Pocket Network News | NOV 2021

Hello Pocketeers 👋 We bring to you this month’s newsletter with much excitement. Here is a breakdown of all things Pocket!

Pocket Network saw unprecedented scale in November, serving more than 3.7 billion relays!

2048 apps are live on Pocket Network as of November. These apps requested 3,761,085,065 relays(up by 213%) which were served by 13,000+ Nodes(up by 62%) on the network in comparison to October.

Welcome to the future, welcome to decentralized infrastructure.

📰 News

Pocket Network Gets Listed on Web3 Index

After a successful vote, the Web3 Index listed Pocket Network among other leading middleware protocols!

Read the accompanying Why Web3 Needs Pocket Network guest post, by Alberto (DisruptBanksy), to understand how Pocket is proving to be a critical piece of Web3 infra, replacing the centralized gateway services that developers rely on today for easy access to smart contract platforms and work protocols with a permissionless, decentralized alternative.

Algorand Blockchain is Live on Pocket Network

Pocket Network brings its 13.6k+ globally-decentralized node infrastructure to the Algorand ecosystem. Decentralized apps, wallets, block explorers, and anyone seeking a privacy-centric connection on Algorand can now use decentralized Pocket-powered RPC endpoints.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pocket-partners-with-algorand-to-provide-infrastructure-301434347.html

Head over to the Pocket Portal to mint yourself an Algorand RPC endpoint today!

This also means that Algorand node operators can now monetize their nodes by participating in Pocket’s work economy of serving application requests to earn POKT.

Pocket Network Node Snapshot Solution by STORJ

Storj is a decentralized file storage solution, which brings fast and efficient performance to cloud storage customers without having to compromise on resilience or costs.

“We chose Storj DCS as our storage layer because of its innovation in decentralization - and for our shared values of a trustless, sustainable, and globally distributed architecture. And bottom line, the performance blew us away.”

- Michael O’Rourke, CEO & Co-Founder, of Pocket Network

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/storj-showcases-unmatched-performance-throughput-130000534.html

Leveraging Storj’s own capabilities, the STORJ team has built a node snapshot solution for the Pocket Network ecosystem, which will help the node runners spin up and sync up pocket nodes much faster as they will not have to do it from scratch anymore.

For a deep dive, watch this segment in our October community call from the Storj team:

Pocket Network Sees Growth in Harmony Relays

Harmony applications and public RPC drove 2 billion+ relays in November through the Pocket Network protocol.

As mentioned in a previous edition of Weekly Relay Recap 46, the drop in initial relays was mostly attributed to Harmony’s public RPC, which was routing some of its traffic through Pocket’s decentralized network of Harmony nodes. Working with Harmony, Pocket engineers opted to exclude Pocket from the rotation while the team investigated the stickiness issue with the public RPC’s configuration, in which it expected the block height of a node it’s calling to be the same as the last node it called, even if it’s calling historical data for which recent blocks are not relevant.

This type of behavior is predictably going to have a hard time using a diverse network of nodes. However, it is not inevitable; as far as we can tell, all other Harmony apps are still using Pocket, because they don't rely on this same "stickiness". The “stickiness” issue is something that many, if not most, web2.5 infra providers suffer from.

As seen in WRR47, the Pocket engineering team, while coordinating closely with the Harmony team, is super excited to have resolved this issue, especially as a web3-native solution!

Towards the third week of the month, a patch was passed to the canary and deployed on the master, which solved this stickiness issue. Selective Node Stickiness is now enabled and live for the Harmony public RPC endpoint, as well as, all our other public RPC endpoints when they are used with web wallets as this will mitigate the errors seen lately with MetaMask.

Harmony public RPC traffic has started returning in increments and we are expected to be back to 100M+ daily relays soon.

wPOKT update

wPOKT website gets a reboot and a new wPOKT devlog is launched!

Our focus has been on ensuring that we release a robust and secure product. Keeping this in mind, the team last week has been working on an internal dry run test of the wPOKT token contract, LBP, and farming app on a testnet.

The wPOKT Token Bridge is on track for a Q1 2022 launch. Also, Ferrum’s multi-chain bridge will be compatible with (but not limited to) Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Algorand, and Avalanche.

Read all the latest updates straight from the source here:

https://wrapped.pokt.network/dev-log-2

CEO Michael O’Rourke talks about decentralization, Pocket Network, and wPOKT at DCentral Miami.

POKTopus Community Giveaway

It has been a busy month for longtime community contributor and member Jinx (aka POKTopus).

He self-organized a campaign to randomly gift POKT to other community members on Thanksgiving weekend. Initially, the reward was 1000 POKT to be distributed among 10 people, however, since then 3 more community members have joined him, taking the rewards to 4000 POKT!

Together they plan to organize 8 additional #POKTstorm campaigns.

Follow this Twitter handle for future giveaway updates:

https://twitter.com/thepoktopus/

There is actually a contest running right now, ending at 5PM EST. If you want to test your look, follow the directions of this tweet:

If you’d like to contribute to the community-driven #POKTstorm giveaways, you can donate POKT to this address.

POKTopus launched its own weekly blog which talks about the Pocket protocol. You can subscribe and read along here.

Jinx, an active community contributor, has stepped up to manage the weekly Node Runner Office Hour events where the node runners come together to discuss their insights, issues and learn from each other.

Join Pocket Network’s discord channel to RSVP to these events:

https://discord.gg/NuDHkPAM?event=913171920332161094

📈 Network Heartbeat 🩺

Throughout November, blockchain applications using the Pocket Gateway have driven a total of ~3.76B relays.

Not only were we able to sustain the historical rise last month to 1B relays but managed to drive more than 3B relays in a single month! This is the most relays that Pocket Network has had in a month, and we look forward to ending the year in the same spirit.

At the time of writing this, there are 13,609  staked nodes in Pocket Network.

Refresh of Weekly Relay Recap #47

The below image shows the total number of successful relays per day, week, and month throughout the months of September, October, and November.

The Pocket Network is growing faster than ever! And, with that an increasing number of POKT rewards for node operators. The below pie chart displays the number of POKT minted this past week:

Most Relays in SEP --> 41,658,221 (September 3rd)

Most Relays in OCT --> 162,351,112 (October 31st)

Most Relays in NOV --> 205,244,972 (November 9th)

🧰 Developer Updates

Pocket-tools v.0.2.0 is here!

Early this month, Pocket-tools v0.2.0 was released. A big thank you to Enrique for his hard work.

Pocket-tools is a collection of useful tools that can be used by anyone building on the Pocket Network.

The tools can be found on Github at: https://github.com/pokt-foundation/pocket-tools.

Community tools

POKTscan, a data analytics and node management platform of Pocket Network, pushes major updates in November which enhances user experience & helps large node runners better track their individual and collective node reward performance.

Here are many of the recent updates:

• Fixed Explore page
• Fixed Date Range overlay that was not able to be click due to a zIndex issue with the table lines. * Fixed Persistent Nodes Selection on Node Runner page. Now you can use Node selector to filter and select first time, after that your selected nodes will be persisted on the localStorage and load next time you came to same Node Runner page. Fixed total miss calculation on Node Runner Performance table.
• Fixed and issue that nodes that does not produce any relays yet are not returned on Performance Table.
• Added Clear filter button on Node runner page.
• Added Error Toast notifications for a better understanding of what is going wrong on Explore and Node Runner pages.
• Added better Title and more summary information in Node Runner.
• Added Column Filter for tables on Node Runner.
• Added Search text field for tabled on Node Runner.
• Enhance sizes of Summary and Top chains cards on Node Runner.
• Duplicate database and website hardware resources for a better response time.
• Redesign UI/UX for all entity details.
• Node/App tables now display account related balance
• Added Copy link for all entities (Modal & Page details)
• Transaction table information for the Node/App/Account detail
• Added Transfer table information for the Node/App/Account detail
• History table information for the Node detail

⚖️ Economic & Governance Updates

November Community Call

The recap of the monthly community call is live and can be found here:

A range of topics was discussed, if there’s any topic you’d like to see discussed during the next community call, please contact @Jackal on Discord.

https://discord.gg/NuDHkPAM?event=913171920332161094

The agenda for this call was:

• wPOKT update
• Ledger Update
• PIP-7: Validator/Servicer Split & Validator Consolidation
• PIP-8 : Using Coordinape for Contributor Onboarding
• PEP-16 : Universal Contributor Income
• Q&A / Open discussion

Governance Updates

PEP-13: POKTscan App

Passed ✅:

Full proposal here: https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-13-poktscan-app/

PEP-13 includes two options, with four possible deliverables for a POKTscan application. POKTscan intends to be the go-to platform for Pocket Network data analytics and node management.

PEP-14: POKTwatch

Passed ✅:

Full proposal here: https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-14-poktwatch/1216

PEP-14 proposal requests the support of development and hosting of POKTwatch.io, a Pocket blockchain explorer with a slick UX and a simplistic UI.

PUP-9: Gigachad Pocket Portal Free Tier

Passed ✅:

Full proposal here: https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-14-poktwatch/1216

The foundation is running out of POKT to stake for Portal apps at the current pace of adoption, so this proposal will enable the Foundation to lock in a cheaper relay price for its stakes so that it can continue to provide a free tier as a bootstrapping mechanism as the network scales.

PIP-7: Validator/Servicer Split & Validator Consolidation

Passed ✅:

Full proposal here: https://forum.pokt.network/t/pip-7-consensus-rule-change-validator-servicer-split-validator-consolidation/1272

PIP-7 proposes upgrading the protocol to separate validators from servicers above a MaxValidators limit and to set the MaxValidators limit to 1k. This means validators staked below the top 1k validators (which is currently a threshold of 15.5k) would only be eligible to service relays, not to produce blocks. This will help to scale the network and support many more servicers.

PIP-8: User Coordinape for Contributor & Voter Onboarding

Under Discussion:

The full proposal can be found here: https://forum.pokt.network/t/pip-8-use-coordinape-for-contributor-voter-onboarding/1274

The current process of entering into DAO is not very smooth. This proposal introduces a new class of stakeholders(Contributors) in the DAO to serves 2 purposes:

1. Makes it easy for community members to contribute towards Pocket protocol.
2. Becoming a Contributor will be a stepping stone to become a Voter in the DAO.

The process is to be administered via Coordinape.

PEP-16: Universal Contributor Income

Under Discussion:

The full proposal can be found here: https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-16-universal-contributor-income/1275

This proposal talks about distributing a fixed % of future DAO revenue on a monthly basis to Contributors so they have more stability and ultimately engage more Contributors overall. The distribution of this revenue, to start with, would be determined by Coordinape.

We are seeing active and engaging discussions by the Pocket Network Community on the forums. Join the discussion and share your opinion. Your voice matters and will be heard. You can do so by clicking the hyperlinks of any of the proposals.

🐦 Wall of Tweets and Memes

Connect with Pocket:

🦜 Follow Pocket on Twitter at @POKTnetwork

💬 Chat with the Pocket team and community in Discord

👾 Visit the Pocket Network Website

♻️ Learn more about wPOKT

🔗 Mint an RPC endpoint for your application