This request is for funding of:

• Maintaining public RPC services for kusama, kusama commons (assethub, bridgehub), encointer, westend and westend assethub (all included in polkadot.js.org)
• Maintaining bootnodes for kusama and westend

In the previous 30 days we served:

• 133.390.042 Kusama & common chains RPC requests
• 37.080.656 Westend & common chains RPC requests

Live data can be seen on our webpage.

It is a follow-up of our previous opengov and earlier ended Infrastructure Maintenance Bounty requests.

Previous request were more post funded (requested at the end or after a period) while this one is more pre funded (at the beginning of the period). Main reason for this is that there seems to be a sentiment against spendings of the treasuries in general (HACNA) and also some discussion about rpc node funding; how many providers do we need, are we going more to a light node enviroment without rpc servers? We would like to have some clarity of our funding in the light of planning our resources. For example database sizes of archive nodes are growing fast, we need to deploy extra servers in case the load of our servers gets too high, etc.

We believe that:

• we provide a valuable service to the community with a reasonable funding
• at this moment rpc services are still needed because accessing the network by light nodes is not very functional/mainstream yet
• it is good to have diversity in providers and also smaller rpc providers should have a place in the ecosystem
• our track record is long enough to earn some trust that we will use pre-funding in a responsible way

Full proposal can be found here, hoping for a positive outcome and of course open to discussion/comments.

Regards,
Max | Stakeworld.io