GIP-75: Should GnosisDAO retroactively fund POKT-powered Public RPC endpoints for Gnosis Chain pruned and Gnosis Chain archival?

https://forum.gnosis.io/t/gip-75-should-gnosisdao-retroactively-fund-pokt-powered-public-rpc-endpoints-for-gnosis-chain-pruned-and-gnosis-chain-archival/6363

Summary

Pocket Network is a decentralized, middleware protocol focused on the RPC layer. Our goal is to provide blockchain application developers with a privacy-preserving, multi-chain gateway on top of the Pocket Network protocol that allows dapp developers to mint reliable, fast RPC endpoints for the 40+ blockchain networks supported, including both Gnosis Chain pruned and Gnosis Chain archival.

Over the last month, Gnosis Chain has carved the number 2 spot in terms of requests per day at 195M daily avgerage requests according to POKTscan!

Abstract

By sponsoring a pokt-powered Public Gnosis Chain RPC endpoint, GnosisDAO and Pocket Network would continue to contribute to the decentralization, increased resiliency, and censorship-resistance of the Gnosis Chain network. All the while, continuing to incentivize Gnosis Chain node runners with $POKT tokens for serving Gnosis dapps.

Public RPCs are a public good, we hope to share in the responsibility together with the GnosisDAO of maintaining these high-quality public goods on behalf of Gnosis Chain users. The Pocket Network team and community have been a long-time supporters of the Gnosis Chain.

We’re proud to continue supporting Gnosis!

Motivation

The current set of Gnosis Relay Chain IDs (RCIs) we suport are:

Gnosis Chain = 0027 (mainnet) Gnosis Chain Archival = 000C (mainnet)

The POKTdao allowlisted Gnosis Chain (0027) on 07/06/21, with Gnosis Chain Archival (000C) shortly after on 08/26/21). Since the allowlist date, Pocket node operators earned 55.6M POKT from servicing over 38.9B Gnosis Chain mainnet read/write requests.

See this spreadsheet for a breakdown of relays drive and POKT earned:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13q-hebfwWOCeQbWGuAeclOyu5MQk-m-YHot60Kjd94I/edit?usp=sharing

Over that time, these Gnosis RCIs developed to become one of the more populated, stable, and higher-performant pools of nodes. Our network of node runners easily handled several spikes, including a big spike to 243.6M requests on a single day recently in JAN 2023.

According to POKTscan, there are currently 22,379 Pocket Service Nodes pointing to Gnosis Full Nodes for the 0027 Relay Chain ID and 2,561 Pocket Service Nodes pointing to Gnosis Archive Nodes for the 000C Relay Chain ID. This demonstrates the POKT node incentives at work!

The POKTdao supported node deployment solutions through funding grants such as Node Pilot and DappNode to make it super easy to spin up and monetize Gnosis full/archival nodes within the Pocket Network protocol.

Rationale

Pocket Network Inc. staked POKT on behalf of the GnosisDAO to subsizie a public good in the form of public RPC endpoints (available in the Gnosis Chain docs) without rate limits:

https://gnosischain-rpc.gateway.pokt.network https://gnosischain-archival-rpc.gateway.pokt.network

We’ve simplified our model this year to mirror a traditional SaaS-like tiered structure, which is much more affordable. To sweeten the deal, we are offering the Gnosis DAO team and community a massive discount on a 200M requests per day throughput on a 1-year commitment with the option to renew on an annual basis:

$135,997 USD for 200M Requests Per Day on a 1-year Contract (i.e. next 12 months)

That represents 4.8x in savings (a 480% discount) compared to the original offer!

In case a buffer is wanted/needed, as traffic continues to grow, we’d like to extend another option to purchase additional bandwidth at the discounted price of $0.0000018640 per request throughout the contract period.

Public RPCs are a public good, we hope to share in the responsibility together with the GnosisDAO of maintaining these high-quality public goods on behalf of Gnosis Chain users.

The GnosisDAO will be able to monitor and manage the public RPCs through our Pocket Portal as they see fit, including the ability to enable additional security features such as allowlisting user-agents, origins, smart contracts, and methods.

Implementation (Completed)

In return, Pocket Network agrees to these milestones and deliverables:

If we are unsuccessful in our proposal to secure retroactive funding, PNI will continue to support the Gnosis Chain network; however, in an effort to do so sustainably, we would introduce per second rate limits on the Public RPC that would channel users and developers to our paid tier in the Pocket Portal where costs would be passed on directly to Gnosis builders outside the free tier of 250k requests per day.

Payment Schedule

Payment Dates & Amount Due Upon Proposal Passing 50% = $67,998.50 USD Upon Milestone Completion 50% = $67,998.50 USD Total 100% = $135,997 USD

PNI prefers payment in stablecoins, such as USDC or DAI, at this provided address -> 0x5F1Feefc4BB7a414096cCF070BeEF94da8Ff88A6