Tldr;

• OnFinality has a proven track record providing RPC API support for 68 Polkadot and Kusama parachains
• To help cash-starved parachains through the winter, we propose funded complete support for the entire Polkadot ecosystem
• Each parachain team will be allocated US$620 of base funding each month for this service which will be held by OnFinality to explicitly provide the service. In our experience, this is the average funding that we require to provision, run, maintain, and monitor a basic service for each small network.
• Historic data has shown us that this should be sufficient to serve up to 5 million daily API responses with careful rate limiting and DDOS protection.
• For the few larger networks that exceed these requirements (e.g. Polkadot’s RPC endpoint), those sovereign parachains will be responsible for all costs above the base $620 funding.

Background and Problem Statement

As Polkadot’s largest infrastructure provider, since November 2020 we've provided access to dedicated node support and free public API service for over 68 networks in the Polkadot / Kusama ecosystems. We’ve always made it our goal to provide complete support for the entire Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. For RPC API services, historically we have sought funding from the sovereign parachain teams themselves for funding the ongoing operating expenses of these services. However, as the crypto winter has hit hard, many teams are no longer able to fund core public good services like public RPC endpoints.

This has a detrimental effect on applications that serve the Polkadot ecosystem (many of which are our customers). Wallets (e.g. Talisman and Nova), explorers (e.g. Subscan and Polkaholic), account tools (e.g. Sub.ID), indexers (e.g. Subsquid and SubQuery), governance applications (e.g. Polkassembly and Subsquare), and thousands of other applications in each ecosystem struggle to find reliable, performant, and SLA supported RPC API endpoints for many smaller networks.

This is causing a divide in our ecosystem between highly funded parachains that can survive the winter, and new emergent chains that are struggling to get started - we’re seeing first hand that the number of growing new parachains in Polkadot is stalling.

Proposed Solution

From our point of view, the greatest advantage of Polkadot is the network effects and support that it brings. Funding from the Polkadot treasury is a holistic solution that will allow us to support as many parachains as possible.

With this in mind, we’re requesting globally accessible and equitable funding from the treasury to cover a basic RPC API service (full archive and trace node support included) for all active Polkadot and Kusama parachains.

This proposal will cover US$620 of base funding each month for each parachain’s API service. To start with, we budget that there will be 60 parachains that take us up on this offer (all parachains with an active lease will be eligible). The total combined running cost for each month is estimated at USD $37,200.00 (split between Polkadot and Kusama treasuries) - all inclusive of capital and operating expenses, administration time from OnFinality DevOps, onboarding costs, backup costs, and all other monitoring and right-sizing by our team.

Please read the full proposal here

We welcome all of your comments below, please also note that there is a duplicate discussion post on the Polkadot forums too