Pocket Network News - SEP 2020
6,538,726 relays in the first week of September, 170+ nodes running on mainnet, subsidizing relays for MetaMask and MyCrypto, as well as, Saturn Network DEX integrates Pocket Network, and much more!
Launch Updates:
It’s been a little over one month since the Pocket Network has launched its mainnet protocol!
For the month of August, Ethereum applications, using the Pocket Gateway, have driven a total of 2,779,336 relays. That means nodes have minted (at 0.01 POKT per relay served and validated) 27,793.36 $POKT, with 10% (2,779.336) going to the Pocket DAO, provides perpetual funding for the protocol to sustain itself and continue to evolve!
Here are some more metrics:
AVG Relays per Week (in AUG):
926,445
AVG Relays per Day (in AUG):
132,349
Most Relays in AUG:
675,991 (AUG 27th)
Most Relays in SEP:
1,315,136 (SEP 3rd)
Past 7 day rolling:
6,538,726 (SEP 1st - 7th)
And yes, you are looking at that correctly! We’ve had more than double (almost triple) the number of relays within the first week of September compared to the entire month of August 🤯
It’s important to note that these relays are what’s being driven through the Pocket Gateway, traffic started on August 11th, and it doesn’t include the relays coming from the Pocket Wallet and Pocket Block Explorer, which are directly connected to the protocol via the Dispatch Mechanism (Pocket JS SDK).
One of the applications driving relays through the Pocket Gateway to the Pocket Network protocol is Saturn Network, an uncensorable decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol. It’s now truly unstoppable!
Pocket Network Inc. (PNI) has also been identifying applications that enable their users to add a custom RPC endpoint, in this case, Pocket Network! So far, we’ve run two guerilla marketing campaigns for both MetaMask and MyCrypto. If you use either one of these Ethereum interfaces, check out these two hyperlinked-tweets or watch these videos to follow learn how to easily make the switch to Pocket as your default decentralized Ethereum network provider:
10,000,000 requests per day for MetaMask users
1,000,000 requests per day for MyCrypto users
These guys get it!
If you are a user of an application that wants a more reliable and redundant service, share this newsletter with them! Or if you are an application developer interested in claiming the offer of 1M relays per day, apply below and we’ll get back to you ASAP to provide you early access to the Pocket Gateway.
Join the waitlist 👇
At the launch of Pocket Network mainnet, the protocol had about ~70 instances (nodes) of Pocket Core running and generating $POKT for the underlying layer of Ethereum full nodes. Now, there’s a total of 173 staked nodes run by the collective network of node runners and infrastructure providers!
In order to ensure the quality of service and encourage early participation in the Pocket Network protocol, PNI has been seeking and identifying top-tier infrastructure providers to join the second round of the Pocket Infrastructure Bootstrap Program (PIBP). PIBP is an interest-free 18-month loan for infra providers to spin up to 10 nodes. If you’re a professional node operator interested in learning more or signing up, please apply here:
Luis shares his thoughts on the problem Pocket solves with this Twitter thread:
Developer Updates:
The Pocket Core RC-0.5.1 release candidate has made even more significant improvements and QOL enhancements to the existing protocol. However, it’s not officially released for mainnet yet and will be rolled into the larger Pocket Core RC-0.6.0 protocol update. More details on that coming soon!
Those features include but are not limited to:
Add terminal completions
Ensure pocket-evidence is deleted in all lifecycles
Roll back blocks / override app hash
Merged POSmint into core
By adding terminal completions, those using the CLI will be able to see a command ahead of time before typing it completely. Through ensuring that pocket-evidence is deleted in all life cycles, it should reduce the bloat on the state of the blockchain and keep it relatively lean. Instead of clearing the entire database, an ability to roll back a few blocks has been added just in case of a non-deterministic state. An in-house, modified, pure Proof of Stake fork of tendermint POSmint has been merged into the core repo. Anyone is free to use this pure PoS consensus model!
For a full list, you can view the changelog in our GitHub repo.
Also, the Pocket Developer Portal has been updated to version 3.2. A major overhaul of the dev portal is underway with the upcoming release of v4.0., which will heavily draw from community feedback.
Speaking about the community, Jeremy took the initiative to include a community contributions page within the developer portal to highlight solutions and tools from members of the Pocket Network community. For example, Simply VC (one of our bootstrap node partners) created a tutorial to help node operators monitor their Pocket Infrastructure using PANIC:
Economic and Governance Updates:
In case you missed it, we’ve published a recap of what has happened so far and what you can expect moving forward with the Pocket DAO.
The first set champions have successfully voted on adding additional voting members to the Pocket DAO.
Please, welcome the new voter set:
Dermot of Eden Block
Chris of Chainflow
Francesco of Simply VC
Who would you recommend to be part of the next set of voters? Let us know on either Discord or Twitter!
To tie off the DAO updates, please enjoy this thread of governance thought leadership around the prompt of “Blockchains don’t need software licenses, they need constitutions” by Jack Laing:
News:
Michael O’Rourke has been invited to participate in a Diffusion Digital panel discussion “The Future of Node Ecosystems” alongside the moderator Deborah Simpier of Althea Network, as well as, other panelists Alexander Ramsey of Gantree, Yaniv Tal of The Graph, Konstantin Richter of Blockdaemon, and Joe Petrowski of Parity.
Link to RSVP 👇
Causal, a mathematical modeling platform, highlighted the Pocket Network Economic Model put together by Adam Liposky as the recent Model of the Week:
Pocket Network was recently featured in Evan Van Ness’ newsletter Week in Ethereum:
We’d like to showcase some of the quality memes created by community members:
The Pocket Gateway was added to Product Hunt, please consider giving us an upvote!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/decentralized-api-for-ethereum
Behind the Scenes:
Application and node outreach continues, with efforts starting to compound and interest bubbling. We’ve noticed a need for Archival Node support when talking to application prospects, so we’ll be prioritizing that and coordinating with our bootstrap node partners.
In the background, we are building an embedded game within our Discord server to foster engagement between community members and the protocol itself. If you are interested in testing it out and providing feedback, tag someone with the @🧙Admin 🧙♀️ role in our Discord server for an invite.
The Pocket community has asked for node tutorial videos, so we are going to deliver on that promise. We’ve roped in a previous collaborator Dabble Labs to work in unison with Jeremy on putting together a series of videos called “Zero to Node” around the topic of running nodes. This will help anyone get up to speed for spinning up and running a production-level node operation.
What if users of an application could crowdsource and subsidize relays for their favorite application(s), while earning a yield?
A small, but dedicated team is currently ideating on and building out a design that would enable a user base to stake POKT on behalf of an application natively within the Ethereum ecosystem in the form of wPOKT. More details coming later, but Regen Farmers will be welcomed to harvest!
Fun note:
Gabriel Shapiro actually got kind of close to what we are imagining 👇
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