Relay Recap #96 features a new relay milestone, OEC/OKC moving up the charts, and IoTeX clearing 10M daily RPC relays. This recap covers stats from December 29, 2022 – January 4, 2023.
Time for our first Relay Recap of 2023 – and we’ve already got a new milestone to celebrate the New Year!
With December now in the books, we can officially say we have a new all-time high for monthly relays! December’s 36.57 billion relays edged out October’s previous high of 35.1 billion relays. This was thanks in large part to Ethereum’s huge month. In fact, Ethereum peaked at nearly 700 million relays serviced by Pocket Network in a single day. It’s been exciting to see Pocket play a larger infrastructure role with such a prominent chain.
Now, on to the past week – relays decreased marginally this week, with a slight downward trend throughout the period. After flirting with an all-time high on December 30th, we closed the week with 4 days just below 1.2 billion.Â
However, in the days since this Relay Recap period closed, we’ve seen a return towards all-time highs. There looks to be a bounce-back from any slight “holiday lull” we may have seen this week. We’ll see how things look in next week’s Recap – hopefully we have some more daily milestones to share by then!
[Note: We’ve recently published an end-of-year recap highlighting all the work our team was up to in 2022. If you haven’t checked it out already, make sure to give it a read!]
Throughout this period, the network serviced an average of 1.24 billion daily relays. The daily high for this time period was recorded at 1.36 billion on December 30th.Â
Overall, 8.67 billion relays were serviced during the week. This was a 1% decrease over the 8.75 billion relays the prior week.
Chain Highlights
OEC was the big gainer this week, with weekly relays more than doubling (114% increase). The chain had a rapid rise from 1 million to 2.3 million daily relays to start the period, with traffic mostly maintaining and staying steady around that level for the last 5 days of this period. [You can see more about our support of OKC in our recent blog post.]
IoTeX also had a big week, with relays up 62%. IoTeX nearly doubled last week’s high for 2 consecutive days to end 2022, before dipping back down for the last 4 days of this period. Even with the dip, every day this week finished above 10 million relays, a number that wasn’t cleared at any point last week.
Klaytn posted solid growth of its own, with relays up 22%. The chain had steady performance around last week’s high for the first 4 days of this period, with a rise over the course of the final 3 days. After being below 3 million daily relays much of last week, Klaytn finished this period approaching 4.5 million daily relays.
BSC also increased its relays by 20%, pushing towards 100 million daily relays multiple times. We saw a dip from BSC on New Year’s Day, but the chain climbed again in each of the last 3 days of the period, finishing on a weekly high of 97.5 million relays.
Finally, Fantom also had a 10% gain in weekly relays. The chain started this period with a steady 4-day rise to clear 36 million relays on New Year’s Day. Following that, Fantom had about a 15% dip in daily relays, but wound up bouncing back for the last 2 days of this period.
For the developers out there, remember to visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other chains that we support!
Node Earnings
From December 29th through January 4th, the Top 3 earnings picture was largely the same as last week, with Ethereum just clearing 2M in POKT earnings and Gnosis – xDai holding on to its recently claimed #2 spot over Polygon. Meanwhile, BSC and DFKchain remain in the #4 and #5 spots – same as last week.
In terms of average daily relays per node, we saw the following chains make the Top 15 list.
Overall, there was less movement on this list compared to last week, with the entire Top 3 staying put and a collection of relatively small movements elsewhere on the list.
OEC was the big gainer, thanks to the chain more than doubling its weekly relays while keeping roughly the same number of nodes servicing the chain.
NEAR’s brief run in the Top 5 also came to an end, as the number of nodes servicing the chain increased by 26% this week.
Node Infrastructure
As of January 4th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 23,461 active nodes across more than 20 different countries, allowing the network to provide constant uptime and resiliency while supporting dozens of different chains.
This total node count was down about 0.3% from the previous week.
Note: PIP-22 and PUP-19 brought big changes to the incentives that shape Pocket’s node infrastructure, by way of introducing stake-weighted servicer rewards and increased validator rewards. We’ll likely continue seeing a consolidation of nodes, as node runners and providers combine stakes to take advantage of these incentive structures that we rolled out in v0.9.0.
Wrap Up
- December sets a new monthly all-time high for relays, edging out October’s previous high.
- OEC more than doubles its weekly relays, and moves into the Top 5 for average earnings per node.
- IoTeX relays jump more than 60%, as the chain clears the 10 million daily relay mark.
- We’re continuing to test daily all-time highs – perhaps another milestone next week?
Thank you for reading, and happy 2023!