This is a follow-up proposal to what we submitted before:

#229 Subscan | Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Kusama & Statemine (from July to December 2022)

This is also a re-submission of Referendum 316:

#316 Subscan | Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Kusama & Statemine Networks (from January to September 2023)

Overview

Subscan serves as a vital block explorer and analytics tool within the Substrate ecosystem, offering valuable insights to its community. However, maintaining and operating Subscan demands significant resource investments, encompassing server infrastructure, security, and personnel costs. Thus, we propose reimbursing the operation and maintenance fees for Subscan from January 2023 to March 2024 from the Kusama treasury, ensuring its continuous operation and maintenance.

We highly prioritize feedback from our community users. In Q3 2023, we made substantial efforts to reduce infrastructure costs, yielding effective and gratifying results. Operational expenses gradually decreased starting from July 2023 and have recently stabilized. As an example, our GCP bill for September 2023 decreased by more than 50.52% compared to its historical peak.

In this re-submission, we appended billing information covering October 2023 through March 2024. While ongoing block production growth naturally increases GCP expenses, we managed to moderate this increase, ensuring slow and predictable billing growth over the recent half-year. Particularly noteworthy is the March 2024 bill, significantly lower than its March 2023 counterpart despite the elapsed year, showcasing the substantial efficacy and enduring benefits of our Operations and Maintenance Cost Reduction Plan.

Re-submission Details

Following the rejection of Referendum 316, we diligently reviewed and implemented optimization strategies suggested by the community. Data from the past 9 months demonstrates that these measures have been highly effective, making future costs more predictable.

However, it's important to note that the Kusama network has not covered any costs for Subscan for 15 months, posing a significant financial challenge for our team. The substantial cost shortfall has us concerned about our future. Should this proposal not be approved, we may need to consider pausing the development of new features for the Kusama network, potentially impacting the ecosystem negatively—an outcome we earnestly wish to avoid.

We appeal to the Polkadot community for support in this proposal. Our commitment to enhancing and maintaining the infrastructure remains steadfast. By securing the necessary funding, we can continue our work without interruptions or compromises, ensuring the robustness and innovation of the ecosystem.

View detail here.