Lucky Friday | Cost-Effective Proposal for High-Performance Bare-Metal RPC Nodes

Proponent:

Lucky Friday Labs

Requested Allocation:

Initial Provision of xxx KSM (USD – $11,200)

Recipient Address:

HPUEzi4v3YJmhBfSbcGEFFiNKPAGVnGkfDiUzBNTR7j1CxT

Short Description:

The Lucky Friday team is seeking funding to provide RPC services for the Kusama and Statemine networks. We are well established within the ecosystem, operating numerous geo-diverse validators, collators, miners, and vaults on Kusama and Polkadot.

Our team intends to provide RPC services at our SOC 2 Type 2, CCSS-compliant facilities, co-located on dedicated bare-metal servers. We are investing significant capital upfront, believing we can offer reliable and secure unmetered service to the community at a fixed and reasonable cost.

Our decades of data center experience – and desire to encourage ecosystem growth – means that we recognize and are concerned about the risk of centralization happening due to the haste of quickly turning up nodes in AWS, Google Cloud, and others. Hetzner has already begun shutting down crypto-related activities.

Lucky Friday does not believe in easy; we believe in right.

We desire to leverage our high-performance, high-availability infrastructure and scalability to support the Dotsama ecosystem by providing the enterprise-level connectivity needed to serve an ever-growing userbase and influential applications like Polkadot.js, Talisman, PolkaGate, Nova, and more.

Providing that the proposal is accepted, we will seek initial funding of $11,200. Upon successful completion of milestones as set out in the proposal, we will provide a report on our undertaking and details on load tests. We would then further engage for monthly recurring costs of $14,920.

The complete proposal is available for review and comment here. We greatly value and appreciate any feedback. 🍀

Updates

For the sake of transparency and open communication, we will be providing periodic updates on this page. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to comment below or reach out to us directly.

• [email protected]
• @luckyfriday:matrix.org

November 18, 2022

Upon approval and execution at block #15354720, the Lucky Friday account (HPUEzi4v3YJmhBfSbcGEFFiNKPAGVnGkfDiUzBNTR7j1CxT) received 402.95 KSM from the Kusama treasury. The EMA7 price at the time of submitting Motion 572 was $27.795 ($11,200). However, due to market volatility, the value at the time of sale was $23.75 ($9,570.06) with a transaction fee of $9.57. Per the motion, the difference of $1,620.37 ($11,200 - $9,570.06 - $9.57) will be included with our subsequent request.

January 22, 2023

Dear community, we placed sizable orders for servers, storage, memory, and processors. However, due to procurement issues during the holiday season and global supply shortages, we are experiencing a delay in the rollout of our service. Judging strictly from the project schedule, this shifts us back by eight weeks, giving us a new target completion date of April 7, 2023. These problems are unique, as we are provisioning new racks with new hardware, but we are making every effort to reduce delivery times as much as possible. We appreciate your patience and will continue to keep you posted.

February 14, 2023

All equipment has been received. It is racked, wired, and powered. The insurers are analyzing the devices and setup and making assessments. Once complete, we will move ahead with node installation. We are still on track for April 7, 2023.

March 23, 2023

We have spent the past few weeks load-testing the servers using various-sized payloads from various pallets. Tests were done at multiple geographic locations, all to our satisfaction. We also invited community members to load test the endpoints, and neither has broken. The polkadot-js team has advised we run for ~2 weeks on Westend before inclusion in the polkadot.js app.