Proponent: a3byawr54JPxf1RpvnbLZPkZN2Q9Ry7gg5CXiqcvEtgPWvQM8
Date: 7th October, 2022
Requested KINT: 4,559.17
Short description: Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for Interlay's Kintsugi Network.

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 manage all the nodes for our users and distribute them across the world (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  Kintsugi Network 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 Kintsugi nodes  to any cloud of your choosing.

Service Details and Enhancements

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.

Enhancements

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

• API Insights so you can analyse and learn about your API applications faster and find bugs with your dApp
• Cost optimisations to reduce pricing for our customers by up to 40%
• New API plans for our high usage customers and a way to allocate resource to move towards a more sustainable funding model
• Support for Alibaba Cloud to provide more decentralised cloud hosting options for our customers
• Updates to our website to include a new Network marketplace so you can see what networks are supported
• Support for new layer 1s - Avalanche and Juno (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 and analytics page.

Full proposal can be found here