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

Over the last 3 months (October, November, December 2021) we've provided a scalable free public API service so that everyone can access public pools of managed Kusama and Statemine nodes.

Between 2021-10-01 and 2021-12-31 our Kusama API service has:
- Served a total of 9,333,324,393 (9 billion) responses (an increase of 16% on the previous quarter)
- Accumulated over 60 TB of data egress (up 7% on Q2)
- The highest daily total was 394,214,930 responses in a single 24 hour period
- Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 44 million responses each day.
- Statemine had over 314 million API responses in the period
- All time totals for Kusama is 20,233,883,203 (20 Billion) since November

![Q4 data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSWsNDzGIGX16MM4vjqaDe_w8JWVoSa-Fl6A71mn-WlKkYumG07PBA2q5KJcSSrQavHUcnEUdGhJpkf/pubchart?oid=1902245037&format=image)

In early October we experienced a surge of activity that took us to our highest daily response count of almost 400 million responses in a single day.

During this period we also noticed additional load on the compute component of our resourcing that we believe is due to over 20 different parachains connecting to the main relay chain and the additional block verification that resulted. We scaled up the compute component of our infrastructure to maintain service levels as a result. Additionally we are closely watching the work that Dwellir is doing in the ecosystem to propose improvements to the RPC nodes.

Additionally, our experience shows significant performance improvements in terms of response times when the CPU usage is less than 50%. We observed a noticeable drop of service quality (in terms of response times) when the node is under load.

This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for Kusama and Statemine. The total combined running cost is USD $45,949.51

[The full writeup is here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mzROC1pcn6h6awsxdQ0LB1nOLWzUMNZjK8L2kL_3p_A/edit?usp=sharing)

OnFinality - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q4 2021)

**This is a post to indicate our intentions to submit a full on chain submission to the Kusama treasury for Q1 operating costs. Please feel free to review and [get in contact](james.bayly@onfinality.io) with OnFinality if you have any questions**

**Proponent:** ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP
**Date:** 27th April 2022
**Requested KSM:** 276.29 KSM
**Short description:** Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for Kusama and Statemine.
**Raw Data:** https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SeLZ-N0G55G4JgjncfS-8_kM3L6fWUl5X0SaQMWZ--4/edit?usp=sharing

## Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (January, February, March 2022) 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 infrastructure  services that can be depended on
- Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we’ve made GitHub issues based on behaviour we’ve observed)

## Service Details

This last quarter has been huge for Kusama and OnFinality, the demand for our services continues to be another  unprecedented period. January had a larger activity than the rest of the quarter which also had our highest daily response count (for Q1). [Raw data is here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nPk1_IPvRj4_8Xpn7Wa2KNjrqXW7kRacP9X0nsCo6fQ/edit#gid=1598230413).

This quarter was all about service stabilisation as part of the promise we made to this ecosystem to provide enterprise grade services to the community. Our services all exceeded our 99.9% target, with 99.99% uptime for Polkadot over the last 90 days. This is an important measure as we surpassed our largest ever day, with over a billion API responses processed by our service in a single 24 hour period in late January.

Between 2022-01-01 and 2022-03-31 our Kusama API service has:

- Served a total of 4,975,878,346 (4.9 billion) responses
- Accumulated over 34 TB of data egress
- The highest daily total was 85,238,268 responses in a single 24 hour period
- Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 49 million responses each day.
- Statemine had over 654 million API responses in the period
- All time totals for Kusama is 1,186,285,385 (1 Trillion) since November, 2020
- At the end of this period the 90 day uptime on Kusama and Statemine was 99.99% and 99.97% respectively

[The full proposal is here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15ezC2j2KbSatjrDIND67H5w8cZntc0Grgfj2Z3267ko/edit?usp=sharing)

OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q1 2022)

## Background

Over the past few months OnFinality has been investing heavily in improving it’s API service infrastructure for both customers and partners (including the Polkadot treasuries). This has provided more features to consumers of the API, better load balancing, and infra updates to [reduce our costs for hosting your service to the treasury by 40%](https://onfinality.medium.com/go-further-with-more-affordable-pricing-f0430e8197ca).

We have just released a new set of API service plans that go above and beyond our standard public service with higher rate limits and unlimited request numbers. We believe these pricing plans are extremely competitive compared to other RPC providers out there in the market.

**These changes are designed to allow us to transition to a more sustainable future.** Previously, The Polkadot Treasury has funded the API service for Polkadot, Westend, and Statemint and this has provided the community with free access to reliable and scalable Enhanced RPC infrastructure that has allowed them to build amazing dApps. **The ecosystem has benefited from over 121 billion API responses over the lifetime of your service for Polkadot, Kusama, Rococo, Westend, Statemine, and Statemint.**

## Options for Consideration

At the moment there is somewhat unrestricted access on public API endpoints. We are now moving towards a better cost model where you will share the costs for your service with customers that are paying for high API pricing plans. 

**To encourage this though, many of our parachain customers are migrating to a model where we put in place lower rate limits for the public API endpoint.** Users in Polkadot have become accustomed to free RPC infrastructure so this transition may take some time - but we believe it is necessary to ensure that our ecosystem is sustainable.

**Just to be clear, we can continue as is with the treasury funding a near unlimited API RPC endpoint for the purpose of ecosystem growth.**

Some customers have even requested significantly lower rate limits for their network endpoints and we are happy to comply (where it would be near impossible to run a production application on a public endpoint). Note that these rate limits only apply to public API endpoints (not ones with an API key) and we can whitelist domains such as polkadot.js so key public good apps are not impacted. Note that these rate limits only apply to public API endpoints (not ones with an API key) and we can allowlist domains such as polkadot.js so key public good apps are not impacted.

## Summary

Just for clarity, this is just a proposal for what OnFinality can do to our public good service that we provide to the treasury. We have had this discussion already with the 41 other networks that we support with mixed decisions taken (rate limit or none). It is ultimately up to the treasury to decide on what to do here, or maintain the status quo.

**I'm looking for an open discussion around what does the treasury see for the future of public common-good infrastructure.**

If it’s “we expect to fund public commons good infra for the foreseeable future” then we should stay with the status quo. But if its “we expect that public common good infra should start to finance their own operations” then we need to transfer cost from the treasury to the community, and we can potentially do that by transferring costs to high volume users.

Full description and writeup here [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wyZT2nyzYJRINeSKT0luZHuVUxl26eGLaTdglusxu1Y/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wyZT2nyzYJRINeSKT0luZHuVUxl26eGLaTdglusxu1Y/edit?usp=sharing)

Public RPC API Service Sustainability Options

Proponent: ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP

Date: 6th October 2022

Requested KSM: xxx KSM (USD: $59,124.98)

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

Raw Data: <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eftYcA4iedfQiwwekxLvNixhksG3uNMRAU0QGAmI09Y/edit?usp=sharing>

Full Report <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UW9Cg5FmYoxaT2bDCzYOpMuv-LNmzvvayfe0vgEBKlY/edit?usp=sharing>

* * * * *

## Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (July, August, September 2022) 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 infrastructure  services that can be depended on
-   Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we've made Github issues based on behaviour we've observed)

## Service Details

During the last quarter, we've focused on three key areas for the development of OnFinality - cost optimization, network expansion, and providing more value from our Ultimate API service.

The bear market has made many of our customers more price sensitive, and as such we've been working with them to optimise our services to provide more for less. We've reduced prices for our larger customers between 30 and 40%, and created products designed to target and onboard new chains with entry level pricing. We've also been working on new rate limiting capabilities to progressively restrict abusers of our public APIs to upgrade to paid API plans.

In the past quarter we have succeeded in our goal of onboarding two new networks, with the addition of Avalanche and Juno to our API service. This was a large amount of upfront work, extending OnFinality to allow chains outside of Polkadot/Substrate, but now that it has been done we should be able to move faster and onboard new chains each week. We hope that this means that we will be able to invite as many new ecosystem participants into Polkadot as possible with this expansion. 

Finally, providing move value from our Ultimate API service has always been a priority, and in this space we've added new API specific paid plans at competitive prices to our competition. We have also delivered the ability for our customers to better understand and learn about their users, with API Insights that tell you where your users are, what they are requesting, what methods are failing (to find bugs in your dApp), and where optimisations can occur.

We continued to execute on our efforts to provide unprecedented service stability and reliability to this ecosystem. All supported networks exceeded our 99.9% target, including 99.94% uptime for Kusama over the last 90 days . At this stage, OnFinality is operationally striving for four 9s of availability, which means less than an hour of downtime each year.

Between 2022-07-01 and 2022-09-30 our Kusama API service has:
-   **Reduced cost to the Kusama treasury while serving a similar amount of traffic**
-   Served a total of 4.932 billion responses
-   Accumulated almost 56 TB of data egress
-   The highest daily total was over 102 million responses in a single 24 hour period
-   Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 60 million responses each day.
-   Statemine had over 364 million API responses in the period
-   All time totals for Kusama is 35,987,582,620 (35 billion) since November, 2020
-   At the end of this period the 90 day uptime on Kusama and Statemine was 99.94% 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:

-   [API Insights](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-introduces-api-insights-so-you-can-analyse-and-learn-about-your-applications-faster/) so you can analyse and learn about your API applications faster and find bugs with your dApp
-   [Cost optimisations](https://blog.onfinality.io/go-further-with-more-affordable-pricing/) to reduce pricing for our customers by up to 40%
-   [New API plans](https://blog.onfinality.io/get-ahead-with-onfinalitys-new-api-endpoints/) for our high usage customers and a way to allocate resource to [move towards a more sustainable funding model](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/1815)
-   [Support for Alibaba Cloud](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-collaborates-with-alibaba-cloud-to-provide-a-premium-experience-to-web3-builders/) to provide more decentralised cloud hosting options for our customers
-   [Updates to our website](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-announces-a-new-ui-to-help-web3-developers-build-smarter/) to include a new Network marketplace so [you can see what networks are supported](https://onfinality.io/marketplace)
-   Support for new layer 1s - [Avalanche](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-beta-api-support-for-avalanche/) and [Juno](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-api-support-for-jun-c3-b8-network/) (in Cosmos)
-   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](https://status.onfinality.io/) and [analytics page](https://analytics.onfinality.io).

Full Report <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UW9Cg5FmYoxaT2bDCzYOpMuv-LNmzvvayfe0vgEBKlY/edit?usp=sharing>

OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q3 2022)

**Proponent:** ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP (OnFinality)

**Date:** 2nd May 2023

**Requested:**  USD: $51,971.31 (KSM value will be calculated using EMA7 rate here on day of approval)

**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](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vsf8h4wio7lyH0_yrSdSdJ4lGfSSepyscWixoBEdTxI/edit?usp=sharing)

**Raw Data:** [Kusama Data Q1 2023](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kLH15a_iPl8F-DmDnYekGlDxnj3zx_-0FP3Meb3bKP8/edit?usp=sharing)

* * * * *

## 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-developer-update-auto-expand-storage-for-dedicated-nodes/) - 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-partners-with-pocket-network-to-unlock-access-to-unstoppable-infrastructure/) to bring in more external developers into the Polkadot ecosystem

-   [Geographical Insights](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-adds-geolocation-insights-for-dapps-and-api-apps/) - 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/how-does-onfinality-deal-with-personal-information/) - 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](https://status.onfinality.io/) and [network analytics page](https://onfinality.io/networks).

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

OnFinality - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q1 2023)

## 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](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_Sr8v7x81LvnZ62sW7zT3sWxEFTdfcQwfrElRbIGG0Q/edit?usp=sharing)

We welcome all of your comments below, please also note that there is a duplicate discussion post on the [Polkadot forums](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1822) too

Funded High Performance Public Infrastructure for the entire Polkadot and Kusama Ecosystem (OnFinality)

**Proponent:** ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP

**Date:** 12th July 2023

**Requested:**  USD $62,110.28 (KSM value will be calculated using EMA7 rate [here](https://kusama.subscan.io/tools/charts?type=price) on day of lodging on-chain)

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

**Raw Data:** [Kusama Data Q2 2023](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mb5GI3KAz3mza0qehduwd332DtVoPNrpR2MIZHr2ZCc/edit?usp=sharing)

**Full Proposal:** [Kusama Q2 2023 Treasury Proposal](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHIh9fcqbhiDz0tqAFTaxm2-zU56XK_3CpM0r_CcvvU/edit?usp=sharing)

Original Motivation
===================

Over the last 3 months (April, May and June 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 infrastructure  services that can be depended on

-   Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we've made Github issues based on behaviour we've observed)

Background on our RPC Service
=============================

Since inception in November 2020 we have made a large number of improvements to our Ultimate API service focussing on three key areas; performance/reliability, providing more value from our Ultimate API service, and cost optimisation.

### Performance/Reliability

OnFinality is operationally striving for a minimum of 99.99% reliability, which means less than an hour of downtime each year.  We proudly display and share our [90 day uptime statistics](https://status.onfinality.io/) for each network publicly [here](https://status.onfinality.io/uptime/r40wwpclbwzm).

We have invested hugely into a team dedicated to optimising our application gateway and caching layer to ensure that we provide the fastest possible service for our customers. We run clusters in 5 different regions (North Virginia, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Australia) and across 3 different cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Alicloud) to ensure that we are fault tolerant to any single region or cloud provider ceasing service.

### Providing more value from our Ultimate API service

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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-adds-geolocation-insights-for-dapps-and-api-apps/) 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-developer-update-auto-expand-storage-for-dedicated-nodes/) to prevent the risk of any downtime.

Finally, in Q2 of 2023 OnFinality [launched Trace API](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-trace-api-for-unprecedented-visibility-into-your-dapps/) support which was a huge enhancement allowing unprecedented visibility for dApp builders. Trace API captures and records vital information otherwise not available through regular RPC methods and extrinsics (such as complete XCM transfer records and complete list of balance changes). These APIs are essential in order for [developers like Polkaholic](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinalitys-new-trace-api-helping-colorful-notion-get-trace-data-from-over-40-substrate-chains/) to parse and understand XCM transactions.

### Cost Optimisation

OnFinality is very conscious about providing a strong level of support for Polkadot/Kusama at an extremely competitive price. Cost saving measurement has been a significant focus on behalf of our customers, with advanced rate limiting controls implemented. We can, for example, rate limit each client on a burst and sustained basis and based on the request methods that they are calling (e.g. each state_traceBlock request is rate limited 45x more than chain_getBlock), [read more about these advanced rate limiting tools that we've developed here](https://documentation.onfinality.io/support/public-rate-limits).

Meaning that we can continue to provide generous public API endpoints for over 40 different networks for common-good applications, but restrict access to high volume users that abuse this free service. We've been able to manage our costs significantly on behalf of our customers as a result. 

We've [developed and shared our approach towards service sustainability](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1270), with the introduction of a 'Paid API Revenue Share Discount' scheme. In this scheme OnFinality pools the revenue from customers that pay for higher API pricing plans and distributes this revenue pool to partners that currently pay for and own each API endpoint proportionally based on the number of paid API requests that go to that API endpoint. The scheme was introduced in Q1 of 2023 and resulted in a discount to [Kusama's Q1 treasury proposal](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referenda/183) of $281.90.

Our cost optimisation efforts were validated in Q1 as we had the lowest cost per million responses across all of the major RPC providers that lodged a proposal to the Polkadot treasury. You can see how our costs compared to other RPC providers in the ecosystem during Q1 [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Utw2HfS7I5Gpyhrl9ejuj0CrQ4AcChGFteXdw0a8tro/edit#gid=0).

Service Details
===============

During Q2 of 2023, we've made a number of new improvements to our Ultimate API service that address performance/reliability, features, and costs.

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

-   [Launched Trace API](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-trace-api-for-unprecedented-visibility-into-your-dapps/) allowing unprecedented visibility for dApp builders. Trace API captures and records vital information otherwise not available through regular RPC methods and extrinsics (such as complete XCM transfer records and complete list of balance changes). These APIs are essential in order for [developers like Polkaholic](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinalitys-new-trace-api-helping-colorful-notion-get-trace-data-from-over-40-substrate-chains/) to parse and understand XCM transactions.

-   [Geographical Insights](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-adds-geolocation-insights-for-dapps-and-api-apps/) - 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/how-does-onfinality-deal-with-personal-information/) - OnFinality does not, and will never, correlate or link specific wallet addresses to the IP address or request origin making the RPC request

-   Added support for a number of new networks, including Anmol, HydraDX, Equilibrium, as well as Osmosis, Evmos, Harmony, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fuse, DFK Chain, Celo, and Klaytn 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

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 Polkadot chains. You can always see live data on our API service on our public [status page](https://status.onfinality.io/).

Between 2023-04-01 and 2023-06-30 our Kusama API service has:

-   Served almost 2  billion (1,962,258,944) responses

-   Accumulated over 31,000 GB of data egress

-   The highest daily total was over 42 million responses in a single 24 hour period for Kusama alone

-   Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 10 million responses each day

-   Statemine had over 130  million (132,310,628) API responses in the period

-   All time totals for Kusama is 42,881,996,808 (over 42 billion) since November, 2020

-   At the end of this period the 90 day uptime on Kusama and Statemine was 99.93% and 100% respectively

Costings
========

This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for Kusama and Statemine. The total combined running cost is USD $62,110.28 - [raw data is here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mb5GI3KAz3mza0qehduwd332DtVoPNrpR2MIZHr2ZCc/edit?usp=sharing).

**For breakdown of costings and more information, read the full proposal here:** [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHIh9fcqbhiDz0tqAFTaxm2-zU56XK_3CpM0r_CcvvU/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHIh9fcqbhiDz0tqAFTaxm2-zU56XK_3CpM0r_CcvvU/edit?usp=sharing)

OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q2 2023)

OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Kusama/Substrate community. We just launched our beta version of a shared node API Service and are already listed in the Polkadot.js app. This service expands on our core mission - to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp.

Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult and time consuming, and requires a level of server development expertise that many don’t have. We're applying for funding to scale and improve our platform to provide a level of service and resiliency for production ready applications. **This proposal consists of two milestones, and this application is for just the first**:

1. Implement more comprehensive user analytics and reporting so that each developer can report on exactly what requests are being made to their API service account, and use this data to improve their own dApps
2. Geolocation routing that allows us to maximise the use of different pools of nodes across our user base, and allows us to quickly fall over to alternative pools in the case that one goes offline

**More Info:**
- We just served over 3.2 million requests in a single day on the 6th of January 2021 to our free API service
- We’ll maintain our free tier for users of 500,000 requests a day while funds to run these nodes remain. This is so we can maintain and ensure that Kusama is accessible by all, from the largest and most funded development teams, to the many amateurs tinkering away.
- In the future, we may provide additional paid tiers of API Service usage above those 500,000 daily requests at different costs structures
- We’ll maintain the [one click deploy dedicated node](https://onfinality.io/dedicated_nodes) access to Kusama for customers that need more than what our API service is intended for
- You can access our public API service by[ creating a free account for our admin portal](https://support.onfinality.io/hc/en-us/articles/900004222183), or by connecting to it using [Polkadot.js](https://polkadot.js.org/)

You can read more on this treasury funding proposal at [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XSzTSqf-i2hpMaTk75ygSCHpQC-G_1jED12fW_P2V54/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XSzTSqf-i2hpMaTk75ygSCHpQC-G_1jED12fW_P2V54/edit?usp=sharing)

Additionally, you can talk to us on Telegram at [t.me/onfinality](t.me/onfinality)

Treasury Proposal - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Milestone 1)

OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Kusama/Substrate community. We just launched our beta version of a shared node API Service and are already listed in the Polkadot.js app. This service expands on our core mission - to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp.

Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult and time consuming, and requires a level of server development expertise that many don’t have. We're applying for funding for the ongoing costs of our free public API service for Kusama so that everyone can access a public pool of managed Kusama nodes.

**This funding grant is for the ongoing running costs of this pool of Kusama nodes for Q1 2021 (January/February/March) - this will be proposed again every three months. These costs are currently estimated at USD $1,189.2 a month**

**More Info**
- We just served over 3.2 million requests in a single day on the 6th of January 2021 to our free API service
- There is an additional separate funding grant for improvements to the API service that further scale the service. [The details of this future grant are here](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/431).
- We’ll maintain our free tier for users of 500,000 requests a day while funds to run these nodes remain. This is so we can maintain and ensure that Kusama is accessible by all, from the largest and most funded development teams, to the many amateurs tinkering away.
- In the future, we may provide additional paid tiers of API Service usage above those 500,000 daily requests at different costs structures
- We’ll maintain the [one click deploy dedicated node](https://onfinality.io/dedicated_nodes) access to Kusama for customers that need more than what our API service is intended for
- You can access our public API service by[ creating a free account for our admin portal](https://support.onfinality.io/hc/en-us/articles/900004222183), or by connecting to it using [Polkadot.js](https://polkadot.js.org/)

You can read more on this treasury funding proposal at [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DBjbjR0HhQ_RuEqceu69_jvJbFaAzqF7Cf9xMry2RZY/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DBjbjR0HhQ_RuEqceu69_jvJbFaAzqF7Cf9xMry2RZY/edit?usp=sharing)

You can also read about our funding proposal for the improvements to the scalability of our service [here](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/431).

Additionally, you can talk to us on Telegram at [t.me/onfinality](t.me/onfinality)

Treasury Proposal - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Ongoing Costs for Q1 2021)

***This is a discussion for a future potential treasury proposal to Kusama. We are looking forward to community feedback, especially around how we improve the learning materials and tutorials (or potentially partner with another provider)***

**Proponent:** SubQuery and Fearless Wallet

**Date:** June 2021

**Short Description:** 3 individually proposed milestones delivering open source projects, packages, and associated learning material to help decentralised app developers start building applications on Polkadot/Kusama

### Problem Statement
Polkadot/Kusama is maturing, 
- As our ecosystem matures, more consumers are going to be drawn to it. These consumers are going to expect consumer-facing decentralised applications (dApps); wallets, explorers, and other tools that make it easier to explore and participate in Polkadot.
- Developers have their work cut out for them to build this next generation of consumer friendly dApps, it takes time and effort - we want to minimise duplication of work for our ecosystem to flourish.
- There is little content out there to help a new Polkadot/Kusama developer to build a consumer dApp (rather than a parachain or some other substrate based project)
- As the parachain auctions launch, there are going to be multiple chains each with their own assets that need to be shown in various dApps
  - DApps are going to have a difficult time integrating with each parachain, and querying data from each chain
  - Wallets will want a common core API that each parachain can integrate (and extend) to index and present their data for consumer facing applications (e.g. a wallet)

### Solution

1. Create an Open-Source SubQuery Project for Common Data
   - We will define and implement a standard GraphQL API for common dApp use cases implemented using SubQuery. The entire associated SubQuery application stack, including the project and the core SDK (subql/cli, subql/node, and subql/query), is open source and will remain so. Anyone can take the  deliverable from this grant, extend it, run it, and deploy it to their own infrastructure. The common GraphQL API that this proposal will define will be documented publicly using a open source tool (like Graphdoc)
2. Document and Publish Learning Material and Tutorials
   - We plan to work with a partner to help us write up a collection of related documentation and tutorials for all audiences (technical, getting started tutorials, and end to end application development walkthroughs)
### Outcomes
This proposal is aimed to help provide the following three outcomes:

1. Provide More Support to Developers in Polkadot
2. Improve the Interoperability of DApps and Parachains.
3. Attract more developers to Polkadot

[Full writeup here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13L8HBwB6VB-n2g274FFFJKORYPJsq744C6H8iEDQ0-0/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13L8HBwB6VB-n2g274FFFJKORYPJsq744C6H8iEDQ0-0/edit?usp=sharing)

Proposal Discussion: Open-source DApp API

**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](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vsf8h4wio7lyH0_yrSdSdJ4lGfSSepyscWixoBEdTxI/edit?usp=sharing)

**Raw Data:** [Kusama Data Q1 2023](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kLH15a_iPl8F-DmDnYekGlDxnj3zx_-0FP3Meb3bKP8/edit?usp=sharing)

* * * * *

## 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-developer-update-auto-expand-storage-for-dedicated-nodes/) - 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-partners-with-pocket-network-to-unlock-access-to-unstoppable-infrastructure/) to bring in more external developers into the Polkadot ecosystem

-   [Geographical Insights](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-adds-geolocation-insights-for-dapps-and-api-apps/) - 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/how-does-onfinality-deal-with-personal-information/) - 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](https://status.onfinality.io/) and [network analytics page](https://onfinality.io/networks).

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

Proponent: ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP

Date: 6th October 2022

Requested KSM: 1,295.60 KSM (USD: $59,124.98)

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

Previous Discussion: <https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/1868>

Raw Data: <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eftYcA4iedfQiwwekxLvNixhksG3uNMRAU0QGAmI09Y/edit?usp=sharing>

Full Report <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UW9Cg5FmYoxaT2bDCzYOpMuv-LNmzvvayfe0vgEBKlY/edit?usp=sharing>

* * * * *

## Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (July, August, September 2022) 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 infrastructure  services that can be depended on
-   Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we've made Github issues based on behaviour we've observed)

## Service Details

During the last quarter, we've focused on three key areas for the development of OnFinality - cost optimization, network expansion, and providing more value from our Ultimate API service.

The bear market has made many of our customers more price sensitive, and as such we've been working with them to optimise our services to provide more for less. We've reduced prices for our larger customers between 30 and 40%, and created products designed to target and onboard new chains with entry level pricing. We've also been working on new rate limiting capabilities to progressively restrict abusers of our public APIs to upgrade to paid API plans.

In the past quarter we have succeeded in our goal of onboarding two new networks, with the addition of Avalanche and Juno to our API service. This was a large amount of upfront work, extending OnFinality to allow chains outside of Polkadot/Substrate, but now that it has been done we should be able to move faster and onboard new chains each week. We hope that this means that we will be able to invite as many new ecosystem participants into Polkadot as possible with this expansion. 

Finally, providing move value from our Ultimate API service has always been a priority, and in this space we've added new API specific paid plans at competitive prices to our competition. We have also delivered the ability for our customers to better understand and learn about their users, with API Insights that tell you where your users are, what they are requesting, what methods are failing (to find bugs in your dApp), and where optimisations can occur.

We continued to execute on our efforts to provide unprecedented service stability and reliability to this ecosystem. All supported networks exceeded our 99.9% target, including 99.94% uptime for Kusama over the last 90 days . At this stage, OnFinality is operationally striving for four 9s of availability, which means less than an hour of downtime each year.

Between 2022-07-01 and 2022-09-30 our Kusama API service has:
-   **Reduced cost to the Kusama treasury while serving a similar amount of traffic**
-   Served a total of 4.932 billion responses
-   Accumulated almost 56 TB of data egress
-   The highest daily total was over 102 million responses in a single 24 hour period
-   Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 60 million responses each day.
-   Statemine had over 364 million API responses in the period
-   All time totals for Kusama is 35,987,582,620 (35 billion) since November, 2020
-   At the end of this period the 90 day uptime on Kusama and Statemine was 99.94% 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:

-   [API Insights](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-introduces-api-insights-so-you-can-analyse-and-learn-about-your-applications-faster/) so you can analyse and learn about your API applications faster and find bugs with your dApp
-   [Cost optimisations](https://blog.onfinality.io/go-further-with-more-affordable-pricing/) to reduce pricing for our customers by up to 40%
-   [New API plans](https://blog.onfinality.io/get-ahead-with-onfinalitys-new-api-endpoints/) for our high usage customers and a way to allocate resource to [move towards a more sustainable funding model](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/1815)
-   [Support for Alibaba Cloud](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-collaborates-with-alibaba-cloud-to-provide-a-premium-experience-to-web3-builders/) to provide more decentralised cloud hosting options for our customers
-   [Updates to our website](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-announces-a-new-ui-to-help-web3-developers-build-smarter/) to include a new Network marketplace so [you can see what networks are supported](https://onfinality.io/marketplace)
-   Support for new layer 1s - [Avalanche](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-beta-api-support-for-avalanche/) and [Juno](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-api-support-for-jun-c3-b8-network/) (in Cosmos)
-   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](https://status.onfinality.io/) and [analytics page](https://analytics.onfinality.io).

Full Report <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UW9Cg5FmYoxaT2bDCzYOpMuv-LNmzvvayfe0vgEBKlY/edit?usp=sharing>

**Proponent:** ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP

**Date:** 27th April 2022

**Requested KSM:** 276.29 KSM

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

**Raw Data:** https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SeLZ-N0G55G4JgjncfS-8_kM3L6fWUl5X0SaQMWZ--4/edit?usp=sharing

## Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (January, February, March 2022) 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 infrastructure  services that can be depended on
- Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we’ve made GitHub issues based on behaviour we’ve observed)

## Service Details

This last quarter has been huge for Kusama and OnFinality, the demand for our services continues to be another  unprecedented period. January had a larger activity than the rest of the quarter which also had our highest daily response count (for Q1). [Raw data is here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nPk1_IPvRj4_8Xpn7Wa2KNjrqXW7kRacP9X0nsCo6fQ/edit#gid=1598230413).

This quarter was all about service stabilisation as part of the promise we made to this ecosystem to provide enterprise grade services to the community. Our services all exceeded our 99.9% target, with 99.99% uptime for Polkadot over the last 90 days. This is an important measure as we surpassed our largest ever day, with over a billion API responses processed by our service in a single 24 hour period in late January.

Between 2022-01-01 and 2022-03-31 our Kusama API service has:

- Served a total of 4,975,878,346 (4.9 billion) responses
- Accumulated over 34 TB of data egress
- The highest daily total was 85,238,268 responses in a single 24 hour period
- Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 49 million responses each day.
- Statemine had over 654 million API responses in the period
- All time totals for Kusama is 1,186,285,385 (1 Trillion) since November, 2020
- At the end of this period the 90 day uptime on Kusama and Statemine was 99.99% and 99.97% respectively

[The full proposal is here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15ezC2j2KbSatjrDIND67H5w8cZntc0Grgfj2Z3267ko/edit?usp=sharing)

[**Full report including detailed data and costing**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C7QVo0YCepSk70p3fQKihmoJs9YZunoI_771yxBNRJY/edit?usp=sharing)

### Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (July, August, September 2021) we've provided a scalable free public API service so that everyone can access public pools of managed Kusama, Rococo, 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 infrastructure  services that can be depended on
- Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we’ve made Github issues based on behaviour we’ve observed)

### Service Details

Between 2021-07-01 and 2021-09-30 our Kusama API service has:

- Served an unprecedented total of 8,033,980,647 (8 billion) requests (an increase of 210% on the previous quarter)
- Accumulated almost 56 TB of data egress (up 335.54% on Q2)
- The highest daily total was 229,333,292 requests and 1.5TB data egress in a single 24 hour period
- Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 145 million requests each day.
- Rococo had over 75 million API requests in the period, and Statemine over 186 million
- All time totals for Kusama is 10,895,178,172 (10 Billion) since November
- The last billion Kusama requests took only 7 days
Note: We have implemented custom middleware in our platform that counts and logs these requests, [you can view the raw data here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IgNgwGNQle-8xzS7W3A7PmXX-rI08pknAhG-hllcfw0/edit?usp=sharing).

![](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRfLGHvC9UgKOU0AFSxOjbtqjm81OBXlSvYt70fK6uGqB1sE0WvPXKRdWv5J3Rf3egvV6pP1cLFZunS/pubchart?oid=577419954&format=image)

### Enhancements

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

- An improved dashboard for our partners so that they can monitor usage and manage the upgrades of the nodes in real time.
- Collection of a rich set of metrics and usage data that is securely shared with partners to help them scale and develop their network.
- Improvements to our routing strategies and scale enhancements to our load balancer with the goal of scaling to a Billion daily requests.
- A variety of improvements to our health metric collection tools and automated recovery scripts to ensure our 99.9% SLA is met.
- Scale improvements to our team, processes, and systems to allow us to provide this same service to **every **parachain team at launch

You can always see live data on our API service on our public [status page](https://status.onfinality.io/).

We continue to reaffirm our dedication to providing free support of 500,000 requests to our API service each day for users around the world. You can access our public API service by connecting to it using [Polkadot.js](https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss%3A%2F%2Fkusama.api.onfinality.io%2Fpublic-ws#/explorer) or via the endpoints listed below. You can also [create your own free API key in our application](https://app.onfinality.io) and track metrics and statistics.

- https://kusama.api.onfinality.io/public
- wss://kusama.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
- https://rococo.api.onfinality.io/public
- wss://rococo.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
- https://statemine.api.onfinality.io/public
- wss://statemine.onfinality.io/public-ws

[**Full report including detailed data and costing**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C7QVo0YCepSk70p3fQKihmoJs9YZunoI_771yxBNRJY/edit?usp=sharing)

OnFinality - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q3 2021)

**tldr: Second of three milestones in which SubQuery and Fearless Wallet create an open source API that should be able to provide different types of applications with a sufficient (but read-only) view of all key data within the Kusama chain. E.g. a developer could use it to create their own chain explorer without needing to directly query chain data**

We believe that the DApps ecosystem will benefit from a common core API that each parachain can integrate (and extend) to index and expose their chain data for future consumer facing applications (e.g. a wallet, explorer, or other dApp). 

There will be 3 individually proposed milestones delivering open source projects, packages, and associated learning material to help decentralised app developers start building applications on Polkadot/Kusama

**Who**

This is a joint proposal between two parties - SubQuery/OnFinality and Fearless Wallet/SORAMITSU

**What**
1. Create an Open-Source SubQuery Project for Common Data
2. Document and Publish Learning Material and Tutorials

**Outcomes**
1. Improve the Interoperability of DApps and Parachains
2. Attract and Support More Developers in Kusama

### Milestone 2

**This proposal is for the 2nd milestone only.**

Implement a SubQuery project that provides the data for the previously defined API spec for Kusama (from [milestone 1](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/95)).

Current API Spec GitHub: [https://github.com/subquery/common-api-polkadot/blob/main/schema.graphql](https://github.com/subquery/common-api-polkadot/blob/main/schema.graphql)
Current GraphDoc Preview: [https://subquery.github.io/common-api-polkadot/](https://github.com/subquery/common-api-polkadot/blob/main/schema.graphql)

It will be made open source (MIT license) on GitHub and uploaded to the SubQuery Explorer so it can be indexed and made available for all to query (for free).

Our view is that this API should be able to provide applications with a sufficient (but read-only) view of all key data within the chain. E.g. a developer could use it to create their own chain explorer without needing to directly query chain data. One key thing to note with our core API interface is that the design should largely work across any parachain. We’ve written it with existing parachains like Karura and Moonriver in mind.

You’ll see that there are some open issues in the repository. These APIs are intended to be constantly iterated and improved over time (with considerations to backwards compatibility). We invite the Kusama community to provide feedback directly via GitHub in the form of issues and pull requests.

[Please read full proposal here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13L8HBwB6VB-n2g274FFFJKORYPJsq744C6H8iEDQ0-0/edit?usp=sharing)

Open-Source DApp API: Milestone 2

We believe that the DApps ecosystem will benefit from a common core API that each parachain can integrate (and extend) to index and expose their chain data for future consumer facing applications (e.g. a wallet, explorer, or other dApp). 

There will be 3 individually proposed milestones delivering open source projects, packages, and associated learning material to help decentralised app developers start building applications on Polkadot/Kusama

**Who**

This is a joint proposal between two parties - SubQuery/OnFinality and Fearless Wallet/SORAMITSU

**What**
1. Create an Open-Source SubQuery Project for Common Data
2. Document and Publish Learning Material and Tutorials

**Outcomes**
1. Improve the Interoperability of DApps and Parachains
2. Attract and Support More Developers in Kusama

### Milestone 1

**This proposal is for the 1st milestone only.**

Design and publish the proposed common GraphQL API definition for Kusama that the remainder of this proposal will deliver. This will be published using a GitHub repository and a GraphQL documentation tool (like Graphdoc). 

We will then reach out to the community for consultation and ideas around how we can improve this API (and the models within it) for more general use across different types of dApps.

[Please read full proposal here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13L8HBwB6VB-n2g274FFFJKORYPJsq744C6H8iEDQ0-0/edit?usp=sharing)

Open-Source DApp API - Milestone 1

OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Kusama/Substrate community. We just launched our beta version of a shared node API Service and are already listed in the Polkadot.js app. This service expands on our core mission - to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp.

**This funding grant is for the ongoing running costs of two pools of Kusama nodes for Q2 2021 (April, May, June) - this will be proposed again every three months.**
- These costs are currently estimated at USD $9,056.34 each quarter
- In Q1 2021 we served ([see previous proposal report](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/65)):
    - A grand total of 252,483,124 requests over the quarter.
    - A record 23,686,188 daily requests
    - A rolling 7 day average at the end of the Q1 period of 2,588,618 requests each day
- We’ll maintain our free tier for users of 500,000 requests a day. This is so we can maintain and ensure that Kusama is accessible by all, from the largest and most funded development teams, to the many amatuers tinkering away.
- We’ll maintain the [one click deploy dedicated node](https://onfinality.io/dedicated_nodes) access to Kusama for customers that need more than what our API service is intended for
- You can access our public API service by creating a [free account for our admin portal](https://support.onfinality.io/hc/en-us/articles/900004222183), or by connecting to it using [Polkadot.js](https://polkadot.js.org/)

[You can read more about this proposal, including detailed itemised costing here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_5FU_Xj0JFnPRZrDGpaNHH4poaL-GW1fIU4OwYLruY/edit?usp=sharing)

High Performance Public Infrastructure (Ongoing Costs for Q2 2021)

**Milestone 2 follows the delivery of [Milestone 1](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/71)**

OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Kusama/Substrate community. [We’ve launched our beta version of a shared node API Service](https://onfinality.medium.com/onfinality-is-pleased-to-announce-its-api-service-beta-ce57ba8c7554) and are already listed in the Polkadot.js app. This service expands on [our core mission](https://onfinality.medium.com/our-mission-fb3bb862841e) - to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp. Our API Service is currently completely free (within usage limits) and has launched with access to both the Polkadot and Kusama networks.

**There are two milestones, and this application is for just the second (Geolocation Routing)**:

2. Geolocation routing that allows us to maximise the use of different pools of nodes across our user base, and allows us to quickly fall over to alternative pools located in different geographic regions in the case that one goes offline

**More Info:**
- We just served over 17.682 million requests in a single day on the 24th of February 2021 to our free API service (up from 3.2 million on the 6th of January 2021)
- We’ll maintain our free tier for users of 500,000 requests a day so we can maintain and ensure that Kusama is accessible by all, from the largest and most funded development teams, to the many amateurs tinkering away.
- In the future, we may provide additional paid tiers of API Service usage above those 500,000 daily requests at different costs structures
- We’ll maintain the [one click deploy dedicated node](https://onfinality.io/dedicated_nodes) access to Kusama for customers that need more than what our API service is intended for
- You can access our public API service by [creating a free account for our admin portal](https://support.onfinality.io/hc/en-us/articles/900004222183), or by connecting to it using [Polkadot.js](https://polkadot.js.org/)

**The previous on-chain application for this was calculated at a previous exchange rate. As such, the difference (167.64 KSM) will be returned to the treasury immediately [here ](https://polkascan.io/kusama/account/F3opxRbN5ZbjJNU511Kj2TLuzFcDq9BGduA9TgiECafpg29)and proof with be commented on this post.**

[More information about this treasury funding proposal can be read here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13kQ0zIvytHjyMc-x5cLwRyaRVlrtLlOGKbOiqbwaFWo/edit?usp=sharing)

Additionally, you can talk to us on Telegram at [t.me/onfinality](t.me/onfinality)

Treasury Proposal - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Milestone 2)

OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Kusama/Substrate community. We just launched our beta version of a shared node API Service and are already listed in the Polkadot.js app. This service expands on our core mission - to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp.

Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult and time consuming, and requires a level of server development expertise that many don’t have. We're applying for funding to scale and improve our platform to provide a level of service and resiliency for production ready applications. **There are two milestones, and this application is for just the first**:

1. Implement more comprehensive analytics and reporting so that each developer can report on exactly what requests are being made to their API service account, and use this data to improve their own dApps. We'll also use this reporting and analytics to provide better insights to the Kusama network and for protocol teams using our platform
2. Geolocation routing that allows us to maximise the use of different pools of nodes across our user base, and allows us to quickly fall over to alternative pools in the case that one goes offline

**More Info:**
- We just served over 5.54 million requests in a single day on the 18th of January 2021 to our free API service (up from 3.2 million on the 6th of January 2021)
- We’ll maintain our free tier for users of 500,000 requests a day so we can maintain and ensure that Kusama is accessible by all, from the largest and most funded development teams, to the many amateurs tinkering away.
- In the future, we may provide additional paid tiers of API Service usage above those 500,000 daily requests at different costs structures
- We’ll maintain the [one click deploy dedicated node](https://onfinality.io/dedicated_nodes) access to Kusama for customers that need more than what our API service is intended for
- You can access our public API service by [creating a free account for our admin portal](https://support.onfinality.io/hc/en-us/articles/900004222183), or by connecting to it using [Polkadot.js](https://polkadot.js.org/)

You can read more on this treasury funding proposal at [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XSzTSqf-i2hpMaTk75ygSCHpQC-G_1jED12fW_P2V54/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XSzTSqf-i2hpMaTk75ygSCHpQC-G_1jED12fW_P2V54/edit?usp=sharing)

Additionally, you can talk to us on Telegram at [t.me/onfinality](t.me/onfinality)

High Performance Public Infrastructure - Milestone 1

**Proponent:** ELkVhHcvaP9L43RK9SP6Wn3FBfusEN5EJe2gH7aA2ETiufP

**Date:** 18th July 2023

**Requested:** KSM 2,534.3895 (USD $62,110.28)

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

**Full Proposal:** [Kusama Q2 2023 Treasury Proposal](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHIh9fcqbhiDz0tqAFTaxm2-zU56XK_3CpM0r_CcvvU/edit?usp=sharing)

**Raw Data:** [Kusama Data Q2 2023](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mb5GI3KAz3mza0qehduwd332DtVoPNrpR2MIZHr2ZCc/edit?usp=sharing)

Original Motivation
===================

Over the last 3 months (April, May and June 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 infrastructure  services that can be depended on

-   Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we've made Github issues based on behaviour we've observed)

Background on our RPC Service
=============================

Since inception in November 2020 we have made a large number of improvements to our Ultimate API service focussing on three key areas; performance/reliability, providing more value from our Ultimate API service, and cost optimisation.

### Performance/Reliability

OnFinality is operationally striving for a minimum of 99.99% reliability, which means less than an hour of downtime each year.  We proudly display and share our [90 day uptime statistics](https://status.onfinality.io/) for each network publicly [here](https://status.onfinality.io/uptime/r40wwpclbwzm).

We have invested hugely into a team dedicated to optimising our application gateway and caching layer to ensure that we provide the fastest possible service for our customers. We run clusters in 5 different regions (North Virginia, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and Australia) and across 3 different cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Alicloud) to ensure that we are fault tolerant to any single region or cloud provider ceasing service.

### Providing more value from our Ultimate API service

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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-adds-geolocation-insights-for-dapps-and-api-apps/) 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-developer-update-auto-expand-storage-for-dedicated-nodes/) to prevent the risk of any downtime.

Finally, in Q2 of 2023 OnFinality [launched Trace API](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-trace-api-for-unprecedented-visibility-into-your-dapps/) support which was a huge enhancement allowing unprecedented visibility for dApp builders. Trace API captures and records vital information otherwise not available through regular RPC methods and extrinsics (such as complete XCM transfer records and complete list of balance changes). These APIs are essential in order for [developers like Polkaholic](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinalitys-new-trace-api-helping-colorful-notion-get-trace-data-from-over-40-substrate-chains/) to parse and understand XCM transactions.

### Cost Optimisation

OnFinality is very conscious about providing a strong level of support for Polkadot/Kusama at an extremely competitive price. Cost saving measurement has been a significant focus on behalf of our customers, with advanced rate limiting controls implemented. We can, for example, rate limit each client on a burst and sustained basis and based on the request methods that they are calling (e.g. each state_traceBlock request is rate limited 45x more than chain_getBlock), [read more about these advanced rate limiting tools that we've developed here](https://documentation.onfinality.io/support/public-rate-limits).

Meaning that we can continue to provide generous public API endpoints for over 40 different networks for common-good applications, but restrict access to high volume users that abuse this free service. We've been able to manage our costs significantly on behalf of our customers as a result. 

We've [developed and shared our approach towards service sustainability](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1270), with the introduction of a 'Paid API Revenue Share Discount' scheme. In this scheme OnFinality pools the revenue from customers that pay for higher API pricing plans and distributes this revenue pool to partners that currently pay for and own each API endpoint proportionally based on the number of paid API requests that go to that API endpoint. The scheme was introduced in Q1 of 2023 and resulted in a discount to [Kusama's Q1 treasury proposal](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referenda/183) of $281.90.

Our cost optimisation efforts were validated in Q1 as we had the lowest cost per million responses across all of the major RPC providers that lodged a proposal to the Polkadot treasury. You can see how our costs compared to other RPC providers in the ecosystem during Q1 [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Utw2HfS7I5Gpyhrl9ejuj0CrQ4AcChGFteXdw0a8tro/edit#gid=0).

Service Details
===============

During Q2 of 2023, we've made a number of new improvements to our Ultimate API service that address performance/reliability, features, and costs.

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

-   [Launched Trace API](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-trace-api-for-unprecedented-visibility-into-your-dapps/) allowing unprecedented visibility for dApp builders. Trace API captures and records vital information otherwise not available through regular RPC methods and extrinsics (such as complete XCM transfer records and complete list of balance changes). These APIs are essential in order for [developers like Polkaholic](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinalitys-new-trace-api-helping-colorful-notion-get-trace-data-from-over-40-substrate-chains/) to parse and understand XCM transactions.

-   [Geographical Insights](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-adds-geolocation-insights-for-dapps-and-api-apps/) - 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](https://blog.onfinality.io/how-does-onfinality-deal-with-personal-information/) - OnFinality does not, and will never, correlate or link specific wallet addresses to the IP address or request origin making the RPC request

-   Added support for a number of new networks, including Anmol, HydraDX, Equilibrium, as well as Osmosis, Evmos, Harmony, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fuse, DFK Chain, Celo, and Klaytn 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

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 Polkadot chains. You can always see live data on our API service on our public [status page](https://status.onfinality.io/).

Between 2023-04-01 and 2023-06-30 our Kusama API service has:

-   Served almost 2  billion (1,962,258,944) responses

-   Accumulated over 31,000 GB of data egress

-   The highest daily total was over 42 million responses in a single 24 hour period for Kusama alone

-   Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 10 million responses each day

-   Statemine had over 130  million (132,310,628) API responses in the period

-   All time totals for Kusama is 42,881,996,808 (over 42 billion) since November, 2020

-   At the end of this period the 90 day uptime on Kusama and Statemine was 99.93% and 100% respectively

Costings
========

This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for Kusama and Statemine. The total combined running cost is USD $62,110.28 - [raw data is here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mb5GI3KAz3mza0qehduwd332DtVoPNrpR2MIZHr2ZCc/edit?usp=sharing).

**For breakdown of costings and more information, read the full proposal here:** [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHIh9fcqbhiDz0tqAFTaxm2-zU56XK_3CpM0r_CcvvU/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHIh9fcqbhiDz0tqAFTaxm2-zU56XK_3CpM0r_CcvvU/edit?usp=sharing)