Relay Recap #97 features a new all-time high for Klaytn RPC relays, Ethereum posting another strong week, and a new chain announcement. This recap covers stats from January 5 – January 11.
Happy Friday! It’s time for another Relay Recap.
We tested the daily all-time high for relays both in the beginning and towards the end of this period. We closed this week just barely short of the weekly all-time high from October. And we mean “just barely,” as relays were only about 4 million short of that previous mark.
While relays pushed towards the all-time high of 1.4 billion at times, we also saw a brief dip below 1.2 billion daily. All in all, Ethereum’s 15% growth was complemented by a huge week for Klaytn RPC relays. These factors played big parts in driving the network’s overall relay growth.
Beyond Ethereum, we saw lots of other chains in the Top 10 post very stable numbers compared to last week. Many chains either increased or decreased their weekly relay counts by a single-digit percentage.
Throughout this period, the network serviced an average of 1.28 billion daily relays. The daily high for this time period was 1.39 billion on January 5th.Â
Overall, the network serviced 8.94 billion relays during the week. This was a 3% increase over the 8.67 billion relays the prior week.
New Chain Support Incoming
As 2023 kicks off in earnest, we’re ramping up our support of new chains.
As announced in the official Pocket Network Discord, we are now making preparations to allowlist Arbitrum on January 16th.
Per the announcement:
“We advise node runners who wish to support this chain to begin making their own preparations by deploying their own nodes, getting up to sync, and simulating relays to ensure that everything is working as intended.
DO NOT add the new chain to your pocket node stake until you have ensured your new chain node is working correctly, otherwise your Pocket node will be slashed.”
Layer 2 networks are continuing to play a more and more prominent role in crypto. We’re beyond excited to provide performant and resilient infrastructure, and help Arbitrum and others fulfill their scalability visions. In fact, just this week, Arbitrum and Optimism (another L2 supported by Pocket), combined to surpass Ethereum in their number of daily processed transactions. This is an exciting stat to think about as Pocket gears up to lend RPC support to Arbitrum.
Stay tuned for more info about our support of Arbitrum as we officially allowlist the chain next week!Â
Chain Highlights
The Chain Highlights section is brief this week. Strong performance from a couple of chains balanced against moderate increases or decreases across many other supported chains.
The first of those strong performers was Klaytn. The chain had another big week, with an 87% increase in relays. Klaytn RPC relays had a serious jump from 4.2 million to 6.2 million on the first day of this period. This was followed by an upwards trend for the rest of the week. After coming in around 4 million daily relays last week, Klaytn eventually cleared 7.6 million towards the end of this period. In fact, that 7.6 million figure was a new daily all-time high for the chain! Overall, we’ve been seeing strong Klaytn RPC relay stats since the DeFi Kingdoms Serendale launch on the chain.
Next up, somewhat unsurprisingly at this point, was another solid week of relay growth from Ethereum. Relays were up 15% for the chain, thanks in part to a big jump from 425 million to 575 million on the first day of this period. Relays dipped below 500 million over the next three days, but Ethereum finished with three straight days of increasing relays. This mini-streak to end the week had Ethereum approaching 600 million relays per day again. The chain is also back above a 40% share of total Pocket Network relays, closing this period at 42%.
For the developers: visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other supported chains!
Node Earnings
From January 5th through January 11th, 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 the #2 spot over Polygon. This week, however, we saw a wider gap between Gnosis and Polygon, as the former grew its share of total relays by 1% while the latter had a 2% decrease.
In terms of average daily relays per node, we saw the following chains make the Top 15 list.
This was another week with the Top 3 staying put compared to the prior period, with other chains making moves up the rankings close behind them.
While Optimism relays only increased marginally for the week, a decrease of about half a percentage point in the number of nodes servicing the chain helped to move the chain up 5 spots on this list. Beyond that fairly significant move, you can see from the chart that we didn’t have too many other drastic moves in the Top 15.
That being said, while Polygon Archival’s move up the rankings (2 spots) wasn’t huge, it’s nevertheless noteworthy to see it inch into the last spot on this list, as it is currently the only archival to crack the Top 15 (there were none on the list last week).Â
Node Infrastructure
As of January 11th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 22,592 active nodes across more than 25 different countries, allowing the network to provide constant uptime and resiliency while supporting dozens of different chains.
This total node count was down about 3.7% 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 have been rolled out in v0.9.0.
Wrap Up
- Klaytn RPC relays increase nearly 90%, setting new daily all-time highs.
- Arbitrum support is incoming!
- Ethereum’s solid week balances out mostly flat weeks from many other chains.
- Optimism makes a solid move up the average relays per node rankings.
Thank you for reading!