Joshua
Background and Data (Quantification)
1. Explain the context of the problem and how it is challenging for the persona to achieve their impact.
Parachain builders struggle on many aspects from prototyping their first Runtime, making the Runtime production-ready, winning a Parachain auction, running DevOps for collators, and much more. There are both strong complaints about this externally from the Polkadot forum and also within the Parity forum. As @gautamdhameja estimates on the back of envelope, a custom parachain costs around $4.7 million for the first year and $3.8 million for ongoing maintenance.
In particular this user story focuses on the challenges for DevOps:
  • Limited DevOps expertise:
    Polkadot SDK is used primarily for Runtime engineers who are skilled in the knowledge of distributed systems and cryptography. The skillset of a Runtime engineer does not necessarily come with DevOps knowledge. This may become a barrier to small engineering teams who just want to work on the code not the infrastructure and may need to recruit or hire an additional team member for DevOps - incurring additional cost.
  • Repeated DevOps activities from teams:
    To execute a good DevOps strategy (for eg. managing boot nodes for collators, performing CI/CD, performing server monitoring, and hosting DApps and interfaces) will incur additional costs both in time and money. These activities will be similar among every team which could benefit from consolidation. Furthermore, to optimize costs, teams often find themselves doing similar activities for DevOps efficiency improvements that would have been best left to the subject matter experts.
2. Share the state of existing solutions to solve the problem at hand
There are managed services solutions offered by OnFinality, SenseiNode, Zeeve, and 10Clouds.
These solutions make infrastructure as a service (IAAS) much more accessible however the follow features are still lacking:
  • Difficult for Prototyping:
    One-click deployment of existing Parachain and Polkadot node binaries but not for prototyping a new chain
  • Lacking of runtime templates
    - would mean you need to manually customize and compile a new binary from scratch to load within their platform
Recent work done by Tanssi has proven that through the use of Runtime Templates deployed on a one-click platform, parachain teams are able to accomplish a proof-of-concept on what would have been originally months, to be completed in weeks (in some cases hours). At the time of writing they have at least 100 teams interested in leveraging their platform to deploy appchains / parachains when they are production live.
The following are the benefits,
  • Ready-made Parachain Templates:
    Currently there are 2 templates - EVM template and Polkadot SDK Node template with new node templates being created and audited by OpenZeppelin underway.
  • Collation-as-a-service:
    Tanssi runs a network that offers physical node hardware (incentivized by their native token) to permissionlessly act as collators on behalf of all teams that use their platform.
  • Potential Cost Leadership:
    Because of the permissionless nature of node infrastructure provisioning (incentivized by native token rewards), node providers participate in providing infrastructure from anywhere in the world without restriction and be driven by market forces to the cheapest infrastructure sources.
However, some limitations persist in Tanssi's platform,
  • Opinionated construction of collator set:
    As the platform is permissionless in terms of node provider participation, teams who use their platform have limited control of who would be part of the collator set. This can impact their desirability for enterprise use cases who are careful about their collator set (eg. Industry consortiums).
  • Second-order Protocol/Tokenomics Risk:
    Teams who build their network on top of Tassi's network will inherit the protocol risk that is inherent with Tanssi and subject to the pricing Tanssi's business model that maybe tied with their native token. In the event that Tanssi can no longer provide the services from its network, teams are vulnerable to a scenario where they are left with no collators supporting their parachain. This problem can be alleviated with competing providers to Tanssi.
Beyond the Polkadot ecosystem, the IaC trend is happening in Layer-2 scaling solutions. With a combination of Rollup SDKs, Data Availability chains, and multiple execution layers for settlement and consensus, (in-particular sovereign rollups or validiums) the Layer-2 ecosystem will becoming more competitive and accessible over time for blockchain development and deployment.
It is important that the Polkadot ecosystem is able to provide cost leadership for blockchain deployment that is cheapest in terms to time, cost, and manpower.
The opportunity persists in Polkadot to encourage more one-click node template deployment providers and foster a competitive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) services market for production-ready runtimes where builders are spoilt for choice both in the use of pre-audited runtime templates as well as DevOps platform providers giving the best pricing available.
3. Support with estimate numbers that justify the potential upside (savings / increase revenue / tech improvements etc) based
As of the time of writing, Tanssi reflects at least 100+ teams have applied to use one-click-deployment container chains. That is 4X the size of the Substrate Builders Program pipeline that is focused on custom pallets and custom parachains rather than templates for deployment.
Just for Tanssi alone with 100 project chains, this reflects in savings of $44.5 million.
As Polkadot scales to 1000 cores and assuming a conservative 25% adoption of one-click-deployment (250 projects), a $445k in savings per project is equivalent to $111.25 million in annual savings for the ecosystem.
As a caveat to this savings number, it does not mean that the money which was saved means more money for the ecosystem. In reality, because of this high hurdle of costs, many of these projects would have otherwise not been possible to go to production. Think of the headline number as the barrier cost for growing Polkadot's ecosystem that can be avoided.