As the Stellar Network grows, we’ve seen an increased number of projects reach out to us to provide a critical piece to future trustless services – such as trustless key recovery for users of the “Bean App” (a SCF round 10 winner). Similarly, the SDF has been encouraging a potential Public Node role in Allbridge’s trust-minimized cross-chain bridge. We expect similar opportunities will only grow with the introduction of Soroban.

Any funds received from SCF round 12 will be used to expand our stellar-supporting hardware, implement ongoing trustless opportunities, and seek out new partnerships and methods to provide trust-minimized services to developers using Stellar.

Public Node was a winner in Round 3 of the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) - three years ago. We have operated continuously since that time. Our stated 2020 SCF goals were to "become a Tier 1 node provider" and to "start pursuing official nonprofit status." We accomplished both goals and more.

We received our 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization determination letter from the United States Internal Revenue Service on March 11, 2020. For three years and counting, we consistently demonstrated our ability to provide reliable validation of the Stellar Network (verifiable with Stellarbeat.io) and earned our place among Stellar’s Tier 1 validators in March of 2022. In addition to operating some of the Stellar Networks most reliable validator nodes, we also run one of the only publicly accessible Horizon end points - a critical and often overlooked component of being a decentralized and accessible blockchain network. In fact, several projects building on Stellar (including members of SDF's very own Stellar Quest team) have found our Horizon endpoint to be preferred over even SDF’s Horizon endpoint for certain tasks and for being “very handy in avoiding rate limits.”

Establish a plan to make our Horizon end-point more robust and used. The first deliverable will be an initial assessment of our current hardware setup compared to a potential alternative setup.

Steps taken:

1) Create a configuration for a two server Horizon setup.

2) Crosswalk that configuration with available hardware options across various hardware providers.

3) Create a schematic that illustrates Public Node's current Horizon hardware setup compared to the potential two-server alternative as grounded in the market availability of servers.

4) Upgrade the storage capability on Public Node's server used to monitor performance and provide trustless API services.

5) Complete integration of the production API used in the Beans App SEP-30 solution. Host a developer staging ground for the Beans App SEP-30 solution on Public Node's server used to provide trustless API services.

Deliverables:

1, 2, and 3. Current Horizon setup compared to 2nd Horizon Endpoint Plan is viewable here: https://publicnode.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Public-Node-Horizon-Plan.pdf . We are also currently talking to Molly Karcher and Jesse Chen from SDF to evaluate this plan as well as problems solve our current configuration.

Migration from Hetzner to OVH is being considered given Hetzner's policy on using their servers for blockchain. OVH server configurations evaluated were found on this website: https://us.ovhcloud.com/bare-metal/prices/#filterType=range_element&filterValue=advance

4. Pyxis server was upgraded and loaded with SEP-30 api for production and development for Beans app. See here for OVH invoice of upgrade: https://publicnode.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Invoice_WE2957294.pdf

5. Both production and development instances of a SEP-30 api solution are running. Beans App is now stress testing the software and setup before implementing in as a service. Verifiable: https://beans.publicnode.org/ and https://beans.publicnode.org/.well-known/stellar.toml