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At TOKEN2049, OnFinality and Google Cloud announced their support for two community-backed initiatives to empower developers to build, launch, and scale interconnected decentralised applications (dApps) on the Polkadot network. To advance the growth of emergent parachains and the overall maturity of the Polkadot ecosystem, the first initiative will reduce the complexity and cost associated with blockchain node infrastructure management while the second initiative will help power large-scale blockchain analytics capabilities.

Launched by Web3 Foundation in 2020 and now managed by its community via on-chain governance, Polkadot is a blockspace ecosystem uniting a network of interoperable, use-case specific blockchains called parachains (parallel chains). Polkadot facilitates secure cross-chain transfers of any data or asset, enabling the development of applications and services that span multiple parachains. Polkadot provides several benefits to Web3 innovators, including security, flexibility, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and fast time-to-market.

Parachains are built using the modular and flexible Substrate framework, allowing developers to customize the components (e.g., network stack, consensus model, transaction format, governance method) best suited to the needs of their use case. This includes any Web3 use case, from decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to digital wallets, social media applications, gaming applications, Web3 infrastructure services, and much more.

OnFinality Provides High Performance Public Infrastructure for the Polkadot Ecosystem

Under the first initiative, OnFinality is providing enterprise-level blockchain infrastructure and tooling support that is funded by the Polkadot treasury and built on Google Cloud for all 40+ Polkadot parachains. With equitable funding from the treasury to cover common good infrastructure provided by OnFinality’s Ultimate API Service (i.e., provision of high performance Remote Procedure Call or RPC endpoints, including archive and trace nodes), developers can seamlessly create and connect their dApps on and across parachains without incurring excessive DevOps and infrastructure management overhead. In the immediate term, this helps promising yet emergent parachains to continue meeting the needs of their independent communities.

Ensuring Cost-Efficiency with Google Cloud

To ensure that this initiative is cost-efficient for the Polkadot treasury, OnFinality has selected Google Cloud as the primary cloud provider to power its Ultimate API Service. By hosting this service on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), OnFinality can leverage GKE’s serverless, dynamic autoscaling, distributed load balancing, and health monitoring capabilities to concurrently manage all 40+ parachain networks, keep up with constantly changing request volumes, and meet its service level targets of 99.99 percent uptime. GKE’s best-in-class autoscaling features, in particular, helps OnFinality optimise costs and pass on its savings to the Polkadot treasury.

Unifying Processes and Tools

In the longer term, OnFinality has proposed setting up a Parachain Infrastructure Bounty with more than 10 other solution providers to deliver provider-agnostic common good infrastructure for all active Polkadot parachains. The goal is to make the ecosystem more harmonious, unify processes and tools, speed up development progress, and help all new parachain teams kick-start their projects.

James Bayly, Chief Operating Officer at OnFinality, said: “OnFinality has been the trusted launch partner for more than 40 Polkadot parachains. As a result of the prolonged winter, many parachain teams have requested for help to cover the operating expenses of RPC endpoint services, which we’ve managed to provide at no cost to the best of our abilities. We’re humbled to now be entrusted with funding from the Polkadot treasury to support all parachains.”

He added: “This level of ecosystem support reaffirms Polkadot’s reputation as one of the most developer-friendly ecosystems and a top choice for appchain builders when deciding which layer 0 to build in. With Google Cloud proving to be the best option for running our full suite of services in a cost-optimized, automated, and highly reliable way, we look forward to making more contributions to Polkadot, such as providing RPC support for the upcoming Polkadot Data Alliance.”

Polkadot Data Alliance to Deliver Aggregated On-Chain and Cross-Chain Analytics

Building on the first initiative, the second initiative involves establishing a Polkadot Data Alliance. This involves building and maintaining Dotlake, a scalable common data platform that democratizes access to on-chain and cross-chain analytics for data users in and beyond the Polkadot ecosystem. Powered by Google Cloud’s data management capabilities, such as Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, and Workflows, Dotlake will allow users to more easily and accurately assess the value, health, and potential of the Polkadot ecosystem and benchmark it against other ecosystems.

Third-party data experts have been enlisted from the community to facilitate and guide this initiative to ensure transparency, that engineering best practices are being applied, and that the initiative delivers high quality data solutions. OnFinality is leveraging the community’s complete support for the Polkadot network to provide the trace RPC API endpoints necessary to populate the data platform.

Enabling Resource-Limited Parachains

To facilitate all on-chain data from the Polkadot ecosystem becoming available for public consumption, a treasury-funded Polkadot Data Alliance Bounty has been set up to provide underrepresented and resource-limited parachains with Google Cloud’s secure data hosting infrastructure services and OnFinality’s universal data indexing support. To avoid redundancy and unnecessary costs, the alliance will also use existing data solutions—such as the Colorful Notion Substrate ETL project that has already indexed data from over 70 parachains—as well as open source data formats and services.

There are further plans for the alliance to offer shared community data visualisation and reporting dashboards on top of Dotlake—with common metric definitions and computations, support for exporting the data to other known analytics platforms (e.g., Nansen, Dune Analytics), and educational materials to reduce knowledge gaps around working with Substrate and Cross-Consensus Message Format (XCM) data.

Mitesh Agarwal, Managing Director, Solutions and Technology, Asia Pacific, at Google Cloud, said: “Web3 companies continue to build on Google Cloud because of the scalability, security, and sustainability of our enterprise-grade infrastructure and developer-friendly platform. As new industry use cases emerge, we’re focused on working with global organizations like Polkadot and OnFinality—who also serve a community of parachain builders in this region—to enhance the resilience of foundational layers, deliver high-quality on-chain and cross-chain datasets for easy analysis, and facilitate faster access to dApps for users.”

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