Pay for Upgrade from Public to Private Polygon RPC (Alchemy)

Background

Until now, we’ve used https://polygon-rpc.com as our Polygon RPC. It's a free and public RPC provider for making calls to Polygon to retrieve data and submit transactions. While it gets the job done most of the time, it lacks support during node outages and other general slowdowns. Moreover, data returned can be a few blocks behind depending on which node we are routed to.

It became clear that at our current scale we need a private RPC provider with a dedicated channel that we can work with directly as issues arise and very low downtime. The Polygon Team recommended Alchemy, which has a great reputation and is used by other companies like OpenSea and Fortmatic at scale.

We have moved to Alchemy now, and we are seeing a decrease in latency for our Web3 calls and decreased downtime. We also expect this to provide a much more reliable way of querying blockchain data as their nodes are more up to date block-wise than the public RPC. The details and terms of service for our agreement can be found in the ‘Alchemy Offering’ section after the ‘Rationale’ section. The payment terms are one year paid upfront for $126,000, renewing annually.

Proposal

DG DAO treasury covers the cost of moving to the Alchemy Platform with Gold service level and Alchemy VIP Support out of the DAI Treasury.

Rationale

The deal with Alchemy is done and a ‘No’ vote would result in the DG Team covering the expense out of project runway as we’ve done with other expenses. There is precedent for the DG DAO covering expenses related to operations core to ICE Poker: The DAO covers wearable submission MANA costs out of the DAO per the 11/10/2021 proposal ‘DG DAO Funding ICE Wearable Submissions’ (IPFS #Qme1xWn).

Like wearable submissions, having a best-in-class RPC is needed for the growth and sustainability of the core business, ICE Poker. The project runway comes exclusively from selling vested $DG tokens to investors as all project revenue accrues to the DAO; whereas, funding from the DAO would come from the DAI Treasury. Over time, shifting expenses toward the DAO also decreases emission (inflation rate) on the $DG token.

Alchemy Offering

Alchemy Platform ● Alchemy Testnet APIs ● Alchemy Supernode for Mainnet ● Alchemy Notify ● Alchemy Monitor ● Alchemy Build ● Enhanced APIs and Websockets ● Custom Rate Limits ● Dashboard access (10 user licenses included)

Alchemy VIP Support ● Gold included ○ Email support ○ Real-time chat (Telegram) ○ Direct access to core engineers, product and executive team ○ Unlimited support tickets ○ Dedicated account manager