Pocket Network News - JULY 2020
Mainnet launches in 18 days on July 28th, Best Node Service Competition kicks off on Monday July 13th, AMA with Staking Hub scheduled on July 15th, and much more!
Launch Updates:
Pocket Mainnet launches on July 28th 🚀
The Genesis File has been finalized. Incentivized testnet participants that have locked in their accounts will receive their earned POKT tokens on the launch date.
We had roughly 150 individuals running over 500 nodes, making incentivized testnet a smashing success. Some of these nodes were run by high-profile staking firms and infrastructure providers, such as but not limited to Rivet, Simply VC, ChainFlow, Skillz, Stakin, and Figment Networks.
We are also excited to kick off a one week Best Node Service Competition!
This will ensure every incentivized testnet participant has the most hardened setups possible in preparation for mainnet while giving an opportunity for new entrants to run Pocket nodes and compete in earning POKT. It’s scheduled from 8 AM EST Monday, July 13th to 8 AM EST Monday, July 20th.
POKT will be awarded to those who prove they serve the most successful relays in that week. The rewards will be broken down into this:
🥇 150,000 POKT - to the single node who proves the most successful relays that week.
🥈 100,000 POKT - to the single node who proves the second most successful relays that week.
🥉 50,000 POKT - to the single node who proves the third most successful relays that week.
15,000 POKT will also be awarded to each node who achieves at least a 95% success rate on Pocket relays from our load tests (minimum 1 million relays served).
For more details, read this announcement and look for the #🥇🥈best-nodes-competition🥉🏅 channel on our Discord.
Developer Updates:
On June 30th, we released the latest protocol update Pocket Core RC-0.4.1.
It came with a ton of Quality of Life (QOL) improvements for node operators, such as increasing the number of consecutive blocks a node is allowed to miss to two before it’s jailed, as well as, fixing the Account-txs and Block-txs CLI commands that weren’t working. This protocol release also rolled out updates to the PocketRpcProvider and JS/TS libraries (Pocket-JS & Web3-Provider) like:
Securely porting over your private keys
Fixed the issue where the Session would sometimes come up as “not found”
Fixed the issue where sendRelay call would not send proper proofs.
Visit the changelog to check out all the improvements rolled out in this release.
Economic and Governance Updates:
We’ve prepared and published two economic articles focused on both sides of the two-sided marketplace. One dives into the developer side of the economic model with Pocket Economics for Apps, while the other side attends to the node operators through Pocket Economics for Nodes.
On the Pocket Network economics page, you’ll find a newly updated staking calculator. After reading Pocket Economics for Apps or Pocket Economics for Nodes, play with it to so you can see how much you can save as an app or how much you can earn as a node.
The first draft of the Pocket Network Constitution is complete and going through external review. Once this feedback is processed and integrated, we’ll be publishing the Constitution and starting the community ratification process.
In the meantime, we’re testing out processes and configuring tooling for the Pocket DAO’s launch.
News:
Decrypt published an insightful article titled “Pocket Network is Web3’s Answer to Amazon Web Services”. We highly recommend reading it to understand the pain points Pocket is solving for developers and node operators.
Algorand shared a press release highlighting the development of a Pocket integration into their AlgoSDK. This will let developers natively point to Pocket’s decentralized API through the Algorand SDK, providing access to a network of Algorand node runners in a censorship-resistant manner. It also highlighted the construction of an Algorand <> Pocket Token Bridge after the first integration is completed. From there, we will be able to issue an Algorand Standard Asset (ASA) version of POKT, Pocket’s native cryptocurrency, as a POKT-ASA, which will provide added utility for our community of developers and node operators.
Solana announced that Pocket is working on integrating Solana into our SDK. Pocket’s novel economic model and node incentivization scheme provides a perfect complement to Solana’s existing architecture. For example, currently, Solana Archivers are incentivized to store massive amounts of data (~4 petabytes per year) within the Solana blockchain, but there is no incentive for serving this data in a censorship-resistant manner. Pocket enables further incentivization on the reads for this data!
Arcadia Group wrote a Medium post “How Pocket can change the way Exchanges interact with overarching networks” exploring the use case of exchanges powered by Pocket. You’ll find out that by leveraging Pocket’s architecture and economics it makes for a more robust and secure exchange, whether it’s a CEX or DEX.
In June, we hosted an Infrastructure Call with leading staking services and node providers in order to go over how to run Pocket in production. It’s recommended that node runners watch this to get their operations up to speed:
A must watch, especially with the Best Node Service Competition coming up!
Behind the Scenes:
First and foremost, we are partnering up with Staking Hub to do a community AMA on July 15th at 18:00 UTC. Michael O’Rourke, Luis C. de Leon, and Alberto Jaureguire will be answering all your Pocket Network related questions. If there is something you’ve been wanting to ask us, the AMA is the perfect time. You can add your question(s) to this Questions Document, then set a reminder with this Google Calendar invite. The AMA will be hosted in the Staking Hub Telegram, which you join by clicking the hyperlink.
Pocket Wallet and Block Explorer are code-complete. Click the hyperlinks to check them out.
Development for Dashboard and Gateway continues. They’ll be ready for mainnet!
If you are active within our online community on Discord, you may have noticed a new layout to the server. It’s been prepped for when we add a gamification and reputation layer. We recently registered pocketnetwork.eth for 10 years, yes 10 years, so expect to see some fun experimentations with ENS domains.
In order to stave off potential spammers and bots, we added a welcome bot and introduction flow to verify your humanity.
We started to come up with memes, here are a few examples. Let us know your favorite and if you have an idea for a Pocket meme, share it with us!
We thought it would be interesting to highlight a few tweets from our community members, so here you go:
Connect with Pocket:
🦜 Follow Pocket on Twitter at @POKTnetwork
💬 Chat with the Pocket team and community in Discord