[Proposal: XX] OnFinality Q4 2024/Q1 2025 Public RPC & Bootnode support for Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha

OnFinality Treasury Proposal to provide free public RPC access to the Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha communities in Q1 2024 & Q1 2025

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
  • OnFinality is the only Moonbeam RPC Service provider to guarantee high availability and low latency, with financial penalties if service level targets are not met
  • OnFinality processes an average of 25M requests per day for Moonbeam, 8M/day for Moonriver, and 2M/day for Moonbase Alpha in Q3 2024
  • We’re partnering with SubQuery to help make our service even faster, while allowing the community to participate in this Hybrid Decentralised RPC service. OnFinality’s managed API clusters will remain the primary destination for most RPC traffic for Moonbeam.
  • Treasury funding will sponsor the public endpoint of OnFinality Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha networks at a rate of 50 responses / second.
  • One bootnode per network is included free of charge

Motivation
Setting up reliable and scalable RPC infrastructure is difficult and expensive:

  • It requires a level of server development expertise that many do not have. 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.
  • Asking others to run their own node hurts your ability to onboard developers into your ecosystem and serves as a massive barrier to entry. It’s costly to run a full node nearly continuously, especially when your dApp’s traffic is low and inconsistent.
  • Running nodes and performing the related DevOps activities requires constant attention - time that would be better spent elsewhere building.

OnFinality’s Ultimate API service mitigates these barriers of entry. Users in your ecosystem can enjoy the ultimate reliable API endpoint that can power their app as it grows.

OnFinality’s Services

  • OnFinality’s reliability, performance, and feature set has made it historically the largest RPC provider in Moonbeam
  • OnFinality is the only Moonbeam RPC provider to offer both 99.9% Availability and Latency service level guarantees with financial penalties
  • More decentralised and global coverage through our partnership with SubQuery on Hybrid Decentralised RPCs
  • 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 is the only infrastructure provider for Moonbeam that supports 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 historical uptime & latency statistics for Moonbeam on our statuspage & community forum updates
  • OnFinality is one of the largest commercial enterprise RPC providers 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 & SubQuery’s Hybrid Decentralised RPCs help decentralise the Moonbeam family of networks by reducing the reliance on popular hyperscalers for RPC services and bootnodes and encouraging the community to participate.

Our Partnership with SubQuery

We’re partnering with SubQuery to help make our service even faster, while allowing the community to participate in this Hybrid Decentralised RPC service.

SubQuery’s decentralised RPC infrastructure relies on a network of gateways to route requests to community node operators based on a combination of latency, cost, and other factors to ensure the best performance, reliability and stability.

OnFinality’s managed API clusters will remain the primary destination for most RPC traffic for Moonbeam, but SubQuery’s decentralised network will be used in the following two scenarios:

  1. Surge traffic: RPC traffic is bursty, and OnFinality’s gateway will automatically route surge traffic to SubQuery’s network of decentralised community RPCs to cope with excess demand, resulting in higher reliability.
  2. Underserved regions: OnFinality will run clusters in North Virginia and Asia, but traffic from regions far from these two can be routed to SubQuery’s network of decentralised community RPCs, resulting in lower latency and faster traffic.

Users will continue to query through OnFinality’s default endpoint, and will not have to do anything to benefit from OnFinality & SubQuery’s Hybrid Decentralised RPCs.

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 $3,000 USD / Month for the Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha RPC services combined.

Payable 6 months in advance ($18,000 USD) split at 60% Moonbeam and 40% Moonriver.

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

Service Details
All services include:

  • 99.9% Service Availability Level (SLA) with financial penalties
  • Externally monitored 99th Percentile latency of under 1 second 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). In addition to decentralised and global coverage through our partnership with SubQuery on Hybrid Decentralised RPCs.
  • Additional Lightning Restore backups maintained in Frankfurt for scaling and incident recovery
  • 24/7 Monitoring and on-call engineers operating from Auckland, Singapore, and Guangzhou
  • Community support via our telegram channel and Support Centre
  • Rate Limits ensure fair usage of shared public RPC services. Public access to our Moonbean, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha endpoints will be provided at 50 responses / second, per IP
    • Public access at 50 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.


Read the full proposal here

Dear @daniel_onfinality ,

The @TreasuryCouncil would like to thank you for submitting the above RPC service proposal!

I am starting here a round of questions / feedback, other Treasury members could join afterwards.

With reference to your proposal my question is specifically about these points you reported in the proposal:

“ *OnFinality is the only Moonbeam RPC Service provider to guarantee high availability and low latency, with financial penalties if service level targets are not met"

And

" * OnFinality is one of the largest commercial enterprise RPC providers in web3 in terms of number of networks supported (over 100 networks and growing)… bringing new users into the Moonbeam ecosystem from other networks"

Can you kindly better describe in a quantitative manner these 2 points above? (financial penalties and new users onboarding onto MB Eco)

To stay on schedule we’d appreciate a reply in a timely manner, ideally by next Monday, September 9th.

Thanks & kind regards
Michele

Hi @micheleicebergnodes

Thanks for reviewing our proposal and for your questions

“ * OnFinality is the only Moonbeam RPC Service provider to guarantee high availability and low latency, with financial penalties if service level targets are not met"

You can find the full details of our System Availability and Latency credits in the Appendix of our proposal here. We provide credits starting from 10% of the monthly fee if we don’t meet the 99.9% uptime or 99 percentile response time of <1 second targets.

Measurements are taken externally once per minute from random locations within the service regions. For Q2 2024, we applied a $720 credit to the Q3 2024 payment, details here.

I note that our latency target is especially strict. Latency is typically measured via Average or 95 percentile instead of 99 percentile, and our method of testing via infrequent requests from random locations means we often measure the “first connection” time.

" * OnFinality is one of the largest commercial enterprise RPC providers in web3 in terms of number of networks supported (over 100 networks and growing)… bringing new users into the Moonbeam ecosystem from other networks"

We currently support 113 different networks and offer a unique depth of service with both shared RPCs and self service PAYG dedicated nodes. Over the past few months we have been helping several significant teams from the Ethereum space move into the Moonbeam ecosystem with dedicated Trace Nodes. Today, over 60 development teams are using OnFinality API Key endpoints to integrate with Moonbeam and many more use our public endpoints.

Unfortunately quantifying the number of users who have joined the Moonbeam ecosystem via OnFinality is quite difficult. We work with the application teams instead of end users directly, and do not maintain the specific wallet addresses or IP addresses used in transactions made through our infrastructure, see our privacy policy for more info

I hope that helps, let us know if you’d like to know anything else!

Daniel

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Hi @daniel_onfinality , the Treasury Council has carefully reviewed your proposal. In terms of cost, your proposal came out around average earning a neutral score in that area. Historically, OnFinality’s offering features a good track record of service and participation in the ecosystem as well as supporting additional features such as bootnodes, eth.getLogs and trace+API. However, your proposal had a weaker score with regards to geographic coverage and when all factors were considered and it came to make the final benchmark/evaluations, OnFinality was not among the 3 RPC providers selected for Q4 2024 / Q1 2025.
We hope that in the future we will have other opportunities to collaborate, in the meanwhile, we thank you again for your proposal.

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