worth noting that the response size has increased as fewer queries are required to obtain the same data.
• ArrowSquid release: The main feature introduced by the ArrowSquid update is the new ability of the processor to ingest unfinalized blocks directly from a network node, instead of waiting for the archive to ingest and serve it first. The processor can now handle forks and rewrite the contents of its database if it happens to have indexed orphaned blocks. This allows Subsquid-based APIs to become near real-time and respond to the on-chain activity with subsecond latency. Another major feature introduced by ArrowSquid is the support for transaction execution receipts, traces and state diffs.
• Decentralizing Archives: launched public testnet on CoinList with over 40.000 participants (https://coinlist.co/subsquid-testnet). Several thousand indexers in the Subsquid testnet were deployed to index Moonbeam, a Polkadot parachain.
• Subsquid is powering ≈ 650 live projects in Q4 2023
• The biggest Polkadot projects have fully migrated or are in the process of finishing the migration from FireSquid to ArrowSquid, including: Polkassembly, Subsocial, HydraDX, KodaDot, Talisman, Multix Multisig , RMRK, Apillon, StellaSwap
• Support continues to be added for new and upcoming Polkadot projects, including new and burgeoning partnerships and Archive implementations with Polimec Protocol, Acurast, Watr, and others.

Statistics and data

Over the course of Q4 2023:

• Served a total of 1,325,237,833 (~1.32 billion) queries to the substrate based archives in Q4 2023
• Served ~500m monthly archive requests for substrate based archives
• The highest daily total responses have been 19.15m in a single 24 hour period for substrate
• The decrease in queries reflects an ongoing shift to Firesquid, largely attributed to a substantially improved query structure that optimizes performance.

Giant Squid is a service we introduced in Q1 2023, and has been launched in mid-January, here are two charts showing its quick adoption by the community, as an index of its success:

Costing

This proposal includes the combined costs for running Giant Squid and Archives for Polkadot, Kusama and their Parachains,which amounts to a total of 49 257.65 DOT. Raw data for Archives can be seen here. Raw data for Giant Squid can be seen here. The proposal is submitted towards the Polkadot treasury.

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

Giant Squid running costs: