Proponent: ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP (OnFinality)

Date: 8th May 2023

Requested:  1,835.806 KSM (USD: $51,971.31)

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

Full Report: Kusama Q1 2023 Full Report/Proposal

Raw Data: Kusama Data Q1 2023

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Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (January, February, March 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 reliable infrastructure services

• Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how nodes are running, what calls are causing errors, and where traffic is originating from

Service Details

During Q1 of 2023, we've made a large number of stability improvements to our Ultimate API service to allow us to add a large number of new parachains over the last quarter as well as support for multiple chains outside of Polkadot.

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.

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 Substrate chains.

Between 2023-01-01 and 2023-03-31 our Kusama API service has:

• Served a total of 2.08 billion responses

• Accumulated over 43,000 GB of data egress 

• The highest daily total was 62 million responses in a single 24 hour period for Kusama only

• Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 33 million responses each day

• Stateme had over 190 million API responses in the period

• All time totals for Polkadot is 40,919,737,864 (nearly 41 billion) since November, 2020

• At the end of this period the 90 day uptime for Kusama and Statemine was 99.96% and 99.99% respectively

Enhancements

Additionally, we are proud to have delivered some key service enhancements that benefit the Polkadot ecosystem in the last quarter. This includes:

• Auto Expand Storage - When the node's storage reaches 85% utilisation, the storage size will be automatically increased by 10%. Saves developers and devOps time on having to constantly check on and manually upgrade their node storage size

• Partnership with POKT network to bring in more external developers into the Polkadot ecosystem

• 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

• We're testing access to various unsafe methods like traceBlock and subscribeStorage that will help developers create applications that utilise XCM - contact us if you would like to be part of the beta

• Reduced our exposure to any single cloud provider - Progressively migrated resources away from AWS to other cloud providers for lower cost and exposure.

• Expanded our OnFinality for Startups Programme to support teams from the Substrate Builders Programme and Scytale Ventures

• Added support for a number of new networks, including Ajuna, Unique, Clover, SORA, Composable Finance, Collectives, xx network, as well as Polygon, BNB, Fantom, Gnosis and Evmos 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

You can always see live data on our API service on our public status page and network analytics page.

Full report can be read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vsf8h4wio7lyH0_yrSdSdJ4lGfSSepyscWixoBEdTxI/edit?usp=sharing