Pocket Network Monthly Recap | JUNE 2022

Hello Pocket Network family! June was another jam-packed month of developments for Pocket Network, and we’re here with a Monthly Recap to share some of the highlights with you.

Network Overview

Overall, relays stayed very stable compared to the month of May, with about 26.6 billion relays serviced on the network during the course of June (down 1% from the 26.9 billion serviced in May). 800M+ was the norm during June, as daily relays were higher than 800 million for 27 out of the 30 days of the month. This included 10 days over the 900M relay mark, and 2 days over the 1 billion mark!

Those two back-to-back days over 1 billion included a POKTscanall-time-high of 1.2 billion relays. In fact, there was even a time during those two days in which the rolling 24-hour relays reached 1.4 billion.

We can also mark the end of Q2 now, and close the door on another remarkable quarter of growth for Pocket Network. Compared to Q1, total relays jumped another 152% this quarter, and the distribution of those relays became far more diversified as Pocket has onboarded and grown traffic from more and more chains.

At the end of June, Pocket had 44,468 active nodes on the network, down about 7% from 47,912 at the end of May. Thanks to the extremely engaged community discussion of key proposals in the Forum (more on that below), the incentive structure for nodes is changing, and larger nodes can now potentially reap more rewards. We’ll likely continue to see more node consolidation as node runners adjust accordingly.

A New Milestone - 50 Chains Supported on the “Road to 100 Blockchains”

We also announced support for several new chains in June, including:

• Moonbeam Mainnet (0050)
• Moonriver Mainnet (0051)
• Optimism Mainnet (0053)

These new chains brought us to yet another milestone that we were thrilled to share with our community - 50 supported blockchains! As we reach the halfway point of 2022, we are halfway down our “Road to 100 Blockchains” - right on schedule for our goal to support this many blockchains by year-end.Our CEO Michael O’Rourke said it best:

“As we see developer demand drive more activity and apps to a wider variety of blockchains, interoperability challenges, as well as latency and reliability, from centralized infrastructure providers will continue to grow. With our multichain strategy, we are positioned to cement Pocket as the true decentralized, full-node RPC protocol in the industry.”

We’re excited to share the news of the next 50 supported chains with you as the year goes on. In the meantime, you can get set up with endpoints for our supported chains today via the Pocket Portal.

As we move further towards 100 supported blockchains, our TriForce initiative will be a major factor in getting us to that milestone. TriForce will allow the Pocket team to leverage the skills, experience, and connections of our community members to not only onboard new blockchains for support, but also to deepen connections within the dApp ecosystems of those new blockchains.In June, TriForce shards made headway with two particular chains: Meter has started onboarding, while plans have been made for Aurora to start onboarding in July. Two significant TriForce proposals were also passed in June (more on that in the Governance section below), with payments for shard members expected to begin in August.

Events, News, and Media

We had a number of events that we participated in with our community and partners throughout June, as well as news to share out. These included:

• We reached another new milestone - 50 supported blockchains!
• The first v1 pre-release was shared with the community, including foundations for each of the key modules, a roadmap for the future of v1, and a quick demo video.
• We published our Zero to Node tutorial on YouTube, written and produced by Steve Tingiris of Dabble Labs.
• v0 Pocket Core Contributors Program was announced, encouraging contributors to strengthen communication with the Core Dev team and share more ideas for the Pocket Core client.
• We dished out $10k worth of prizes at the ETHNewYork hackathon.
• We attended Polkadot Decoded in Buenos Aires, and spoke about how our community can help decentralize Web3 infrastructure.
• We spoke about DAO working groups and decentralizing enterprise during multiple panels at DAO NYC.
• We attended Consensus 2022 in Austin.
• We participated in a Twitter Space with Moonbeam, one of our recently supported blockchains.
• We participated in a Community Call with Evmos, another one of our supported blockchains.
• We had an AMA with our friends at Drops DAO.
• Pocket Network CEO and co-founder Michael O’Rourke joined YWhales to chat about the inspiration for Pocket and how the protocol works.
• Michael also joined the Untold Stories podcast to share “Lessons from the Bull Market”
• Several videos of our Infracon sessions were uploaded to our YouTube playlist.

Development and Product Updates

We also have some recent development and product updates to share:

• Progress on Ledger integration. Thanks to continued efforts with our Ledger-approved vendor, Ledger integration has reached the “Dev Complete” stage, with integration into the physical device being finished. Up next will be a further review process to move towards approval for actual production. We’ll have more updates for you as we move closer to the finish line here.
• AVAX validation and subnets.  We’re proud to announce that we’ve deployed our very first Avalanche Validator and our first Subnet validator in partnership with the Crabada Swimmer Network. Check us out on avascan.info!
• Wallet options.  We are deploying wallet.pokt.network options for users in the coming weeks. Available soon is both an e-wallet (current Pocket wallet) which is web-based, or for added security, users can download the Pocket wallet locally.

Governance Discussions

There were several important discussions presented and further hashed out in the Forum throughout the month of June.

• PIP-22: Stake-weighted Servicer Rewards. PIP-22 enables weighted staking by scaling per-relay rewards according to the stake size of a servicer. This is a significant proposal that has now been passed, and will incentivize larger nodes and node consolidation in order to reduce the network’s operating costs. PIP-22 is expected to come into effect later in July.
• PUP-21: Setting Parameter Values for the PIP-22 New Parameter Set. PUP-21 sets the parameters for PIP-22 and essentially determines how much node consolidation to allow and incentivize. The proposed parameters aim for “sizable but conservative” node consolidation, with a targeted result that is neither inflationary or deflationary compared to the WAGMI adjustments that have been in effect for months.
• PUP-19: Increase Validator Reward From 1% to 5% Immediately. PUP-19 creates an economic incentive for node runners to stake additional POKT to become validators. The proposal, which has been passed and executed already, creates more of a token “sink,” strengthens network security, consolidates servicer nodes into validator nodes, and aims to increase rewards overall.
• PEP-33: Triforce Shard Income Proposal. PEP-33 incentivizes TriForce shards with ongoing supplemental income tied to the shard’s performance (measured in relays per day). This proposal has been passed, with payments for shard members starting in August of this year.
• PEP-34: Triforce Shard Budget (1st Tranche). PEP-34 provides TriForce shards with working budgets to offset costs related to launching support for new blockchains. Like PEP-33, this proposal has been passed, with budgets for shard members starting in August.
• PIP-8: Use Coordinape for Contributor & Voter Onboarding. PIP-8 was passed previously, and has now been implemented in a modified format. The modified implementation of PIP-8 uses a custom Discord bot that creates simple emoji votes when community members submit a verify command to onboard as a new voter. The “Verified” role is then assigned if the vote gets at least 33% approval from existing voters.
• PUP-17: The Phase Plan (a progressive plan for network security and optimizations). PUP-17 proposes two distinct phases to achieve the highest priority goals of Pocket Network: the Security Phase and the Optimization Phase. The Security Phase would aim to increase rewards for block producers and increase the minimum stake. Next, the Optimization Phase would add a lite client and establish adequate inflationary controls.
• Increase MaximumChains to expand node servicing capabilities. This proposal would increase the max number of chains a node can service to 30. The proposal states several anticipated effects of this change, including keeping idle nodes busy, better serving the goal of onboarding more chains, and allowing increased flexibility to node runners.

Thanks for checking out our Monthly Recap - until next time!