BIP-65 Infrastructure Funding Extension and Cap Adjustment for April 2024 - September 2024

Intro:

For three 6-month cycles the Beethoven X DAO treasury has maintained a capped infrastructure cost funding (BIP-23, BIP-36 and BIP-41) for the protocol. Through this the treasury covers the infrastructure costs associated with the operation of beets.fi. This proposal seeks to continue this funding arrangement. The funding for infrastructure will be capped at $4500 USDC per month, a slight increase, allowing us to be better prepared if the market conditions continue reflecting the positive developments in bringing down infrastructure costs over the duration of the funding arrangement. In addition, we will need to migrate our subgraphs to the graphs decentralized network which is no longer free to use and Stellate prices will increase.

Motivation:

Infrastructure is critical for the availability of the beets.fi services and costs are directly related to the amount of trading, traffic and requests needed to be served.

The market being slow through the summer of 2023 and into Q4, is visible on the graph below and reflects less requests needing to be served. The momentum shift into 2024 and increased activity on Fantom and Optimism is also reflected. While we remain well below the infrastructure cap we propose to lift the cap to $4.5k which will cover higher load on our infrastructure plus additional cost incurred by The Graph’s decentralized network which will no longer be free. In addition, our caching provider Stellate will also raise their prices by 50% starting from May. It is hard for us to estimate how much additional cost this will incur, but we’ll try our best to keep it as low as possible.

In 2023 the joint development of the backend infrastructure together with Balancer commenced and with the integration of the Balancer chains into the backend infrastructure, it was decided that the infrastructure will be hosted in Balancer's AWS account. Therefore, the cost of this needed not be carried by Beethoven X DAO allowing us to decrease the cap from $7.5k monthly to $2.5k. Below you can see that the migration of the infrastructure in June and July resulted in a significant drop in expenses.

Since the infrastructure is now running under Balancer’s AWS account, it is likely that Beethoven X DAO will be asked to pay a share of the cost, proportional to our usage. This proposal will be resubmitted / amended as and when this occurs. Regardless, the infrastructure consolidation helps reduce cost overall and should remain below the pre-consolidation levels, relative to the activity, for Beethoven.

Risks:

Potential risks of cost inflation due to unpredictable factors like surges in user traffic continue to exist. In case of such overspends, separate proposals will be presented for community approval.

Impacts and Specification:

Treasury will shoulder the new monthly infrastructure cost cap of $4500.

Impact on Previous BIPs: This BIP serves as an extension and modification of the most recent BIP that concludes in March 2024.

Team: No impact.

Tokenomics: None

Other Committees Recognized by the DAO: None.

Execution Plan:

The DAO treasury will cover the infrastructure costs up to a maximum of $4500 per month for the next six months, starting in April 2024 and ending in September 2024. This represents a potential maximum expenditure of $27,000 for this period.