Proposal: cardinate.io - Request as API node service provider for Astar & Shiden network free of charge for 3 months

Proposal type: Request as API node service provider for Astar & Shiden network free of charge for the first 3 months without further liabilities
Author: @cardinate
Date proposed: 2023-03-14

As already mentioned in the discord channel, below is our request as an API node service provider for the Astar & Shiden network.
We have been supporting the Astar & Shiden network for several months with a collator and nodes in our data centers.

Short Summary:

  • support the Astar & Shiden network in its decentralization, development and growth
  • request as public and independent public API node service provider for the Astar & Shiden network in the center of Europe

High level objective:

  • provide an fast and reliable public API endpoint that is completely independent of one of the major cloud providers

Background:

  • support the decentralized approach of the Astar & Shiden network, because our operations, IP connectivity and server systems are definitely not depending on one of the major centralized cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, OVHcloud, Hetzner, etc.)

Description of Activity:

  • provide an public API endpoint for Astar & Shiden, free of charge for the first 3 months, without further liabilities, which can be tested by anyone

Change or improvement:

  • diversification of Astar & Shiden API services and creation of redundancy
  • real decentralization is one of the declared goals of the Astar & Shiden network, which we hereby support

Description of Group:

  • we have been in IT since 2001, starting in the Web 1.0 world and compiling Linux systems ourself (Kernel 2.2), quickly realizing that IT and network infrastructure is our strength
  • already in 2004 we have been operating our own linux routers, switches and LAMP servers in data centers
  • since 2015 we operate our own autonomous system (AS) and geo-redundant data center infrastructure in the center of Europe and can provide fast reliable services that are completely independent

Budget:

  • free of charge for 3 months, without further liabilities

Delivery and Reporting:

  • if approved, beginning April 2023 our public API service for the Astar & Shiden network will be available free of charge for the first 3 months
  • we will then provide an evaluation of the API usage and make a further proposal at which fair market costs we can provide the service in future
  • the community can then decide whether they see our services as added value and want to make use of them

author:

  • cardinate.io - providing fast, reliable, and real independent API and node services

Best regards
cardinate

1 Like

I noticed that you already created a post here.

At this moment, we already have a lot.

Hello Toga,

thanks for your feedback.

I agree with you that at first glance it looks like the Astar & Shiden API infrastructure is well decentralized.

However, if we look at the backbone providers through which the API services are provided, this stands out from the total of 6x API endpoints at Astar, for example 5x API endpoints (83.33%) are provided via three large US cloud providers and only 1x API Endpoint (16.66%) is provided by an independent provider.

I think in terms of diversification and decentralization we should aim for at least a 50/50 balance of power here.

We can contribute to this goal with our completely independent public API endpoint!

For this reason we have already prepared our public API endpoint for Astar and Shiden, you are welcome to test it, we look forward to feedback.

cardinate.io - public API endpoints for Shiden / Astar Network

Shiden API

Astar API

Best regards
cardinate