June 2021 Newsletter - Pocket Network Blog

June was quite the month! In this newsletter you’ll find our network statistics, developer updates, community, economic & governance updates, news, and finally a wall of tweets in which we highlight this month’s amazing tweets by the community!

📈 Network Heartbeat 🩺

Over the last four weeks, blockchain applications using the Pocket Gateway have driven a total of ~130.6 million requests. All of which were successfully processed by the network.

In this timeframe, that means nodes have minted a total of 1.30M POKT, with 89% going to the service nodes (1.16M POKT), 10% going to the Pocket DAO (130.6K POKT), and 1% going to the block producers (13.0K POKT).

At the time of writing this, there are 5,199 staked nodes in Pocket Network.

That’s an increase of 322 nodes (+6.60%) compared to last month!

Refresh of Weekly Relay Recap #30

Pocket Gateway Stats 06/24 to 06/30

06/03 to 06/09: 33,145,070

06/10 to 06/16: 33,995,194

06/17 to 06/23: 29,402,774

06/24 to 06/30: 22,467,892

AVG Relays per DAY (in April): 4,982,846

AVG Relays per DAY (in MAY): 5,474,895

AVG Relays per DAY (in JUNE): 4,355,167

AVG Relays per Week (in APRIL): 34,879,925

AVG Relays per Week (in MAY): 38,324,267

AVG Relays per Week (in JUNE): 29,502,746

Total Successful Relays in APR: 149,485,394

Total Successful Relays in MAY: 169,721,755

Total Successful Relays in JUNE: 130,655,021

For the last week of June, node operators served 22.4M relays from blockchain applications. That means they generated 224.5K POKT with 89% going towards the service nodes (199.8K POKT), 10% going towards the Pocket DAO (22.45k POKT), and 1% going towards the block producers (2245 POKT).

Most Relays in APRIL: 8,420,327 (APR 11th)

Most Relays in MAY: 6,722,197 (MAY 28th)

Most Relays in JUNE: 6,561,442 (JUNE 10th)

The number of active validator nodes surpassed 5,000! Over 240M POKT remains staked on nodes, currently there’s about 420M unstaked POKT.

If you’re new to running a node or you’re looking to get started with a node, then learn more here.

🧰 Developer Updates

New Chains Being Whitelisted!

The Settlers of New Chains proposal passed!

https://forum.pokt.network/t/pip-6-2-settlers-of-new-chains/1027

These following blockchains are scheduled to be whitelisted on ASAP:

Avalanche Mainnet (0003)
BSC (0004)
BSC Archival (0010)
Fuse (0005)
xDAI (0027)
Ethereum Archival (0022)
Ethereum Archival Trace (0028)
Ethereum Ropsten (0023)
Ethereum Rinkeby (0025)
Ethereum Goerli (0026)
Ethereum Kovan (0024)

This means node runners will be able to earn POKT for running full-nodes and serving application requests of these blockchains. App developers will be able to access these additional network options through our dashboard Pocket Portal.

There’s already traffic coming from applications that use those 11 soon-to-be whitelisted chains.

From 06/24 to 07/01, a total of 17.2M relays were processed by Pocket Network’s altruistic infrastructure servicing these chains.

If these were paid networks, then it would have minted ~172k POKT.

Here’s a breakdown of traffic per ChainID:

As you can see, we are excited to have finally nailed down an efficient way to onboard new chains rapidly, which better balances the needs of the nodes, the apps and the network. We will start to feel the effects immediately

30/06 Chain Halt

After coming out strong on the previous chain halt, fate decided to test our resolve again. On Wednesday 30th June, the consensus rule change for 0.6.3 was activated in line with PIP-4 passing last week. Shortly after this, the chain halted due to the large number of nodes running Beta-0.6.4 and Beta-0.6.4 falling out of consensus with the stable 0.6.3.

On Friday July 2nd 6pm EST, after a series of hotfixes and and in collaboration with our hyper vigilant node communities(across varying timezones) we managed to resolve the issue and further harden the network (and community). .

It’s important to note for developers who may be reading this, that at no time applications lost service because the products that are built on pocket (the pocket dashboard/gateway specifically in this case) are designed with an additional layer of redundancy, which in this case was the automatic switch to “altruism mode” in which a large(but select) group of non-pokt nodes continues to service a given application and chain.

Needless to say we take “be unstoppable” very seriously.

More details will be provided on the chain halt this week as the team issues a post-mortem analysis and game plan to the community.

PocketJS RC-0.6.13

PocketJS RC-0.6.13 was released in the first week of June. All release details can be found on our Github. This release contains the following updates:

RPC:
ResponseDeliverTx was causing the getAccountTxs and getBlockTxs queries to fail:
Removed gasWanted and gasUsed properties.
Added recipient, signer and messageType properties.
StdTx model:
Updated the Msg property to accept Any object since the response schema is not static.

⚖️ Economic & Governance Updates

All-hands Community Call Recap

Last week, various members tuned in on Discord for the all-hands community call.

During this call, the following items were focused on:

Chain Halt Post-Mortem 0.6.3
Consensus Upgrade (PIP-4)
New Chain Listing Strategy (PIP-6.2)
Node Pilot Updates

Jack collected all relevant notes, organized them and published them as a comment on our forum: https://forum.pokt.network/t/community-all-hands-06-25-21-12pm-edt/1052/2

If you’re an active member, then please take your time to read through these notes as they’re important for all users.

If you have additional comments or feedback, feel free to add a comment to this forum thread.

Governance Updates

May was a busy month for the DAO, with various proposals . We’ll highlight the proposals that passed & the ones that are currently being discussed for you:

Proposals that successfully passed:

PUP-7: Whole Lotta Requests, PUP-8: Increase MaxValidators from 5,000 to 50,000, PIP-6.2: Settlers of New Chains and PIP-4: Consensus Rule Change: 0.6.3 successfully passed. We’re happy to see more members join the discussions around our proposals and encourage you to do the same if you’re interested. Make your voice heard as you can have a direct impact!

The biggest impact of these proposals passing is that we can now deploy the “Settlers of New Chains” strategy for enabling nodes to earn revenue (and apps to access service) for brand new chains. See Developer Updates above for more details.

For more information regarding each of the proposal and the involved discussions, click on the above hyperlinks.

We are also excited to see an influx in activity in the POKT arcade, it is our discord based mechanism to earn a DAO vote in a sibil resistant manner.

More than 30 quests were claimed in the last month, and we are super close to seeing our first community generated “Savant” which is an elite level developer who has contributed to many different aspects of the community.

No new DAO voters yet, but we are sure with all of this activity we will get to see new voters claim their rights very shortly, as some are only a few quests away.

Although we aim to continually improve this process, we are very happy with this process for becoming a DAO voter that isn’t dependent on token weights but instead merit within the community.

wPOKT update

We are working on wPOKT as quickly as possible. The application is complete, smart contracts are done – all that remains is the bridge. Because of the nature of building the bridge, at this time, we can’t put an exact date on the launch of wPOKT.It has taken longer than originally estimated (as nearly all bleeding edge engineering goes ;)) to ensure the development and quality of the bridge integration for wPOKT and the POKT token.

While we had originally envisioned releasing wPOKT without a bridge to ship quickly, after deliberation, it was decided that releasing wPOKT without a bridge had too many downsides for the users of wPOKT and POKT. To recap, the original plan was to release wPOKT without the bridge enabled and build it in parallel just to get wPOKT in the hands of potential users. But we quickly decided against that course of action because launching a wPOKT token with a bridge has much higher utility to all users in the community.

We decided to risk the potential FUD that may come with the lack of a hard date because we know that when we launch, it will have been done the right way. We apologize for any delays caused by our efforts to do things right.

So to the interested parties (including pre-committed applications like some mentioned below) thank you for your patience and will update you as soon as we are confident in the renewed release timeline.

We are just as eager as anyone to test this novel approach to leveraging DeFi farming methods to subsidize decentralized infrastructure indefinitely. We envision an application suite built on top of Pocket Network that grants decentralized applications undeniable service, at literally the lowest costs possible with the tools available.

And that is what we are working towards.

📰 News

POKT x SeaScape: Decentralized Infra for Decentralized Gaming

We are excited to welcome SeaScape as both a partner and one of the earliest wPOKT launch partners! This means that when you stake wPOKT in our data farming program, you are subsidizing relays for not only Seascape, but providing blockchain network bandwidth for all of our partners within the “Genesis Farm”.

We encourage you to read through the full announcement for more information about SeaScape and for all partnership details: https://medium.com/pocket-network/dubbed-as-the-ultimate-gaming-platform-around-nfts-and-defi-seascape-network-is-a-project-we-are-42b81ee7ab52

POKT x Automata Network

June was a month full of new partnerships, besides SeaScape we also welcomed Automata Network as a new partner! Automata Network helps DApps be more confidential with user information, and counteract against the “MEV tax” that we keep hearing more and more about every single day.

We’re excited to work with them to not only enable DApps to become more decentralized, but also more private!

For all details, see our official announcement: https://medium.com/@POKTnetwork/pocket-x-automata-bringing-privacy-to-the-forefront-of-web3-a22ff3c0733f