April 2022 Relay Recap

Hey Pocketeers - what a month April was for Pocket Network relays and growth. Let’s dig into some of the details here.Pocket’s relay totals broke into brand new territory during April. Over the course of the entire month, Pocket Network tallied nearly 22 billion relays - up more than 80 percent from March’s total relays!After the month started off with a 4 billion relay week, it was only two weeks later that the network increased another 40 percent from that figure - all the way up to 5.7 billion relays in just one week’s time.

In fact, there wasn’t a single day in the month of April in which daily relays clocked in below 540 million. From this new floor, daily relays climbed over the first half of April, hitting a daily peak of about 876 million, and then closed the month with strong, consistent performance around 800 million relays per day.In May, we’ve already pushed the daily relay figures over 900 million consistently. Now, our sights are set on 1 billion daily relays - we can’t wait to share this milestone with you, the community who has helped us make it possible.

(Data source: POKTscan)

New Chains Whitelisted

We’ve continued to work relentlessly to support more blockchains to the network and boost the capabilities of application developers. Integrating new chains on Pocket Network is essential for the growth of the protocol, given our supply & demand incentive mechanisms. The more service relays the network supports, the more revenue node runners receive, creating a cycle of attracting more runners, servicing more relays, and offering a better service for applications.In April, we were proud to whitelist Fantom (RelayChainID 0049). Relays started booming immediately, and at the time of writing Fantom has vaulted into the top 5 chains in relays, with more than 60 million served over a 24 hour period.

Alberto Jauregui, Ecosystems Developer at Pocket Network, had this to say when he spoke with Bankless Times:

“Prior to now, there were no full-node incentives on Fantom––only Fantom validator nodes could earn $FTM rewards for validating blocks and maintaining consensus. Supporting Fantom not only provides a resilient and reliable RPC service for developers but also creates an extra stream of income in the form of POKT for full-node runners while making the Fantom network more robust at the same time.”

Fantom RPC endpoints are available for developers in the Portal. If you’d like a deeper dive on running Fantom nodes, you can find all the info you need via Fantom Foundation’s Developer Documentation.We’d also like to congratulate Evmos on their successful Mainnet launch at the end of April! Evmos is bringing fantastic Ethereum-based applications and assets to the Cosmos ecosystem, and we’re looking forward to whitelisting them VERY soon (RelayChainID 0046).

Triforce Will Keep the Relays Coming

You may have heard about Pocket’s Triforce initiative this week too. Triforce will be yet another highly effective way that Pocket Network will be able to keep the new chains (and relays) coming, and it’s one of the projects that we’re most excited about here at Pocket. Long story short: Triforce will blend the efforts of both internal Pocket Network team members AND community members, and will allow us to launch, maintain, and grow blockchain-specific traffic even more effectively. You can check out our quick “May the Triforce Be With You” thread and our recent community call for more details on the initiative.

Chain Highlights

• Polygon continued its strong relay growth during the month, clearing 350 million daily relays on April 18th. From about 3.5 billion relays in March all the way to 8.9 billion relays in April, Polygon has shown a 154 percent jump month-to-month. The growth has been thanks to the RPC endpoint aggregator across several RPC providers, and has been a testament to the growing popularity of Polygon's ecosystem.

• BSC Mainnet also showed tremendous growth in April, crossing 8 million daily relays towards the end of the month. That growth has continued as of late, with the chain clocking in at more than 13 million daily relays at the time of writing.
• Gnosis Chain hit its own milestone during the month, passing the 100 million daily relay mark. At the time of writing, they’ve moved all the way into the 3rd highest source of relays for Pocket Network (at more than 150 million daily relays), and have grown nearly 1,200 percent month over month!
• Fuse also experienced huge growth in April, starting the month with about 33 million daily relays, and ending with around 85 million. Fuse is leading the way in evolving web3 payment solutions, and should continue to be a strong source of relays for Pocket Network.

Overall, we’re excited to see the sources of relays become more diversified across a number of different chains at Pocket Network. At the beginning of 2022, we had nearly 80 percent of daily relays coming from one chain. Now, the top 3 chains account for 34 percent, 23 percent, and 18 percent of the daily relay totals. This diversity is a testament to the broad applicability of Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure services, and its growing role in a multichain world.

Node Infrastructure

Pocket’s node infrastructure continues to grow and strengthen its resiliency. Relays are being serviced by independent node runners across 6 continents. At the end of April, 45K+ validator nodes were active on the network.

Wrap Up

We continue to close in on the 1 billion daily relays milestone, and we know that this will be just one step on our journey to provide unstoppable infrastructure. Beyond just the total number of daily relays, it’s been an important achievement to increase the diversity of Pocket Network’s relay sources through growing our relationships across so many different chains. We are so excited about what the rest of 2022 can bring for relay growth and for the growth of Pocket Network and our community in general!