Subsquid - Public data indexing Infrastructure for Polkadot and Kusama (Q1 2023)

Proponent: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Beneficiary: Subsquid Lab Official - 13bfKSQXoBn3AMLtZaW6BKv797fqZzsD3PYF6xpJDir3tdoE

Contact Details: Subsquid Labs GmbH, 6302 Zug, Switzerland - [email protected]

Short description: Ongoing development and maintenance costs for public Subsquid Archives and the Giant Squid API

Archive raw data: Archive Infrastructure Metrics - January, February, March

Giant Squid raw data: Giant Squid Infrastructure Metrics - January, February, March

Requested DOT: 37196.65 DOT + 12683.35 DOT = 49880.0 DOT = $ 224,460.03

Previous proposals: https://kusama.subsquare.io/treasury/proposal/280

Motivation

A) Archives

Archives are an important piece of Polkadot and Kusama data infrastructure provided by Subsquid. They provide access to on-chain data in GraphQL format for all major parachains on Kusama and Polkadot, with more chains getting support as the ecosystem grows. They are being used as a data source for Squids and for efficient data exploration and ad-hoc queries. An up-to-date list of Archives is kept in a public Archive Registry.

All archives can be accessed and queried via an web intuitive GraphiQL interface and are often used as developer friendly replacement of a block explorer.

For example, here’s a query for the last ten transfers on Kusama blockchain run against the Kusama Archive endpoint.

Over first Quarter of 2023 we've provided a free public data indexing service for ~94 Substrate blockchains (some archives have been dismissed, new ones have been added), so that everyone interested in the projects can publicly access indexed data on Substrate Events, Extrinsics, Storage Items and EVM logs. Here are projects (parachains and mainnets aiming for future parachains slots) we currently support:

• kusama
• polkadot
• moonbase
• gemini_2a_testnet
• rococo
• khala
• astar
• moonriver
• crust
• moonbeam
• karura
• equilibrium
• shiden
• kilt
• bifrost
• statemine
• aleph_zero
• heiko
• acala
• robonomics
• aleph_zero_testnet
• calamari
• kintsugi
• parallel
• shibuya
• phala
• sora
• basilisk
• statemint
• interlay
• litmus
• origin_trail
• bitcountry_pioneer
• integritee
• clover
• picasso
• altair
• bifrost_polkadot
• centrifuge
• hydradx
• subsocial
• efinity
• tanganika
• t0rn
• cere
• litentry
• composable
• bajun
• invarch_tinkernet
• amplitude
• imbue
• foucoco
• phala
• dorafactory
• pichiu
• kabocha
• darwinia
• gmordie
• snow
• frequency_testnet
• peaq
• elysium_testnet
• gear_testnet
• reef
• collectives
• frequency
• pangolin
• myriad
• elysium
• ternoa
• soonsocial
• crab
• myriad_testnet
• polkadex
• kylin
• reef_testnet
• tidechain
• pendulum
• hashed
• joystream
• gear_testnet
• darwinia_2
• mangata_x
• mangata
• polymesh
• nodle
• reef_testnet
• automata
• lagoon
• crust_shadow
• agung
• kico
• gemini_3a_testnet
• mars

B) Giant Squid
Giant Squid is a set of open-source GraphQL APIs built with Squid SDK and maintained by Subsquid Labs. The APIs cover the most commonly used data for Pokadot, Kusama and a growing list of major parachains and is used by explorers (such as Calamar) and wallets (e.g. SubWallet).

The Giant Squid currently consists of two families of endpoints outlined below. The API endpoints for each network and the current status are available at the Status page.

Explorer API. The endpoint URLs follow the convention https://squid.subsquid.io/gs-explorer-${network}/graphql. Support queries on:

• Blocks
• Events
• Extrinsics
• Calls

Statistics API. The endpoint URLs follow the convention https://squid.subsquid.io/gs-stats-${network}/graphql. Support queries on:

• Validator/Collator data
• Account balances
• Staking statistics
• Nomination pools statistics
• Transfers statistics
• Extrinsic statistics

Achievements

• Launched Giant Squid as a public API service for the community to explore relay and parachain statistics
• Powering ≈ 360 projects in Q1 2023 ( ≈ 500 as of May 2023) including substrate and evm
• Deployed new archives, expanding the list of available networks to 95 (increasing by 200%)

Statistics and data

Over the course of Q1 2023:

• Served a total of 162,509,254.3 (~162.5 million) queries to the substrate based archives in Q1 2023
• Served ~54m monthly archive requests for substrate based archives and ~ 400m monthly archive requests in total including EVM Archives
• The highest daily total responses have been 2.3m in a single 24 hour period for substrate and 12.3m including EVM Archives
• The daily queries confirm a growing trend, only partly due to the deployment of new Archives (which initially are not very busy)

Giant Squid is a new service, and has been launched in mid-January, here are two charts showing its quick adoption by the community, as an index of its success:

Costing

This proposal includes the combined costs for running Giant Squid and Archives for Polkadot, Kusama and their Parachains,which amounts to a total of 49880.0 DOT. Raw data for Archives can be seen here. Raw data for Giant Squid can be seen here.

The proposal is submitted towards the Polkadot treasury. Here is a summary of the running costs for Archives, in a tabular format:

Giant Squid running costs:

You can read the full report here.