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.
- https://moonbeam.api.onfinality.io/public
- wss://moonbeam.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
- https://moonbeam-alpha.api.onfinality.io/public
- wss://moonbeam-alpha.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
- https://moonriver.api.onfinality.io/public
- wss://moonriver.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
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 3
_yrnTreasury Council Member
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.
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 1. 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