Pocket Network News - OCT 2020
Since the mainnet launch, Pocket Network has processed more than 117M relays!
Launch Updates:
It’s been about two and a half months since Pocket Network launched on mainnet. Since the mainnet launch, Pocket Network has processed more than 117M relays!
This translates to ~1.176M POKT minted across the board (89% to nodes, 1% to block producers, and 10% to DAO) in network revenue.
For the month of September, Ethereum applications using the Pocket Gateway have driven a total of 29,172,219 million relays. That means nodes have minted (at 0.01 POKT per relay served and validated) 291,722.19 POKT, with 10% (29,172.219 POKT) going to the Pocket DAO, providing perpetual funding for the protocol to sustain itself and continue to evolve!
Perpetual protocol funding mitigates the tragedy of the commons that plagues other protocols.
Here are more metrics that matter:
AVG Relays per Day (in SEP): 972,407.3
AVG Relays per Day (In OCT): 7,141,485
AVG Relays per Week (in SEP): 7,293,055
AVG Relays per Week (in OCT): 42,848,910
Most Relays in AUG: 675,991 (AUG 27th)
Most Relays in SEP: 2,055,290 (SEP 15th)
Most Relays in OCT: 12,779,902 (OCT 7th)
1st Week in October: 43,043,609 (OCT 1st - 7th)
Since beginning of OCT: 85,697,819 (Oct 1st -13th)
You’ll notice that the protocol has served more requests in the first week of October than the whole month of September 🤯
If you are a node operator and are interested in monetizing your existing infrastructure, give us a holler on Discord. Applications can also claim up to 1,000,000 relays per day as part of our free tier campaign.
Developer Updates:
Pocket Gateway
In the first ~two months, relay traffic forwarded through the Pocket Gateway to the Pocket Network protocol was highly concentrated among 10 to 15 nodes at a time. On September 22nd, Alex Firmani, App Solutions Lead, released new features for the gateway.
Internal Load Balancer
Relay Retries
The internal Load Balancer lets us manually assign multiple Application Authentication Tokens (AATs) to a single account. A client (application) can now use multiple AATs with just one endpoint. This means high traffic applications, like MetaMask and others, won’t be limited to just one AAT for their entire client base. In other words, through the gateway load balancer, we can provide an application with as many sessions as needed, which allows for traffic to be much more evenly distributed and dynamically served.
For example, we’ve subsidized one application with up to 20M relays per day (saving them 10s of thousands of dollars a month). It has a load-balanced endpoint graphed with 10 AATs that supports 10 sessions with 5 nodes per session. So every hour, 50 randomly selected nodes, distributed across the globe, are serving that application in production.
The Relay Retries feature gives the Pocket Gateway the ability to retry relays up to five times before returning an error to the client. This has brought down our error rate to almost nil.
Together, this dramatically improves our service to applications!
MyCrypto PR
The pull request for MyCrypto has been submitted, approved, and merged. It will be included in the next MyCrypto release. This PR will officially make Pocket Network one of the default network providers amongst the list of others (Infura, Etherscan, and MyCrypto) within the MyCrypto interface applications (desktop, web, and beta).
In the PR, we’ve included a load-balanced endpoint. This will provide a better, more stable service as the requests would be dynamically served through several sessions each paired with 5 paired nodes.
Not only does MyCrypto get an additional redundant layer of node infrastructure by including Pocket as an Ethereum network provider, but also gets served with the utmost redundancy at the protocol level.
MEW PR
Our app solutions team has submitted a pull request for MyEtherWallet, an early supporter during our MVP phase.
It has yet to be approved, but we find it highly likely that it will be approved and merged in the next couple of weeks. This integration will drive extra hundreds of thousands of daily relays to the Pocket Network protocol.
EthersJS PR
A pull request has also been submitted to EthersJS, one of the most used Ethereum SDKs. We’ve gotten confirmation that the repo owner will approve and merge it.
This PR will add Pocket Network as one of the default Ethereum network providers. The current set of infrastructure providers include Infura, Alchemy, and Etherscan.
It’s expected to drive 5M to 10M relays per day to the Pocket Network protocol once the PR is officially merged. The EthersJS SDK load-balances work by taking all the free tiers of the node providers and rotating them evenly for developers.
This integration provides developers an extra layer of redundancy. It also puts Pocket Network at the forefront in the minds of developers for when their application grows out of the free tiers of other infrastructure providers. One advantage we have over others is that we can dynamically assign more AATs to their load-balanced endpoint if more relay throughput is needed.
ETHOnline & Dashboard/Gateway Stealth Launch
You may have noticed on Twitter that we announced we sponsored the ETHGlobal hackathon ETHOnline. Since we were the only blockchain network provider to sponsor the hackathon, by chance, we became the unofficial default network provider for ETHOnline with Ethereum Mainnet/Testnet and xDAI support!
As part of the hackathon sponsorship and an extension of the 1M relay free tier offer, we release a closed beta of the Dashboard/Gateway to developers participating in the hackathon. They’ll be able to keep their endpoint URL, capped at 1 million relays per day, after the hackathon in order to continue to scale. This lets us grow together, too 🌱
We were given the opportunity to hold a workshop to educate developers on how to use the Pocket Gateway, the Pocket Web3 Provider, and Pocket-JS SDK. Here’s the workshop led by Alex Firmani:
Is your app really DeFi? Free Decentralized Blockchain Data from Pocket
Economic and Governance Updates:
The development of the POKT Arcade gamification layer for our Discord server is nearing completion. Many of the pieces (bots, channels, roles, quests, custom emojis, etc) are in place, but we decided to postpone the release by a few more weeks in order to tightly couple the Arcade with several governance tools and give it more significance when launched.
Those tools include, but are not limited to, BrightID, Collab.Land, Snapshot, and Aragon.
The flow looks like this:
When you join the server, you’ll choose some topics that are of interest to you
If you choose Node Running, App Infra, Community, or DAO/Governance, you will automatically enter the Arcade, revealing channels with your first set of quests
Each time you complete a quest, you will report the evidence in #achievement-unlocked and earn a new role
Once you’ve achieved enough of the quest set, you can level up by writing !become-{newrole} in #achievement-unlocked
Once you reach the 3rd level on any of the 4 paths, you will qualify for a vote in the DAO; you can claim the Qualified role by writing !qualify in #claim-vote
You will also need to link your BrightID to Discord, to prove you are a unique human being and prevent Sybil attacks on our governance
Once you have proven your community participation, by earning the Qualified role, and your unique humanity, by earning the Verified role, you can claim a vote by writing !claim-vote in the #claim-vote channel
You are now officially a Voter! All that’s left is to use the Collab.Land bot to claim an airdrop of your voting token, which you can use to submit gasless votes in Snapshot!
Gasless voting is a massive improvement to our governance UX; nowhere in the above flow do you need to own any cryptocurrency, other than the POKT you may need in the course of completing quests. Aragon Court and Aragon Agent will be available as a Snapshot plugin very soon, too, so that means we’ll be able to make full use of our constitution shortly after launching this new experience.
We’ll schedule a call post-launch within our boosted Discord server to give you all an overview of the game, a walkthrough, and a Q&A session.
We also have SourceCred running in the background assigning reputation to community members making contributions across Pocket’s Discord, Discourse, and GitHub. This may be something to look forward to in the next season of POKT Arcade.
A handful of proposals were recently submitted to our Discourse forum. Feel free to join the debate!
News:
If you are interested in running a node but don’t know how, then we have a handful of infrastructure providers who can offer that service for you.
Diversity of node service providers is not only important for the health of the ecosystem but also for the resiliency of the network.
Last week, Michael O’Rourke held a talk titled History of Node Infrastructure during the ETHOnline Scaling and Infrastructure Summit. Watch it below:
Michael also held it down in the Future of Node Ecosystems panel from Diffusion Digital 2020:
In the last week of September, we sponsored the EthHub newsletter.
The Tampa Bay Business Journal included Pocket Network as an example of a local TBA startup that found protocol-market fit and demand during a pandemic. It also tells a story of the collective sacrifice we made to keep going in a moment of uncertainty.
Behind the Scenes:
The onboarding of applications and node operators continues in the background. As that happens, we are also doing consistent app/node outreach.
A few more applications will be coming online soon, driving even more relays to the Pocket Network protocol for node runners to serve and earn POKT in exchange for that work.
A big infrastructure provider has also signed up for the Pocket Infrastructure Bootstrap Program. They’ll be offering discounted access to Ethereum full node and archive node infrastructure, so community members can point their Pocket Nodes to them. Expect to see an announcement near the end of October or in the beginning of November.
We are working on finalizing a Gitcoin Bounty with Solana. This bounty will put a bow on the integration we announced several months ago. In a similar vein to EthersJS, Solana developers will be able to easily connect to Pocket Network with their native development environment. We’re each putting in $5000 for a total of $10,000, with an additional $SOL and $POKT bonus prize for a Solana Block Explorer integration.
The 0 to Node video tutorial series is moving forward, too. This will help anyone get up to speed for spinning up and running a production-level node operation, which in turn sets a baseline standard for node runners and improves the overall quality of Pocket Network’s service.
We also have something in store for DeFi farmers, so stay tuned!
Wall of Tweets and Memes:
Connect with Pocket:
🦜 Follow Pocket on Twitter at @POKTnetwork
💬 Chat with the Pocket team and community in Discord
🏗️ Get started with running a node or deploying an app