Subscan 2025 Q3-Q4 Funding Proposal: Basic service fee for the Kusama Relaychain and Kusama public parachain (AssetHub, Coretime, BridgeHub, People)

SUBSCAN_IO
4d ago
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Due to potential display issues with some charts in format across various devices and platforms, please refer to the detailed information in this Google Document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NXVGFI6i-5zoEXoMpm30j2u7FA5h9f1n2ccWvxR9RWE/edit?usp=sharing

Past proposals

Overview

Subscan requests funding from the Kusama Treasury to support 2025 Q3–Q4 operational maintenance for the following five networks:

  • Kusama Relay Chain
  • AssetHub-Kusama
  • Coretime-Kusama
  • BridgeHub-Kusama
  • People-Kusama

Subscan is one of the most essential public data infrastructure services in the Kusama ecosystem, providing stable, accurate, and low-latency indexing for developers, validators, governance systems, wallets, and other crucial tools.

This proposal covers only maintenance and necessary compatibility work, not new feature development.

Total requested amount: USD 141,624 (to be converted to KSM using the 7-day average price at submission)

Recent Contributions and Ongoing Maintenance Work

Over the past several months, Subscan has continued to deliver crucial updates and maintenance work for the Kusama ecosystem. Beyond providing stable explorer and indexing services, our team has:

  • Completed multiple runtime upgrade adaptations across the Kusama Relay Chain and all supported public parachains, ensuring uninterrupted indexing and API availability.
  • Enhanced compatibility with new chain features introduced through recent upgrades, including adjustments to governance, asset management, and cross-chain messaging logic.
  • Supported the October AssetHub migration on Kusama, making all necessary backend modifications and data-structure updates to ensure seamless continuity for users and downstream tooling.
  • Performed continuous bug fixes, data consistency checks, and indexing optimizations, keeping data quality and performance at high standards despite growing chain complexity.

Why Subscan Matters

As the default block explorer and indexing layer for Kusama, Subscan provides the foundational data required by nearly all ecosystem participants.

Developers & Applications

  • Reliable APIs: blocks, extrinsics, events, XCM, assets, NFTs
  • Faster debugging and monitoring
  • Data infrastructure for indexers, dashboards, bots, dApps

Parachain Teams & Validators

  • Real-time block production, sync status, and finality
  • XCM tracking across chains
  • Early detection of node anomalies

Governance Platforms & Participants

  • Referendum status, account history, delegation data
  • Governance dashboards dependent on Subscan APIs
  • Long-term auditability of past governance decisions

End Users, Wallets, and Ecosystem Tools

  • Transfers, staking, NFT queries, asset visibility
  • Multi-chain UI consistency and reliability

Without Subscan, many essential tools would face significant data degradation, and the accessibility of historical and governance data would be severely impacted.

Scope of This Proposal

This proposal includes the following mandatory maintenance activities:

Core Operational Maintenance

  • Continuous indexing, data storage, and DB maintenance
  • Multi-node redundancy and sync monitoring
  • Data consistency and latency optimization

Runtime Upgrade Compatibility

  • Support for upgrades on the Kusama Relay Chain and all four public parachains
  • Adaptation to evolving XCM, Assets, Governance, and system modules
  • Ensuring zero-downtime during upgrade cycles

Essential Bug Fixing & Performance Tuning

  • Schema updates and historical data alignment
  • Compatibility fixes for nodes and indexers
  • Performance improvements for high-load scenarios

Support for Major Ecosystem Changes

  • Previously ensured smooth migration for AssetHub and recent system updates
  • Future major migrations or critical runtime changes will be fully supported

Service Fee Model & Pricing Methodology

Throughout 2025, Subscan has focused on deep infrastructure optimization. By refining our technical stack, we have successfully reduced internal overhead and operational costs without compromising the high service standards the ecosystem expects. Our goal is to pass these efficiencies directly to the networks we support through a more competitive pricing structure.

Phased Implementation Strategy

To ensure a stable transition, we are rolling out these optimizations and subsequent price reductions in stages:

  • Pilot Phase (Westend): The new infrastructure and discounted pricing are already being piloted on the Westend testnet.
  • Expansion Phase: Following the Westend pilot, these optimizations will be progressively integrated into canary networks (Kusama) and eventually the Polkadot mainnet.
  • Current Proposal Scope (2025 Q3–Q4): This proposal maintains the existing fee structure to ensure continuity and stability during the final stages of the optimization rollout.
  • 2026 Outlook: Starting in Q1 2026, a fully optimized pricing model and additional discounts will be applied across all supported networks.

Note: For a detailed breakdown of how these infrastructure improvements will impact future budgets, please refer to the "2026 Cost Outlook (Infrastructure Optimization Based)" section.

Pricing Methodology

For the period of 2025 Q3–Q4, Subscan’s fee structure remains consistent with the model successfully utilized over the past two years.

 Our maintenance packages are designed to support a wide range of data and operational needs, ensuring stable and efficient system performance. Because our overall cost structure is composed of multiple infrastructure and operational expenses—such as cloud services, network acceleration, monitoring systems, node providers, and the Subscan team’s ongoing operations—we use storage consumption as the primary metric for determining service fees.

Pricing Tiers:
a. Basic Plan

  • Up to 200 GB: $799/month
  • Beyond 200 GB: $5.3/GB
  • Automatically upgrades to the next tier after 350 GB

b. Advanced Plan

  • Up to 500 GB: $1,699/month
  • Beyond 500 GB: $5.2/GB
  • Automatically upgrades to the next tier after 750 GB

c. Professional Plan

  • Up to 1 TB: $2,999/month
  • Beyond 1 TB: $5/GB

Monthly Service Fee Breakdown

  1. Database Storage & Indexing
    • What It Covers: Continuous indexing of on-chain data—from blocks and transactions to event logs, governance info, and NFTs—so users can reliably access both real-time and historical records.
    • Why It Matters: As chain activity increases, so does data volume. By tying fees to storage needs, we accurately account for the costs of scaling infrastructure (e.g., additional database capacity).
  2. Network Egress Bandwidth
    • What It Covers: The outgoing traffic required to serve user requests quickly and consistently, including API calls, UI data retrieval, and integrations with third-party tools.
    • Why It Matters: A stable, high-bandwidth connection ensures that explorers, wallets, and dApps receive timely data responses, even during peak activity.
  3. Monitoring & DevOps
    • What It Covers: Round-the-clock health checks, internal alert pipelines, CI/CD automation, and system auditing. This includes running multiple nodes, maintaining synchronization, and ensuring high availability.
    • Why It Matters: These processes help detect issues early (e.g., node crashes, indexer slowdowns) and streamline updates or deployments, minimizing service disruption for the community.
  4. Node Status Monitoring & Notifications
    • What It Covers: Dedicated tools and alert mechanisms to track the real-time status of network nodes—particularly those relating to the Kusama Relay Chain and the associated parachains (Assethub, Coretime, Bridgehub, People).
    • Why It Matters: Quick notifications enable parachain teams, validators, and the wider ecosystem to react rapidly to performance changes, forks, or potential security incidents.
  5. Technical Support & Troubleshooting
    • What It Covers: Responsive assistance for users, developers, and validators, including issue resolution, feature guidance, and integration help.
    • Why It Matters: Timely support keeps the ecosystem running smoothly and fosters a positive development environment—especially crucial for teams building dApps, explorers, and automation tools.

Why We Use Storage as a Pricing Metric

Correlation to Real Costs:
Storage growth scales directly with block production and transaction activity, making it a more stable and predictable metric than raw API traffic. As chain activity evolves, storage becomes the clearest and most consistent indicator of the underlying infrastructure load required to maintain long-term historical data.

Subscan Baseline:
Subscan determines the appropriate fee tier based on the median storage consumption measured during the billing period. For example, for the Q3–Q4 2025 billing cycle, the baseline storage usage is derived from data recorded on September 30th.

Predictable Billing:
Basing fees on storage reduces the volatility caused by sudden traffic spikes and ensures a more transparent, usage-based cost model for both the community and the treasury.

Beyond Storage: The Full Cost Landscape

Our pricing also incorporates the broader operational overhead required to run a production-grade, high-availability data service—such as cloud infrastructure, network acceleration, monitoring systems, node providers, and Subscan’s ongoing engineering and support efforts.

Because these components fluctuate dynamically based on cloud regions, traffic patterns, redundancy requirements, and security considerations, they cannot be broken down into a stable or meaningful line-item list. In addition, some of these details involve sensitive architectural and security-related information that should not be fully disclosed publicly in order to preserve system robustness and reduce attack surface.

For these reasons, Subscan adopts a service-fee-based pricing model, which is consistent with industry practices used by major explorer and indexing providers. Pegging the service fee to storage usage strikes the right balance between:

  • transparent and verifiable metrics (storage is measurable on-chain and externally),
  • predictable treasury budgeting, and
  • preserving the flexibility and sustainability necessary to maintain and upgrade a mission-critical public data infrastructure.

This model also enables Subscan to invest continuously in optimization and long-term cost reduction—ensuring that infrastructure improvements directly translate into better performance and lower overall fees for the ecosystem over time.

Fee Details

2025 Q3 & Q4 Maintenance Fee

 

Network Actual Usage/GB Date Package Fees/Month Billing Period Fees
Kusama 4236.9 30/09/2025 Professional 19063 Q3 & Q4: 01/07/2025-31/12/2025 114378
AssetHub-Kusama 341.96 30/09/2025 Basic+ 1546 Q3 & Q4: 01/07/2025-31/12/2025 9276
Coretime-Kusama 93.14 30/09/2025 Basic 799 Q3 & Q4: 01/07/2025-31/12/2025 4794
BridgeHub-Kusama 313.12 30/09/2025 Basic 1397 Q3 & Q4: 01/07/2025-31/12/2025 8382
People-Kusama 88.89 30/09/2025 Basic 799 Q3 & Q4: 01/07/2025-31/12/2025 4794
  • Total Maintenance Fees for 2025 Q3 & Q4 (5 networks): USD 141,624

Why Kusama’s Fee Is Higher Than Other Chains

Kusama Relay Chain currently exceeds 4 TB of indexed data. This is primarily the result of long-term historical accumulation and the high density of chain activity. The key technical factors driving the large storage footprint include:

1. Long network lifespan and full historical retention

Kusama is one of the earliest and longest-running networks in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Its extended operational history results in a significantly larger volume of blocks, extrinsics, events, and state transitions.
Subscan preserves complete historical data without pruning, ensuring full auditability and long-term access for developers, explorers, governance tools, and research.

2. Increasing data complexity over time

As runtime modules, governance logic, asset operations, and state transition models have evolved, the structure and richness of on-chain events have grown substantially.
This results in more complex data schemas and heavier indexing requirements for historical blocks.

3. High density of XCM-related activity

Kusama carries some of the most experimental and active XCM traffic in the entire ecosystem.
The large number of cross-chain messages and event records generates:

  • substantially more event data,
  • more complex event-linking requirements, and
  • larger historical datasets that must be preserved to maintain auditability.

This XCM-heavy traffic is a major contributor to the relay chain’s significantly larger storage footprint compared to individual parachains.

Optimization & Cost Reduction Roadmap

(Already operational on Westend testnet and gradually rolling out across the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems, with quantifiable cost-reduction results to be reflected in billing beginning Q1 2026.)

To mitigate long-term storage growth and reduce operational costs—particularly for the Kusama relay chain—we are executing several structural optimization initiatives. These include efforts to reduce reliance on GCP and lower total cost of ownership.

1. Hot/Cold storage separation

We are segmenting frequently accessed data into high-performance storage tiers while moving older blocks and events into cost-efficient archival layers.
This significantly reduces the cost of maintaining multi-terabyte historical datasets.

2. XCM-focused indexing optimizations

Given that XCM events represent a major portion of Kusama’s data weight, we are optimizing:

  • event-linking logic,
  • redundant index structures, and
  • cross-chain reference mappings.

These adjustments reduce long-term index growth without affecting query accuracy.

3. Reduced reliance on GCP (major cost-efficiency initiative)

To optimize long-term infrastructure costs, we are:

  • migrating certain storage layers to lower-cost object-storage providers,
  • reducing GCP I/O operations via caching and pre-aggregation strategies,
  • gradually shifting parts of the system toward self-hosted or hybrid infrastructure.

These changes directly address one of the largest cost drivers in the current operational model.

Long-Term Sustainability & Vision Our long-term goal is to reduce reliance on treasury funding through multiple channels:

  • Continuous optimization to limit infrastructure costs as chain data grows.
  • Exploring responsible revenue streams (e.g., optional premium features or partnerships).
  • Actively incorporating community suggestions to ensure value delivery aligns with user needs, increasing platform utility and potential monetization avenues without compromising openness or neutrality.

🔥 2026 Cost Outlook (Infrastructure Optimization Based)

Subscan’s goal is to deliver high-quality infrastructure services with stable performance, predictable budgeting, and cost-efficient pricing, while also offering additional discounts for prepaid commitments.

As our ongoing optimization continues, Subscan expects to introduce more favorable and more predictable pricing in Q1 2026, including:

  • A more standardized pricing structure across networks and services
  • Improved cost efficiency at higher usage levels
  • Additional incentives for annual/prepaid subscriptions

BASIC PLAN

  • $799 / Month
  • Includes 500 GB / Month
  • Up to ~52% lower total cost vs previous pricing at high usage

ADVANCED PLAN

  • $1,699 / Month
  • Includes 1 TB / Month
  • Up to ~43% lower total cost vs previous pricing at high usage

CUSTOM PLAN

  • Tailored pricing based on usage
  •  ~33% lower total cost vs previous pricing at high usage

Annual Payment Network Discounts (Stackable)

  • Mainnet: 10% off
  • Canary: 25% off
  • Testnet: 40% off

2026 Estimated Annual Cost (Updated Pricing + Testnet Annual Discount)

Network / Service Plan Monthly Fee (USD) Annual Billing Discount Annual Fee (USD)
Kusama Custom 10,000 25% 90000
Kusama Trace Service (Optional) Custom 4,000 25% 36000
AssetHub (Kusama) Advanced (Up to 1 TB/month) 1,699 25% 15291
AssetHub (Kusama) Trace Service (Optional)（This is a new feature and has not yet been officially implemented.） Custom 2,000 25% 18000
Coretime (Kusama) Basic (Up to 500 GB/month) 799 25% 7191
BridgeHub (Kusama) Basic (Up to 500 GB/month) 799 25% 7191
People (Kusama) Basic (Up to 500 GB/month) 799 25% 7191

Based on the current scope and configuration, the estimated Total Annual Fee (USD) for 2026 is: 180,864.

Please note that this amount is provided for 2026 cost forecasting purposes only, and is intended to support an evaluation of the long-term sustainability of the service. We welcome further discussion on the most suitable payment structure and scope adjustments, including:

  • Whether annual billing is preferred (with applicable discounts)
  • After the AssetHub migration, whether the positioning and service scope of AssetHub should be updated
  • Whether to enable additional AssetHub Trace functionality, if required
  • Whether to disable Relay Chain Trace to optimize cost efficiency

Subscan will prepare the 2026 service proposal based on the community’s feedback and preferred direction.

Total Requested Amount

The total requested amount for all 5 networks, including all maintenance, operational overhead, and mandatory compatibility work, is USD 141,624. This request will be submitted in KSM, converted based on the 7-day average price at the time of on-chain submission.

Conclusion
Subscan has evolved alongside Kusama since its inception, serving as the "window" into the network’s data. As we move into the second half of 2025, this proposal is not just a request for funding, but a commitment to maintaining the gold standard of data transparency for the Kusama ecosystem.

Why This Proposal Deserves Your Support:

  • Ensuring Ecosystem Continuity: Subscan serves as a reliable data backbone for governance, staking, and XCM tracking. Our goal is to ensure that developers, validators, and users have uninterrupted access to high-fidelity data, preventing any friction in decision-making or daily operations during critical network upgrades.
  • A Bridge to Lower Costs: While this Q3-Q4 proposal follows the established pricing model to ensure service continuity, it serves as the final transition period. The technical optimizations we are implementing now (such as the Westend pilot) are the direct foundation for the significantly reduced 2026 pricing tiers.
  • Efficiency First: We have proactively addressed the high storage costs of the Kusama Relay Chain through hot/cold data separation and GCP optimization. Our commitment is to ensure that as Kusama grows, the cost of its infrastructure does not scale linearly, but becomes more efficient over time.
  • Unmatched Maintenance: This funding covers the rigorous, behind-the-scenes work of adapting to constant runtime upgrades and new feature—ensuring that when the network evolves, the tools the community relies on don't break.

Summary of Commitment

Subscan is more than a block explorer; it is a public good. By supporting this proposal, the Kusama Treasury is investing in the reliability and accessibility of the network's data. We remain open to community feedback regarding the 2026 roadmap and are dedicated to delivering a more cost-effective, high-performance service in the coming year.

We invite the community to review our track record of consistent delivery and support this proposal to keep Kusama's data infrastructure robust and reliable.

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