Abstract
Lucky Friday, a leading provider of bare metal infrastructure for numerous projects throughout the Polkadot ecosystem, requests quarterly funding of $1,500 from the Interlay Treasury to sustain and enhance our public RPC services. As the sole remaining public RPC provider actively supporting Interlay since the withdrawal of competitors like OnFinality and Dwellir in late 2023, we have ensured uninterrupted network accessibility, handling nearly 100,000 monthly requests with 99.99% uptime. This proposal outlines our proven track record, unique value proposition (USP) in enterprise-grade bare metal operations, and the critical role we've played in maintaining Interlay's decentralization and user adoption amid ecosystem challenges. Approval will secure long-term infrastructure resilience, enabling Interlay to continue its core DeFi innovations like Bitcoin-wrapped asset trading and lending.

Motivation
Interlay, as a Polkadot parachain pioneering Bitcoin DeFi, relies on robust RPC endpoints for dApp developers, wallet integrations, and user interactions. Reliable RPC services are foundational to network health—enabling seamless on-chain event subscriptions, transaction broadcasting, and data querying essential for protocols like Interlay's lending markets and cross-chain bridges. Moreover, as a long-term partner and valued preferred vault provider on both Kintsugi and Interlay, Lucky Friday has done its best to continue its support of the team and novel Bitcoin DeFi solution.

In late 2023, the Interlay community evaluated multiple RPC providers through open discussions, prioritizing redundancy, cost-efficiency, and decentralization. Providers like OnFinality and Dwellir secured initial funding for their services, with OnFinality demonstrating high request volumes (over 2.5 billion across Interlay and sister chain Kintsugi) and Dwellir emphasizing bare metal decentralization at ~$2,284 quarterly costs. However, by mid-2024, both ceased public operations for Interlay due to shifting priorities and bear market pressures, leaving a critical gap in public infrastructure.

During that time, Lucky Friday stepped in as the last dedicated public RPC provider, leveraging our Polkadot expertise to maintain service without interruption. Our continued support has sustained query volumes, and upheld Interlay's commitment to open access. As promised by our CTO Will (aka “Paradox”) two years ago, we were willing to provide this support for free for the first twelve months so that the Interlay community could compare our services and come to rely on unfettered access to Interlay through our public RPC endpoint. We have continued to support the chain for an additional year since that point, and are seeking a retroactive request of $6,000 for the full year and hope to bill the Interlay treasury moving forward on a quarterly basis at $1500 per quarter.

Background on Lucky Friday
Lucky Friday, now dba GlobalStake, specializes in institutional-grade bare metal staking and infrastructure for PoS networks, including Polkadot parachains like Interlay. We operate self-owned servers in Tier 4/5 data centers across Europe, North America, and Asia, ensuring jurisdictional decentralization and sub-50ms global latency.

Key differentiators from our operations:

• SOC 2 Type II Certified: Our infrastructure undergoes rigorous audits for security, availability, and confidentiality—exceeding typical RPC providers and aligning with enterprise DeFi standards.
• Carbon Negative Operations: We offset more emissions than produced, supporting Interlay's sustainable Bitcoin finance ethos.
• Bare Metal Excellence: Unlike cloud-dependent alternatives, our purpose-built hardware delivers 2x higher throughput and 99.999% uptime, tuned for Web3 workloads with ultra-low-latency backhaul.
• Proven Ecosystem Support: We power nodes for Avalanche, BNB, Cosmos, Ethereum, Polkadot, and Solana, processing billions in stake annually. For Polkadot specifically, we've supported numerous parachains with collators, RPCs, and in the case of Interlay and Kintsugi, being preferred vault operators/providers.
  Since Q3 2023, Lucky Friday has exclusively provided Interlay's public RPC endpoints with millions of requests with zero downtime incidents.

Though Prometheus only stores data for the last 90 days, it has processed over half a million requests during that timeframe, averaging 92,554 per month or just over 3000 requests per day.

These figures demonstrate our USP: Enterprise-grade bare metal has provided unmatched reliability, preventing the "single point of failure" risks highlighted in prior community polls. Where others faltered amid cost pressures, our multidisciplinary team (Wall Street finance, DoD security, DevOps experts) integrated disciplined operations to deliver superior risk-adjusted performance—translating to lower costs and maximum performance for the Interlay community.

Budget Request

Quarterly Funding: $1,500, covering bare metal hosting, bandwidth, monitoring, and support
Total for Past 12 Months: $6,000 (8,100,000 INTR at an average price of 0.00074)
Recipient Wallet Address: wdCwHNR2mSeytK9sKosBx3s9Wo53QwVTBvNJAmcKBRqECMufW
This pricing reflects economies from our global footprint and is competitive with historical benchmarks (e.g., Dwellir's $2,284 combined for Interlay/Kintsugi).

Renewal: Quarterly review tied to KPIs (e.g. uptime >99.99%).
By funding Lucky Friday, Interlay invests in the resilient backbone that has kept Bitcoin DeFi alive in the Polkadot ecosystem. We remain committed to the team and its community.

Proposer: Lucky Friday (dba GlobalStake) Team
Contact: [email protected]
Date: November 5th, 2025