📡 Diverse Growth Keeps Relays Steady During Holidays

As we wrap up 2022, it’s time for our LAST Relay Recap of the year - and what a year it’s been!

Relays were almost exactly flat compared to last week, with weekly highs early in the period helping to bring a marginal increase in total relays when all was said and done. Unsurprisingly, we saw a slight dip during the Christmas holiday and the days immediately preceding and following it, with relays bumping back up again on December 28th to close this period.

In addition to strong growth from at least 5 chains that are typically smaller sources of relays, we also saw Ethereum post yet another daily all-time high during this period, with more than 688 million relays on December 23rd!

With chains like Ethereum consistently reaching new heights lately, and other diverse sources of relays showing their own increasing usage of Pocket Network, we’re beyond pumped to see what 2023 brings for network traffic!

[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!]

Learn More About Pocket's "Year of Growth" in 2022

Throughout this period, the network serviced an average of 1.25 billion daily relays, with the daily high for this time period recorded at 1.38 billion on December 23rd.

Overall, 8.75 billion relays were serviced during the week, representing a 0.3% increase over the 8.72 billion relays the prior week.

Chain Highlights

Starknet Mainnet was one of the top gainers this week, with a 64% increase in weekly relays. After the chain had a dip all the way down to about 20,000 daily relays in the final two days of last period, Starknet made a quick climb up towards 100,000 relays to start this period. The chain spent the final six days of this week with very flat performance above 80,000 daily relays, right around last week’s highs.

Moonriver relays were also up 58%, after taking a big jump from 1.6 million to 3 million to end the previous period. The chain maintained that jump by staying remarkably steady around 3 million relays for each of the first three days of this period, before taking a slight dip around 2.75 million for the last four days of the week. Overall, Moonriver has now had eight straight days of nearly straight-line steady performance.

We also had Boba increase its relays by 42%, with a spike of its own from 1.7 million to 3.6 million daily relays to start the period. Boba rose up to clear 4 million daily relays over the course of the next couple of days, before returning back towards 3 million relays over the course of the last four days of this period.

Klaytn also continued its strong recent performance, with a weekly relay increase of 16%. Klaytn’s peaks were on the first and last days of the period, with just over 3.2 million relays on each of those days. There was certainly lots of volatility in between those peaks, with alternating days of growth and decline, before the chain’s relays eventually rose for three straight days to end the period. Even with all the volatility, Klaytn has been putting together a nice multi-week upwards trend.

Finally, Solana also had solid relay growth of 13% this week. While the chain hasn’t quite been able to maintain last week’s peak of 1.7 million daily relays, it’s nevertheless still had seven straight days of very steady performance in a tight channel around 1.4 and 1.5 million daily relays.

For the developers out there, remember to visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other chains that Pocket Network supports!

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Node Earnings

From December 22nd through December 28th, Ethereum was once again able to clear 2M in POKT earnings, now posting nearly three times the earnings of the second highest chain. Speaking of that second highest chain, this week we also saw Gnosis flip Polygon for the #2 spot on the top earnings list, thanks to a combination of Gnosis sustaining its relay numbers from last week and Polygon taking a dip.

In terms of average daily relays per node, we saw the following chains make the Top 15 list.

Ethereum remained in the #1 spot with another week of moderate growth, while we saw Gnosis - xDai flip Polygon for the #2 spot on this list as well.

DFKchain, BSC, and Klaytn made substantial moves up the Top 10, while OEC and Boba were a couple of the chains that gave way for those upwards moves.

We also saw Polygon Archival drop completely off this list, after a brief spell in the #5 spot last week. Polygon Mumbai, however, stayed strong in the #8 spot.

Node Infrastructure

As of December 28th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 23,528 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 up 1% from the previous week, in a slight change of pace from the trend of node consolidation that we’d seen in multiple consecutive weeks before this one.

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 have been rolled out in v0.9.0.

Wrap Up

• Ethereum sets yet another all-time high, approaching 700 million daily relays.
• Gnosis - xDai flips Polygon for the #2 rank in both total relays and average relays per node.
• Double-digit percentage growth across a diverse basket of chains outside the Top 10.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for being part of our community all throughout 2022! See you next year!