OnFinality - Reliable, Robust, and Public Astar/Shiden Infrastructure (22Q4 & 23Q1))

Astar Initiatives
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Proponent: XhjGfuq5T1KoEFp2k5TEDaKBe6o2nFdo8JRXL3UYb1vZySW

Date: 20th December 2022

Requested ASTR: 597,413.0734 ASTR

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

Original Motivation

Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult, time consuming, and expensive:

  • It requires a level of server development expertise that many do not have
  • It’s costly to run a full node nearly continuously, especially when your dApp’s traffic is low and inconsistent.
  • Running production level infrastructure is especially tricky. You need to autoscale quickly to handle bursty traffic, and you want to provide services in different regions around the world to provide low latency services - all of this is incredibly costly, but comes with significant economies of scale for a provider.
  • DevOps requires constant attention - time that would be better spent elsewhere building.

A shared node API service helps mitigate these barriers of entry to trying accessing a new protocol by reducing all these costs to near zero. We distribute all nodes around the world on different cloud providers (with intelligent routing) to achieve global scalability from day 1, we monitor each node and ensure that they meet certain service levels, and we have the expertise and scale to handle production workloads and high peak traffic.

In summary, we try to reduce the pain of getting started on your and minimise the costs of accessing secure nodes while traffic from your dApp is low. When you grow, you can continue to use our shared API service, or we also provide access to one click deploy dedicated Astar/Shiden Alpha nodes to any cloud of your choosing.

Over October and November, OnFinality has (for Astar only):

  • Served 1,494,296,151 responses

  • Provided 3806.94 GB of egress data

  • Averaged 24,496,658 responses each day

  • Handled surges to 41,890,686 responses in a single day

Enhancements

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

  • API Access Restrictions - a new security feature to help you securely manage access to your OnFinality API endpoints
  • Detailed Error type breakdowns on your API Insights dashboard
  • A new Integration tab to help you get connected quickly
  • New enhanced deployment automation processes to allow our network partners to automate deployment of their networks with OnFinality
  • Support for Ethereum
  • A variety of improvements to our health metric collection tools and automated recovery scripts to ensure our 99.9% SLA is exceeded.
  • Scale improvements to our team, processes, and systems to allow us to provide this same service to any substrate team

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

Costings

As per our fixed priced arrangement we are requesting $5,000 USD per month of service less the amount of rewards earned via dAppStaking.

We are requesting costs for the previous quarter’s service plus the upcoming quarter in advance.

Full proposal can be found here: Astar - Q4 2022 and Q1 2023 Treasury Report/Proposal - Google Docs

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Edit: found the original post to on board OnFinality: OnFinality Builders Program Application - Robust, Reliable Public Infrastructure for the Shiden Network - #12 by sota

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Approve The Use Of Treasury Funds
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

4

How competitive is the amount of money you requested compared with the other industry players in your specific arena?

5

That is a reasonable question since, if it passes, we can expect the same treasury proposals from Dwelir and Pinknode and others RPC operators.

1 Like
6

Hi there,

This is a very reasonable question, and one that I completely understand would be asked.

Assuming that you consider the number of requests/responses that are served as the best measure of “productive” output, then over both October and November, we served a total of 1,711,707,760 requests/responses (across both of Astar and Shiden - source).

At US$5,000 per month giving a total of US$10,000 for both October and November, this gives a measure of 171,170 requests/responses per US$1 spent on this service.

I’m not aware of the exact charges that other RPC providers are proposing to Astar in order to compare our cost per request/response, but we have dedicated 2 years to optimising our RPC service across 40 different Polkadot chains to achieve very competitive pricing.

James

2 Likes
7

What are your upcoming plans/roadmap to constantly improve the service you will deliver to our customers this 2023 in order to increase the amount of users that stake their ASTR on your dapp?

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I would like to consider more factors like the service uptime, the quality and the quantity of maximum request/responses you are able to process in times of stress & high demand

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Hi Dennis, we’ve been providing service for Astar and Shiden since the 21st of June 2021. In over 18 months of service we’re able to constantly scale this service to meet surges in demand. For example, the day with the largest requests ever was almost 194 million API responses in a single 24 hour period for Astar (currently we’re averaging around 17 million per day).

1 Like
11

We do a huge amount of work to improve our service for both the public, and for consumers of the API endpoints.

Over the past 6 months we’ve implemented significant rate limiting controls that allow us to set custom bust rate limits for each IP and for each request method (for example, heavy calls have a higher cost that lighter ones). This means that we can limit extremely high users, while providing fair and equitable access to all.

Over the next 12 months we’re planning to make a considerable number of underlying improvements to our service to improve the response time, the price per response, and the latency of our service for each user in the world wherever they are. We have an excellent reputation in the Polkadot ecosystem for the most performant, reliable, and feature rich service and we hope that by continuing this effort the amount of ASTR dapp staking will increase.

James

1 Like
12

Hi Sephiroth,

We are not requesting 597,413.0734 ASTR per month, we are requesting a total 597,413.0734 ASTR for the entire period of 6 months from October 2022 to March 2023 (just under 100k ASTR per month).

We believe that our return on investment of 171,170 requests/responses per US$1 spent on this service is incredibly affordable.

Other providers services may be cheaper, but you will likely find that they serve an order of magnitude less requests/responses that OnFinality each month. As far as we understand, we are the largest infra provider for Astar and Shiden in terms of requests/responses served.

James

14

Hey Sephiroth,

It would be great to understand the significance of the US$4,500 figure you mentioned. We’ve already steeply discounted our service to meet a US$5,000 per month fixed charge and going further means we would need to reassess what services that we provide (for example, not providing a service for Shiden).

Would you like to setup a call with me to explain?

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Who is ‘we’ or ‘us’?
You are very aggressive with your replies without bringing value to this discussion. I would like to understand how you came up with $4500? Why is this fair and not the amount requested? Can you share your comparison with other ecosystem partners to back your request?

2 Likes
17

@Sephiroth account is suspended because of using multiple accounts and manipulating proposals. No need to reply on previous message from him @jamesbayly

3 Likes
18

Thank you for your answer James.
Looking forward to continue collaborating with you and grow together. Let’s go for big! I support your proposal.

Kind Regards Dennis

Thank you