[Proposal: MB33/MR29] OnFinality Q2/Q3 2024 public RPC service support for Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha

Governance Treasury Proposals
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OnFinality Treasury Proposal to provide free public RPC access to the Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha communities in Q2 & Q3 2024

Introduction

  • OnFinality has a proven track record providing RPC API support for the Moonbeam networks since January 2021 and plans to continue the long standing partnership of a reliable top-tier API service
  • With OnFinality Cloud, all Moonbeam family services now run on our own private hardware in premium geographically distributed locations - North Virginia (North America) and Hong Kong (Asia Pacific)
  • The community has continued to show incredible support for OnFinality, with over 50% of requests currently coming from users on paid plans
  • Treasury funding will sponsor the public endpoint of OnFinality Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha networks at a rate of 40 responses / second
  • One bootnode per network is included free of charge

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 the Moonbeam Networks 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 Moonbeam / Moonriver/ Moonbase Alpha nodes to any cloud of your choosing.

OnFinality’s RPC Service

As Polkadot’s largest infrastructure provider, we have provided scalable API services for Moonbeam networks since January 2021.

Since our inception in November 2020 we have a long track record focussing on three key areas; performance/reliability, providing more value from our Ultimate API service, and cost optimisation.

  • OnFinality’s reliability, performance, and feature set has made it historically the largest RPC provider in Moonbeam
  • This funding allows us to run funded public endpoints to help incubate and grow new customers in Moonbeam with a generous tier of free requests
  • OnFinality will provide the highest public access levels of any Moonbeam provider
  • OnFinality is the only infrastructure provider for Moonbeam that allows self-service dedicated node deployments, fully synced within minutes
  • OnFinality allows customers to use API keys to get their own API Insights from users of their dApps, and to help them identify bugs or learn about their users
  • OnFinality is one of the few RPC providers to proudly share exact uptime statistics for Moonbeam on our statuspage
  • OnFinality is the largest commercial enterprise RPC provider in web3 in terms of number of networks supported (over 100 networks and growing), bringing new users into the Moonbeam ecosystem from other networks
  • OnFinality Cloud helps decentralise the Moonbeam family of networks, by reducing the reliance on popular hyperscalers for RPC services and bootnodes

Cost
OnFinality provides a scalable and reliable public RPC API service for Moonbeam, Moonbase Alpha and Moonriver. As always, cost optimisation and simplicity for our customers remains a priority therefore we have moved to a fixed price charging model.

The fixed price will be $3,200 USD / Month for the Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha RPC services combined.

Payable 6 months in advance ($19,200 USD) split between Moonbeam 60% ($11,520) and Moonriver 40% ($7,680), by 28472.57 GLMR and 338.62 MOVR

This is all inclusive of capital and operating expenses, administration time from OnFinality DevOps, onboarding costs, backup costs, and all other monitoring and right-sizing by our team.

Service Details
All services (Moonbeam, Moonriver, Moonbase Alpha) include:

  • 99.9% Service Availability Level (SLA) with financial penalties
  • Complete Archive history
  • Support for Trace and Debug methods
  • Support for eth_getLogs RPC method
  • Geographically distributed RPC nodes in OnFinality Cloud - North Virginia (North America) and OnFinality Cloud - Hong Kong (Asia Pacific)
  • OnFinality’s Intelligent Gateway and caching layer for optimal performance
  • 24/7 Monitoring and on-call engineers
  • Community support via our telegram channel and Support Centre
  • Public access at 40 requests / second
  • Free private API access at 50 requests / second via the OnFinality portal with usage and performance insights. Up to 500,000 requests per day.
  • Higher access levels available for users on our Growth and Ultimate plans
  • Self Service Dedicated Node provisioning on OnFinality Cloud
  • One free bootnode per network

About OnFinality

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.

We continue to reaffirm our dedication to providing free support of 500,000 responses to our API service each day for users around the world. You can access our public API service by connecting to it using Polkadot.js or via the endpoints listed below. You can also create your own free API key in our application and track metrics and statistics.

Our mission remains to support all blockchain developers in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on building the next dApp.

Detailed Q2/Q3 2024 proposal available here

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Hey @TreasuryCouncil

Tagging to make sure you’ve seen this, I realise I didn’t place it in the Treasury Proposals subcategory

Cheers!

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No worries, we got your proposal :ok_hand:

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Thank you Daniel!

Yes we’ve seen it and we will review soon this proposal jointly with others received last week.

Have a nice day!

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Dear @daniel_onfinality,

The @TreasuryCouncil would like to thank you for submitting the above RPC service proposal!
Provisioning of bootnodes and the supported RPC methods are great as are the many insights provided.
However, there have been significant performance issues with regards to latency in the past. Not splitting milliseconds here but speaking of actual blocks delay so 99,9% uptime does not do the trick here.
While we are considering your proposal, could you give us a trustworthy insurance of high quality low latency RPC services for the upcoming six month period?
To stay on schedule we’d appreciate a reply in a timely manner, ideally by next Wednesday, March 13th.

Thanks & kind regards :sparkles:
Yaron

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Hi @_yrn

Thank you very much for your consideration and feedback!

We fully understand the importance of our role in providing both reliable and performant access to the Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha networks.

We have observed an average latency of less than 250ms, and success rate of 99.98%, on our Moonbeam endpoint over the past 30 days - see the detailed report here. If you are able to provide details of the reported performance issues that would be greatly appreciated - we will investigate thoroughly.

To provide extra assurance, we are updating our SLA for all Moonbeam services:

Uptime: 99.9%
Block Height: We guarantee not to exceed a 1-block difference from other nodes in the same region 99% of the time
Latency: We will not exceed 1 second for calls made within the same region as the service provided 99% of the time.

We will provide the council with a detailed monthly report to ensure complete transparency.

We hope these measures adequately address your concerns. We are fully committed to continuous improvement and always welcome your feedback to serve the Moonbeam community better.

Kind Regards,

Daniel

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Hey @daniel_onfinality

Thanks for addressing our concerns and thank you for your patience.
The Treasury Council has had great internal discussions regarding your RPC service proposal and we have decided to be moving forward with it for the upcoming quarter Q2 of 2024 as three members of the Treasury Council signal their support.

However, to ensure constant quality performance and to address our concerns from previous performance issues we will be monitoring overall performance incl. uptime, latency and more.
As we are concerned about the actual rate limitations provided in the wild in particular we have decided and prepared tooling to be monitoring and stress testing those numbers offered on a regular basis.
We highly appreciated your offer of providing us with a detailed monthly performance report and would like to kindly accept it.
Should overall performance have been as good as we all hope it will be by the end of Q2, there will be no obstacles in our way for be moving forward with Q3.

As the RPC service proposals came in with deviating 30dma prices and MOVR and GLMR prices have been changing a fair bit, we would like to define the 30dma to be used by all proposing parties for Q2 based on yesterday’s Coingecko 30dma price data which are as follows: GLMR: 0,5310 USD & MOVR: 22,8473 USD.
For your on-chain-proposal please update your USD based calculations using these up-to-date moving average prices and keeping the proportional GLMR-MOVR split ratio at 60/40.

For Q3 of 2024 those 30dma values shall be fetched by us again, ahead of poposals being put forward on-chain.

Many thanks and kind regards,

The Moonbeam @TreasuryCouncil

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I’m signalling my support. (1 of 3)

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Also signaling support (2 of 3) but agree with keeping an eye on performance.

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I’m also signaling my support (3 of 3)

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Thank you again for your feedback and support @_yrn @aaron.mbf and @lina.k.m

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You’re welcome && thank you!
Ping us when your proposal is submitted on-chain :sparkles:

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Hey @_yrn

A quick update, we will submit the proposal on-chain soon but have already upgraded our RPC endpoints to the specified levels since April 2nd.

Our apologies for the delay with the submission

Thanks

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Awesome, thanks for the update :ok_hand:
A 6d spend period ended just now so the treasury motion would be executed at the end of the current one, now.

Can you elaborate on the technical upgrades performed on April 2nd?

As of yesterday RPC latency was very volatile with an entire block delay to the current block height at its worst for central Europe.

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@daniel_onfinality moonbeam on-chain proposal spotted :eyes:

Let me know when you’ve completed the Moonriver one respectively, shed some light on the upgrades from 4/2/24 and we’ll take care of the rest asap within the current spend period.
Thanks Daniel! :pray:

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Hi @_yrn

Yes we have submitted Moonbeam, Moonriver will come soon. Our apologies again for the delay

Prior to this proposal being accepted we ran a smaller public endpoint with lower rate limits, so on 2nd April we upsized all components and increased the rate limit. What I meant to say was that, despite not having submitted the proposal yet, we are providing the service as outlined :slightly_smiling_face:

Thank you for raising the latency issues to our attention. I can confirm that it has been picked up by our monitoring which we’ll provide at the end of the month. We are receiving extreme traffic spikes once or twice per day and are investigating the cause

In the meantime, we have added a third Moonbeam cluster in Europe to increase capacity

We’ll keep you updated

Regards,

Daniel

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Hi @_yrn

Here is our Moonriver proposal

Thank you!

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Hey @daniel_onfinality,
both treasury motions have been AYE’ed and are now closed. Expect both payouts in your beneficiary wallet at the end of the current spend period i.e. in roughly 11 hrs and 12 hrs respectively.
Kind regards :sparkles:
Y

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Hi @TreasuryCouncil

I hope you’re all doing well

Here is the OnFinality April performance report for our Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha endpoints

In summary, we met the following targets:

  • Uptime 99.9% North America
  • Uptime 99.9% Asia Pacific
  • Response Time < 1 s 99% Asia

But missed this target

  • Response Time < 1 s 99% North America

We are working on the North American latency as top priority and expect to show solid improvements next month. It was partly caused by the request spike we discussed earlier in the month, but we have also identified a second intermittent issue which we are investigating.

How do you prefer that we handle the Service Level Agreement discount for April?

Regards,

Daniel

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Hi @TreasuryCouncil

Here is the OnFinality May performance report for our Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha endpoints

We made an improvement to our North American latency towards the end of the monthr, and our uptime increased to 100%

Kind Regards,

Daniel

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