At the other end of the scale there are smart contracts which cost you the price of a transaction and then it’s all marketing and no running costs.
By the way, you have grossly underestimated the costs of running a parachain. Firstly any team running a product on their chain should also be running dev and quality chains, and if you want to run it as a correct professional setup, then you should consider that those networks match production.
You should also be running RPC nodes, and boot nodes not just validators, both of which require both capacity to handle many network connections, and front end app connections at scale - but most importantly monitoring and uptime is critical. Just as critical as your validators. So you will need to run servers collecting data from your nodes such as grafana, prometheus and Loki. More stuff, more cost.
All of these types of nodes are not small or cheap if you don’t want to have problems and costs start to ramp-up very quickly.
But that’s not all. You should also be looking at running or at least paying for the services such as block explorers and governance apps that connect to your chain and provide services to your community. Again, not a small commitment.
And I haven’t even began to touch on the costs of running a front-end application that sits on top of your blockchain - because without that you have no product at all.
These can range from simple web based UIs (you could store in IPFS) to more complex ones that provide other informational services such as databases, and off-chain p2p comms. Once you start to factor all that in (as we have done for our product) you are running at nearly $4000 per week, and that isn’t counting the cost of your team.
Running parachain is equally as expensive as running a solo chain IMHO, and that financial commitment should not be overlooked. When you compare that to the cost of creating a smart contract, you can see why this ecosystem has an issue attracting projects and developers.
I was aware that there were additional costs besides those for running the validators but I’m surprised that the validator costs comprise such a little fraction of the total costs for running the chain. Thank you for your insights!
Going a bit offtopic here: do you expect parachains to merge? E.g. hydra and equilibrium to become a single chain. Or Totem joining with a suitable partner to become a single chain to cut costs?
It will be difficult given contrasting cultures, resources and visions - but not impossible.
It makes more sense to aggregate talent into a single network and evolve more organically.
The fundamental mistake people have made is to pattern match Polkadot with Ethereum, assuming some similar level of maturity rather than appreciating the highly experimental nature of the tech.
This is probably where products like Tanssi can shine. Lowers costs and complexity barrier + all the advantages of being a Parachain and not a solo chain. What do you think?
