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

The Lucky Friday team seeks 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.

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 support influential applications like Polkadot.js, Talisman, PolkaGate, Nova, and more.

The full proposal (available here) was posted for discussion (post 1934) on November 4, 2022, and has received very positive feedback, with 21 likes and 0 dislikes.

As outlined, we seek initial funding of $11,200 (402.95 KSM based on EMA7). Upon successful completion of milestones as set out in the proposal, we will report on our undertaking and provide details on load tests. We would then further engage for monthly recurring costs of $14,920 (requested quarterly).

Due to the extreme nature of recent market volatility, we understand that the requested KSM may fall short or exceed the dollar amount needed. If we fall short, we would like to include this amount in our following proposal to continue RPC service. If we are in excess, we will return the balance of funds to the treasury.