Blast support for Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya (Oct 2022-Mar 2023)

Astar Initiatives
1

Date: May 15, 2023

Requested allocation: 513777.13845 ASTR

ASTAR Account: Wwfs24NNBLsdN9BHHj29spDsq5vkjk771dxPvMrXwraLywn

Short Description: Ongoing costs for supporting Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya networks in BlastAPI (blastapi.io). These costs are ongoing for as long as the Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya ecosystems need this service. The costs requested are for Q4 2022 and Q1 2023 (from October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023).

Project Overview

Blast is Bware Labs’ API provider platform that aims to solve Web 3 infrastructure issues related to reliability and latency, by employing geographically distributed third-party nodes.

Blast offers a multi-region architecture that, along with a series of clustering and geo-location mechanisms, ensures optimal routing of user requests to the closest point of presence relative to where a call is generated.

The development and maintenance of the Blast platform are provided by a highly technical team of engineers with proven experience in both Web3 and Web2 projects.

Specifications

On our multichain, subscription-based, API platform, Blast we support Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya networks with the following services and specifications:

  • Expose RPC and Websockets APIs for Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya;

  • The Service availability is at least 99.9%;

  • 24/7 Monitoring and alerting for reduced downtime.

  • 24/7 On-call engineering support.

  • Developer support on Bware Labs Discord Channels.

  • The incoming traffic is Geo-load balanced over three regions: North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific, with automated traffic routing for optimal response times.

  • The Clients that use the Public API free version of Blast are limited to 25 API Calls/second.

  • 12 Million API calls/month with a throughput of 40 API calls/second offered for free to Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya users on each dedicated Blast account

  • Total traffic supported on all subscription plans and Public API: 3700 calls/second per region per network.

  • Multi-region node hosting: Astar(EU, US, and APAC), Shiden (EU, US, and APAC), Shibuya (EU, and APAC)

  • Security ensured through continuous integrity monitoring coupled with a smart routing mechanism significantly reduce the risk of malicious behavior from bad actors within the ecosystem

Public APIs:
astar-public-blastapi-io

wss-astar-public-blastapi-io

shiden-public-blastapi-io

wss-shiden-public-blastapi-io

shibuya-public-blastapi-io

wss-shibuya-public-blastapi-io

Dedicated APIs:

Blast API Usage Report:

Rationale

We support Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya networks in Blast API platform so blockchain developers that are building their dApp on can bypass all the hurdles involved in running their own infrastructure thus reducing both their outage risks and infrastructure costs.

We’ve been supporting Shiden and Shibuya networks since 2021. Shiden and Shibuya networks were supported at the beginning on our MVP: Bware API Platform (BAP).

On the same MVP we’ve added support for Astar network in January 2022.

The MVP turned into Blast on March 22, 2022, and since then we support Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya networks on Blast.

*Prior to submitting this proposal, we have been supporting the Astar network for more than 6 months, but never charged Astar any payments for infrastructure, development and integration costs for the time beyond the scope of this proposal.

Use of Funds

The funds will be used to pay for the infrastructure and maintenance of the Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya nodes between October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023.

These funds will be directed to cover the costs from the infrastructure providers that are used for the Blast backend like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Hetzner, OVH, Servers.com and Digital Ocean and our internal resource cost for the support provided by our engineering team to have high quality infrastructure services for Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya networks.

Overall Costs

The total monthly cost breakdown, including infrastructure and support costs for Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya networks, is as follows:

Monthly Infrastructure costs:

  • Astar 11 nodes(3 on EU, 5 on US, and 3 on APAC) $2463
  • Shiden 9 nodes(3 on EU, 3 on US, and 3 on APAC) $2132
  • Shibuya 6 nodes(3 on EU, and 3 on APAC) $623

Support:

  • Account maintenance and on call engineers - $2000

Total monthly costs: $7218

Future cost saving plans:

  • Starting with January, we migrated from Cloud based solution to bare metal, and we’ve been able to reduce the costs by 70%. As the blockchain grows, it’s a tendency for the hardware costs to grow as well and our technical team is constantly analyzing new solutions that scales better in case of blockchain growth.
  • One immediate cost saving plan comes with BlastAPI decentralization, which is targeted in Q2 2023. Here third party nodes can join the protocol, and earn rewards for their contribution. More details about this can be found here: Blast protocol - Blast Documentation
    The costs considered for the proposal are $7,000 per month. From October 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023 the costs are $42,000, meaning 813777.13845 ASTR, based on a 7-day average USD price of 0.051611182 for ASTR.

As we earn an average amount of 50,000 ASTR per month from Collator Rewards and dAppStaking Rewards, the funds requested through the proposal are 513777.13845 ASTR.

2

Could I ask a question to gain further clarity regarding dApp staking rewards? I am aware that you have “Bware Labs and Blast API” dApp deployed, which currently have 229 stakers and a total stake of 4,285,833.031 ASTR. I was wondering if the rewards earned from this dApp are insufficient to cover all your infrastructure costs? In my understanding, I had thought that deploying a dApp contract could potentially yield higher returns compared to regular stakers in this dApp.

3

dApps are getting ~3.5% apr based on the total nomination.

2 Likes
4

Thanks for your question. To answer your question, please allow me to refer to the last sentence from the above proposal:
“As we earn an average amount of 50,000 ASTR per month from Collator Rewards and dAppStaking Rewards, the funds requested through the proposal are 513777.13845 ASTR.”

50,000 ASTR is an average we earn per month from two source of rewards:

  1. Collator (100% rewards to Bware Labs), refer to link: Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer From the collator example, the rewards receive in every 15 mins, let’s take the last reward amount of 13 ASTR: 1 hour = 13 X 4 = 52 1 Day = 52 X 24 = 1248 30 days = 1248 X 30 = 37,440
  2. dApp staking rewards, total token delegated 4.2 million, please refer to: https://portal.astar.network/astar/dapp-staking/dapp?dapp=0xabf7230e022c9146df9b4dbed97e73cf61d612b8 out of the 4.2 million, 1.8 million is from our own, please refer to: Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer therefore, 4.2 - 1.8 = 2.4 million are from the community staking, which is 2.4/4.2 = 57% of the pool. E.g. Take April 7 as an example, total rewards from the staking is 45k per month, please refer to: Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer out of the total rewards, 57% X 45k = 25k per month is the rewards we get from the community delegating portion.
    37k + 25k = 62k, due to fluctuation, we get around 50k ASTR per month.

So, in total, we are still short of the above mentioned ASTR from the proposal. Please let me know if you have other questions. Thank you!

5

Thanks for your question. To answer your question, please allow me to refer to the last sentence from the above proposal:
“As we earn an average amount of 50,000 ASTR per month from Collator Rewards and dAppStaking Rewards, the funds requested through the proposal are 513777.13845 ASTR.”

50,000 ASTR is an average we earn per month from two source of rewards:

  1. Collator (100% rewards to Bware Labs), refer to link: Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer From the collator example, the rewards receive in every 15 mins, let’s take the last reward amount of 13 ASTR: 1 hour = 13 X 4 = 52 1 Day = 52 X 24 = 1248 30 days = 1248 X 30 = 37,440
  2. dApp staking rewards, total token delegated 4.2 million, please refer to: https://portal.astar.network/astar/dapp-staking/dapp?dapp=0xabf7230e022c9146df9b4dbed97e73cf61d612b8 out of the 4.2 million, 1.8 million is from our own, please refer to: Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer therefore, 4.2 - 1.8 = 2.4 million are from the community staking, which is 2.4/4.2 = 57% of the pool. E.g. Take April as an example, total rewards from the staking is 45k per month, please refer to: Subscan | Aggregate Substrate ecological network high-precision Web3 explorer out of the total rewards, 57% X 45k = 25k per month is the rewards we get from the community delegating portion.
    37k + 25k = 62k, due to fluctuation, we get around 50k ASTR per month.

So, in total, we are still short of the above mentioned ASTR from the proposal. Please let me know if you have other questions. Thank you!

6

Ah, it seems that my initial assumption was incorrect. I had thought that dApp operators earned more than nominators, who currently earn approximately 10.8% APR, as a proportion of the 40/10 inflation distribution, where 40% goes to the dApp operator and 10% to nominators.

7

How are the dApp Staking & Collator rewards managed?
Sold every end of the month to be held in treasury to pay infra costs or are the rewards hold as ASTR in the treasury?

If you are asking Astar treasury to pay the cost of last six months (which never was told at any point to the Astar core team), I would like to know more how those rewards are managed.

1 Like
8

Thanks for your question Maarten.
We did not sell the rewards every month, we periodically sold a total of 17% of the rewards received, and kept most of the 83% of the rewards and staked them.
In the last 2 years, we’ve sold 386284 ASTR and we’ve held and staked 1,857,909 ASTR token from the rewards received.
Please refer to the address for verification - YLak7QUmqfJoCvKN55dFHtHDxhFXYz7sGdEkjpLok33XXwL

In addition to the infrastructure support we provided services on Astar, Shiden and Shibuya, we also offered our enterprise RPC API call plans for free for the following dApp:

  • Subscan, 600million calls/month - US$1800 per month if charged
  • Blockscout 120million calls/month - US$420 per month if charged
1 Like
9
Approve the use of Astar Treasury
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

1 Like
10

I want to add my support to this proposal, Blast has been one of our 1st infra partner and providing quality RPC at no cost during last 2 years.

About overall cost, it is quite high yes but I am sure Blast will make the necessary effort to reduce it to sustainable lever with the saving plan described.
In the end if we consider this proposal for 2 years of services provided, the relative cost is $1750 / month for the 3 networks with a weight on treasury reduced by 37% thanks to dapp staking and collator rewards. This seems reasonable and fit to me.

2 Likes
11

I would like to know if you mentioned that you use a total of 26 nodes for the Astar, Shiden, and Shibuya networks. Specifically, I’m interested in understanding whether each node is deployed on a separate bare metal server or if multiple nodes/services are installed on the same bare metal machine for the Astar network. Additionally, I’m curious if the same bare metal server is shared among other networks apart from Astar.

1 Like
12

At Bware Labs, we follow best practices to ensure the stability and reliability of our network:

  1. Each node is deployed on its own dedicated bare metal server,
  2. No sharing of servers between networks.

This setup ensures that if one node fails, it won’t affect other nodes or networks. Our commitment to providing a stable network with no downtime is shared by other networks, which also run strictly on separate bare metals. We value our users’ experience and strive to provide the best service possible.

4 Likes
13

I would like to support and I will vote for yes but as Maarten mentioned, it is out of blue that you would now invoice the service you provided for “free”.

May I ask the plan for the next 6months? Would it be the same $7218/month or it could go up?

14

I think management of the funds received by collator or dApp staking is currently not well. If you havent sold any rewards even not during latest picks is not good. If you would have sold when price was above 0.1$ the earnings for collator and dApp staking would have covered a lot of the costs.

I voted no because of no clear plan with the rewards earned and asking for funds out of the blue 6 months in the past. I would vote yes if this was a request for next quarter with a clear strategy and plan.

2 Likes
15

Agree with Maarten, we were informed that you provided service for free of use to our community so we tried to help Marketing and promoting. I would not want to say no to everything but would like you to explain for future plan please. We may want to extend the voting period if possible.

1 Like
16

RE: Kahori
Thank you for your concern. As stated in our original proposal, we have made significant efforts to reduce costs internally. As a result, our future plans will be more cost-effective than our previous billing cycle.
For our protocol infrastructure service, we have never claimed to offer it for free. As one of Astar’s first infrastructure partners, it is common practice in the industry to support early projects through their infancy and grow together. We initially did not ask for any monetary benefits as a gesture of goodwill, but this does not mean that we will offer our services for free indefinitely. As the ecosystem grows, it is fair for us to recoup some of the costs associated with maintaining the network at a high level of performance and reliability.
In conclusion, for next period:

  1. lower costs than the last billing cycle
  2. adding Trace function to the existing API which is currently under development at NO COST.

RE: Maarten
Thank you for your suggestion regarding selling the tokens. However, we must respectfully disagree with your comment.At Bware Labs, we take a long-term approach. We are true believers in Astar’s future, that’s why we have not been actively selling, and intend to hold and grow with the ecosystem for as long as possible. In the broader crypto industry, it is actually encouraged for network participants to hold and stake their tokens.As a major contributor to the ecosystem, your suggestion to speculatively sell tokens is a rare thought that we have encountered among all the networks we are working with. We appreciate your input, but our approach remains focused on supporting long-term growth and sustainability of the Astar ecosystem.

4 Likes
17

Thank you for explaining!

1 Like
18

I don’t think Blast needs to manage Shibuya nodes since this is a testnet. Then can we reduce the cost?

3 Likes
19

Hello Sota, if this is something you would prefer, we are happy to remove support for Shibuya starting from June 7th, the next billing cycle will be lower. Taking into consideration that if Subscan and Blockscout are needing Shibuya APIs they would probably have to choose another service.

2 Likes