[Proposal: MB3/MR2] OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Aug - Sep 2022)

Governance Treasury Proposals
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Abstract - Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for the Moonbeam networks from 1st August 2022 until 31st October 2022 (2 months).

Motivation - Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. 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. In summary, we try to reduce the pain of getting started on the Moonbeam Networks and minimise the costs of accessing secure nodes while traffic from your dApp is low.

Project Overview and Team Experience - OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Polkadot/Substrate community. Our mission is to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp.

Overall Cost - This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for all Moonbeam Networks. The total outstanding costs for these networks are 83,154.1985 GLMR

Use of Treasury Funds - All funds will be used to pay for resources and infrastructure used to provide the service during August to October 2022

Specifications - We have a heavily modified multi-cloud and multi-region landscape that maximizes performance, reliability, scalability, and decentralisation. Additionally, we are proud to have delivered some key service enhancements that benefit the ecosystem in the last quarter. This includes:

Steps to Implement - This service has already been provided and we are proud to have achived 99.99% uptime for Moonbeam and Moonriver https://status.onfinality.io/.

Full proposal can be found here Aug-Sep 2022 Moonbeam - Treasury Report/Proposal - Google Docs

On chain proposal can be found here Polkassembly

Corresponding Moonriver proposal can be found here Polkassembly

We’ve already made a on-chain proposal for 83,154.1985 GLMR. As this is greater than the updated GLMR proposal (66,144.85 GLMR) we will immediately refund the difference (17,009.3485 GLMR) to the Moonbeam treasury account on receipt of funds

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Hey, James, thank you for your proposal and for all the services that OnFinality provides to us!

As an active member of the Moonbeam community, I would like to ask a few questions.
could you tell us in more detail:

  1. How do you calculate the requested amount?
  2. How is the requested amount spent? (employee compensation, payment for third-party services, and so on.)
  3. Why are you requesting the entire amount in GLMR tokens? This proposal includes services for Moonriver. It seems to me that the services that were provided for Moonriver would be correct to pay with MOVR tokens. and it would probably also be wise to split the costs on Moonbase Alpha, that is, part of the costs are paid in MOVR, the rest in GLMR.

I have reviewed your current proposal and also read the old proposal that was awarded.
(Polkassembly)

  1. In your first proposal, the requested amount was 130,343.29 GLMR, which was equivalent to 80,812$.
    ( 2022-08-24 22:21:00 (+UTC) - the time of submission of the proposal, the average cost of the GLMR token was $0.62)

As far as I understand from your first proposal, the requested amount was calculated for 17 months.
(The time period from February 2021 to July 2022 was of huge growth for Moonbeam and OnFinality, this proposal only covers the period from the 1st February to 31st July.)

80,812 / 17 = 4 753$ / month

did I understand correctly that the expenses are calculated for a period of 17 months?

  1. In your current proposal, the requested amount was 83,154.1985 GLMR, which was equivalent to 39,082$.
    (2022-10-25 21:53:18 (+UTC) - the time of submission of the proposal, the average cost of the GLMR token was $0.47)

As far as I understand from your current proposal, the requested amount was calculated for 2 months. (Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for the Moonbeam networks from 1st August 2022 until 30th September 2022 (2 months)

39 082 / 2 = 19 541$ / month

If I understood everything correctly and calculated it correctly, then could you explain the reasons for such a significant difference in the requested amount?

  1. 4 753$ / month VS 2. 19 541$ / month

In addition, since it takes time to discuss, vote and award funds, it is likely that in the end the amount requested may have a significant difference in dollar terms. perhaps it would be correct to specify the requested amount in dollars?

1 Like
3

Hey james, basically I join the questions made by turrizt, reading the proposal the same doubts came to mind

I would just like to add the following doubts

For how long would the payments be requested for your services?

How frecuently?

and the amount requested, if this would be the new avg per month (20k) - what other reasons or items would make this amount change?

Of course I appreciate and congratulate all the work done by on finality, which helps a lot in the infrastructure tools.

Thanks for you answer

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Hi everyone, apologies for the delay in response.

I’ve updated the cost section of the full proposal to include the full itemised costings.

The total outstanding costs for these networks are USD $47,582.82 which we calculate to be 83,154.1985 GLMR.

Note that we have switched to an accounting system where we take the Time weighted average price from CoinMarketCap for the 30 days preceding each billing period. So for example, August’s rate of 0.66449083 is taken from the 30 days up to the 31st August 2022 and used for that month’s data.

In terms of monthly costs, it fluctuates as traffic increases or decreases. For example, in September 2021 we only had to handle 7,083,326 requests, while 4 months later that grew by to 5,208,249,122 - 73,428% increase. We scale our service constantly to ensure that we keep the endpoint stable and reliable.

These funds will go to our service providers (e.g a mix of AWS, GCP, Alicloud) and to pay our internal staff salaries.

Our standard process it to request payments from treasuries at the end of each calendar quarter (this one is an anomaly at only 2 months because our first one was for a initial period).

We can provide this service for as long as the Moonbeam ecosystem would like such as service.

The average per month does change based on:

  • The size of the chain: Each archive node requires a significant amount of high performance data storage (30% of costs). As the chain grows we need to scale this
  • Level of traffic, we’re currently doing 2.8 billion requests per month across all moonbeam networks, if that increases we can increase resources or start dropping clients
  • The characteristics of traffic, we pay for data egress and so if a whole bunch of dapps that have massive RPC payloads get big the amount of data egress might increase
  • The Moonbeam node codebase: In the past, bugs introduced to some parachains have caused resource usage to increase and we’ve had to scale up to support the same level of traffic while working with teams to help resolve
2 Likes
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Hey, James!
Thank you very much for your detailed answer, we really appreciate it!

Сould you please give a more detailed answer to this question:

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Ultimately its for simplicity - each treasury process takes a certain number of staff hours to complete and we have a lot to get through each quarter

We can split this cost between the two treasuries if the community desires this.

7

Understood, thank you! but personally, in my opinion, I think it is not particularly correct to use only GLMR treasury funds as payment for all services. btw, in Moonriver, it takes 2 times less time to make governance decisions. you can read this information here: Governance | Moonbeam Docs

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Hey @James_SubQuery_OnFin can check if the full proposal document is public? I can’t access
Thanks u

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Sorry, the permissions changed after we moved around a few directories. Updated now

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Hi everyone, I wanted to provide an update to our plans

We agree that it makes sense to split up this proposal between the Moonbeam and Moonriver treasuries (with costs for Moonbase Alpha going to the Moonbeam treasury)

What we plan to do is the following:

  1. Append the cost for October to this submission
  2. Itemise and split the cost up between Moonbeam and Moonriver. You can see the detailed breakdown in this spreadsheet here Moonbeam - Q3 2022 Treasury Data - Google Regneark
  3. Make a new treasury proposal for Moonriver (starting as a discussion post tomorrow) for the Moonriver costs for Q3 2022 (3,024.09 MOVR)
  4. Update the document for this proposal to reflect the updated cost for Moonbeam (66,144.85 GLMR)

Now this is where it get tricky, we’ve already made a on-chain proposal for 83,154.1985 GLMR. As this is greater than the update GLMR proposal (66,144.85 GLMR) we can either:

  • Apply the difference (17,009.3485 GLMR) as credit for Q4 2022 costs
  • Immediately refund the difference (17,009.3485 GLMR) to the Moonbeam treasury account

Our preference is the first option, and we hope that our reputation and history of making treasury proposals across the Polkadot ecosystem instills the necessary trust by this council.

If there are no major concerns in the next 72 hours i will proceed with this plan.

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Hey, @James_SubQuery_OnFin, thanks for the update. I thought about the fact that for Moonriver, this could be an incredibly large expense. If we think about the fact that we are in a protracted bear market. I mean, your expenses occur on an ongoing basis and it turns out every 3 months about 3k MOVR you will request for payment of expenses. It turns out that in one year approximately 30% of the treasury can be spent only on your services. It is interesting to hear your opinion and the opinion of the community on this matter

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hey @James_SubQuery_OnFin , first of all I would like to thank you for the service provided to the networks

Now, if you could answer the following questions, the community and the Treasury Council can have a better idea of everything that the proposal and its services represent, thank you

  1. Do you offer decentralized hosting? Describe this in detail
  2. Provide metrics around the volume of the Moonbeam ecosystem traffic you are currently handling
  3. What plans (if any) are in place to convince dApps and end-users to switch to your RPC solution
  4. Describe any future cost saving plans
  5. Describe monetization and revenue model
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Hi @jose.crypto, appreciate the detailed questions

  1. Do you offer decentralized hosting? Describe this in detail
  • I am assuming that by “decentralised hosting” you refer to the concept of individuals hosting nodes at will and providing them to the network in a trustless way
  • We do not offer decentralised hosting, we provision, manage, monitor, and scale all our infrastructure to optimise for performance, reliability, and cost
  • As a centralised company, we push to achieve these goals and are ultimately accountable for them by this council (and many others around the eco)
  1. Provide metrics around the volume of the Moonbeam ecosystem traffic you are currently handling.
  • For the three month period of August, September, and October we processed
    • 3.33 Billion requests for Moonbeam
    • 1.98 Billion requests for Moonriver
    • 2.54 Billion requests for Moonbase Alpha
  • Detailed breakdown is here
  • Live data is at https://analytics.onfinality.io
  1. What plans (if any) are in place to convince dApps and end-users to switch to your RPC solution
  • 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.
  • A variety of improvements to our health metric collection tools and automated recovery scripts to ensure our 99.9% SLA is exceeded so our customers can sleep in peace
  1. Describe any future cost-saving plans
  • Our pricing fluctuates based off the services provided to run this API endpoint, this is driven by request volume, chain size, consumer behaviour, and the latest versions of Moonbeam images provided by the Moonbeam team.
  • We have constantly worked to allow scaling without elastic price changes. In fact, over the past 6 months, our per API response costs have decreased as we have improved our rate limiting tools, our autoscaling strategies, our load balancers, and gateway caches.
  • We work closely with the team at Moonbeam to share detailed resource usage and work with them to test new versions of images to maximize performance at our scale
  1. Describe monetization and revenue model
  • We are working with Moonbeam to introduce rate limits to our service to progressively migrate high usage customers to a paid API key model.
  • We hope to build a sustainable revenue stream from these sources in the future to allow us to continue to reduce costs for this “free” service to the treasury, while ensuring all new developers can continue to get up and running using public endpoints.
1 Like
14

@James_SubQuery_OnFin - I think it would be more appropriate to refund the difference for now so that we can keep each treasury proposal separate.

Otherwise, I think your proposed changes make sense. Could you please edit the main post to incorporate the changes?

Once the edits are done, please reply to indicate this has been completed. The next step would be to capture the markdown in an MBTP3.md file the foundation treasury github repo:

Feel free to create a pull request with the markdown or let me know and I’d be happy to do it on your behalf.

15

I dont’ have permission to edit the main post now, but it should read as follows

Abstract - Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for the Moonbeam networks from 1st August 2022 until 31st October 2022 (2 months).

Motivation - Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. 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. In summary, we try to reduce the pain of getting started on the Moonbeam Networks and minimise the costs of accessing secure nodes while traffic from your dApp is low.

Project Overview and Team Experience - OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for the Polkadot/Substrate community. Our mission is to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp.

Overall Cost - This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for all Moonbeam Networks. The total outstanding costs for these networks are 83,154.1985 GLMR

Use of Treasury Funds - All funds will be used to pay for resources and infrastructure used to provide the service during August to October 2022

Specifications - We have a heavily modified multi-cloud and multi-region landscape that maximizes performance, reliability, scalability, and decentralisation. Additionally, we are proud to have delivered some key service enhancements that benefit the ecosystem in the last quarter. This includes:

Steps to Implement - This service has already been provided and we are proud to have achived 99.99% uptime for Moonbeam and Moonriver https://status.onfinality.io/.

Full proposal can be found here Aug-Sep 2022 Moonbeam - Treasury Report/Proposal - Google Docs

On chain proposal can be found here Polkassembly

Corresponding Moonriver proposal can be found here Polkassembly

We’ve already made a on-chain proposal for 83,154.1985 GLMR. As this is greater than the updated GLMR proposal (66,144.85 GLMR) we will immediately refund the difference (17,009.3485 GLMR) to the Moonbeam treasury account on receipt of funds

16

Hey, Aaron, I edited this post

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Great, thank you very much.

1 Like
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This proposal was awarded November 25, 2022.

19

The difference (17,009.3485 GLMR) in payment has been refunded to the on chain treasury

1 Like
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Good, thanks u james