POKT 2021: Year in Review & WRR52

All of us at Pocket Network wish you and your families a very Happy New Year. 2021 was the first full year of Pocket Network post mainnet launch. We worked hard towards our vision of making Web3 infrastructure decentralized. The journey has just begun and it wouldn’t have been possible in-part without you all, the amazing Pocket Network community. We thank you all for your support! We have put together a quick snapshot of the year that was. Here are some key 2021 highlights that we are celebrating.

📡 Key Highlights of 2021 💥

Pocket Network successfully served over 13.8 Billion Application Relays.
From serving 4.4M relays daily on average, the network grew to serving 186M+ relays/day.
We started the year with just 589 node runners providing infrastructure to connect to the blockchains and serve the relay requests. Now we are at 18k+ nodes providing required infrastructure in 17 countries across the globe.
There are 2048 Apps on the Pocket Network with ~26.3M in staked POKT.
21 blockchains are whitelisted for revenue generation as of year-end including Harmony, Ethereum, FUSE, Avalanche, Solana, and more. dApps can, within seconds, mint rpc endpoints to any of these blockchains and leverage the power of Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure to serve their end users.
Some of the most recent, key partnerships we did this year: Rocket Pool, DFDAO, and RockTree.
1000x increase in network revenue. $50M+ in December’21 compared to $50k in December of last year.
Pocket Network became a top 5 blockchain in terms of protocol revenue this year!

It has been a tremendous year for Web3 and Pocket Network. Come take a walk with us down memory lane and talk about all things Pocket!

Community Highlights

Pocket Network has grown in part due to the awesome community that we have surrounding us.We are now:

3,800 members on POKT Official Telegram channel.
1,500 members on POKT Unofficial channel a.k.a. the Poktopus Den!
9,248 members on our Discord
19,226 followers on Twitter
823 subcribers on YouTube

Some highlights directly from our long-term community members of their best moments in 2021!

POKTpool launched by Joey Rosati

Launch of Unofficial mascot - POKTopus and weekly POKT giveaways to random POKT wallets by the community to the new members joining the ecosystem.These happen every week, you can participate by following the Twitter account and checking updates - https://twitter.com/thepoktopus

Community members winning POKT giveaways!

Some good words from our long-term community member Ming!

Growth in Relays, Nodes, and $POKT 📈

25.8x increase in application relays in 2021 compared to 2020

Over 13.9B+ relays have been processed in total throughout 2021. The exact figures are displayed in the table below.

Total Relays Served: 13,897,560,375Nodes staked: 18,176POKT Minted: 138,975,604Most Relays in Jan-Mar’21 – > 12,825,811 relaysMost Relays in Apr-Jun’21 – > 8,420,327 relaysMost Relays in Jul-Sep’21 – > 41,658,221 relaysMost Relays in Oct-Dec’21 – > 218,193,075 relaysPocket Network onboarded 20+ new blockchains in 2021 that served billions of relays.Distribution of relays requested by blockchains:

Diving deeper, here are the detailed blockchain-wise relays served and POKT earned by Node Runners:

📡 Weekly Relay Recap #52 🛰️

This has been an exciting week for Pocket!Pocket Network saw a strong start to 2022 with daily relays crossing 300M+ on consecutive days. According to POKTscan, we broke another record on January 5th by serving 355M+ relays in a single day!

🚀 NEW DAILY RELAY RECORD 🎉 🎉 🎉Pocket Network just processed 335.5M relays in 24 hours!

🪙 POKT Minted: 3.5M📈 Best Chain: Harmony Shard 0 (0040) 252.9M (75.4%)🪦 Previous Record: 310.5M - Jan 3 '22 pic.twitter.com/Ptev0XhnQX— POKTscan (@POKTscan) January 4, 2022

The average daily relays grew by 14.5% to 215M relays/day.Over 6B relays have been processed in total throughout the last four weeks. The exact figures are displayed in the table below.

From where did the growth in relays come?This week we saw higher relays from harmony apps like DeFi Kingdoms, as well as, from the xDAI chain due to the Dark Forest New Year’s Community Round, which was powered by Pocket RPC.For those interested in diving deeper into the metrics, one can find them on C0D3R’s Pocket Network charts and on POKTscan

Key Product Launches & Developer Updates

Pocket Network’s core engineering team & the members from the community have been hard at work throughout the year to help make an innovative and groundbreaking product.Here are the key highlights from their work in 2021:

Pocket Portal went live in July! Pocket Portal is an open-source front end for accessing decentralized infrastructure via Pocket Network.
Available for every blockchain that pocket supports
Has a free tier that gets you 4 Endpoints to any supported blockchain
Each Endpoint on the free tier is pre-staked with POKT for up to 1 Million daily relays.
Easy monitoring of your app’s usage of every chain through a single interface.

Read the full post here: https://bit.ly/PocketPortalLaunchSign up here - https://www.portal.pokt.network/You can also watch a demo below, please consider upvoting on Product Hunt:https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pocket-network-s-portal-gateway-to-web3

Launch of Pocket-tools v0.02.0. It is a collection of useful tools that can be used by anyone building on the Pocket Network.
Successful implementation of validator/servicer split as per PIP-7 governance proposal. Thus taking the foundational step towards making a scalable architecture.
Onboarded & whitelisted 20+ blockchains including - Solana, Avalanche, Harmony, Fuse, xDAI & more!
Initial specs of Pocket v1.0 to be released in the next monthly community call which is going to be held this month.
Node nanny tool to be open source in Q1 of ‘22 which will allow large node runners to keep track of failing nodes and nodes not in sync.

Community-built Tools

Node Pilot

Node Pilot, a DIY node running tool launched and is at v0.9.5. They are very close to releasing v1.0 which will be their 1st production release. Over 100 nodes are running on their platform.Just this week the team announced that Node Pilot works on Windows too now!https://twitter.com/nodepilot/status/1478418419766935552

POKTscan

POKTscan, a node explorer tool has come a long way since launch in early 2021 with new features & enhancements happening every week!Latest updates from POKTscan this week:

BUG FIX: Now can select different types of chart on App Chart of Network Stats tab in Explore.
BUG FIX: Error when changing node selection on By Nodes Chart of Rewards tab in Explore.
BUG FIX: Fix time display on Latest Block and tables that does not format times on browser timezone.
BUG FIX: Fix load error when select big node runner domains.
BUG FIX: Not duplicating tooltips on charts.
BUG FIX: Error 400 code when select nodes on Rewards by Chains Chart.
BUG FIX: First color series on rewards by nodes chart was not the same color of color picker.
ENHANCEMENT: Established contains as default filter on address columns on several tables to allow case insensitive search as default.
ENHANCEMENT: Removed the option to paste a list of address on address filter for node selector and established contains as default filter.
ENHANCEMENT: Month Descending sort by default on Rewards Table in Node Runner.
ENHANCEMENT: Now truncating values of rounding to be more precise.
ENHANCEMENT: Added ability to select multiple chains on By Nodes rewards.
ADDED: Button to paste addresses on node selector dropdown.

Governance Updates

One of the core tasks of the DAO Council is to ensure smooth governance. Anyone from the community can submit proposals on the public Pocket Network forum. The proposals are then open for discussions by the community at large, after which it goes for the voting where the DAO Council can either approve or reject the proposal.There is one active proposal in Pocket’s Snapshot at this point in time:

PIP-10: Security by Anonymity Option

These proposals are under active discussion by community members:

Here are some of the governance proposals that were passed in 2021 starting with the most recent ones:

✅ PUP-10: Increase SessionNodeCount to 24

This proposal suggests to improve scalability and better utilization of the theoretical capacity of the network. This change also enables the Portal API to select 24 servicer nodes for serving relays in each session instead of the current 5.

✅ PIP-8: Using Coordinape for Contributor & Voter Onboarding

Along with the DAO community, Pocket Network will now recognize a new class of stakeholders: contributors; which would make it easier to enter and would be a stepping stone to becoming a Voter. This new contributor onboarding path would be administered through Coordinape.

✅ PIP-7: Validator/Servicer Split & Validator Consolidation

This proposal upgraded the protocol and separated validators from servicers above a MaxValidators limit and set the MaxValidators limit to 1k. This made the network more scalable and support many more servicers.

✅ PEP-11: Bridge to a multi-chain POKT

Ferrum Network is building a multi-chain POKT bridge that would go beyond Ethereum and POKT, and would include other chains such as, but not limited to BSC, Polygon, Avalanche, Algorand, Moonriver, and more.

✅ PEP-6: Node Pilot - A new node deployment solution

Node Pilot along with Node Launcher are the free open-source tools built by community members Shane Burgett and Ryan Burgett. The tool aims for anyone without technical understanding to be able to spin up nodes on Pocket Network.

✅ PEP-4: Pocket Listing

The proposal enables DAO-assigned committee to pursue listings of POKT on centralized exchanges in order to create an open market for POKT.

✅ PIP-3: Remove the DAO’s Asset Ownership Restriction

The proposal allowed for the removal of the sentence from the Constitution that restricted ownership of assets other than POKT and enabled collaborative activities such as the like-for-like token swaps with other DAOs.

✅ PUP-7: Whole Lotta Requests

As Pocket’s user base grew, this proposal was brought forward to set price targets for apps that cross the free tier. To ensure that the service is priced competitively and therefore maximize app user growth, a certain average price of relay had to be ensured. The task of maintaining the set price targets has been allotted to the Pocket Network Foundation.

✅ PUP-9: Gigachad Pocket Portal Free Tier

This proposal allowed for more support to a larger number of free tier applications with more dynamic volume adjustments while minimizing chain bloat, as part of a strategy to more aggressively onboard new applications. This was done by making adjustments to the BaseRelaysPerPOKT value.

✅ PIP-6.2: Settlers of New Chains

This proposal introduced a new method of bootstrapping chains. The Pocket Network Foundation would provide a minimum number of relays (revenue) on each new RelayChainID to attract enough nodes to provide quality service to new apps. This allowed for smoother onboarding and servicing of new chains which were whitelisted on Pocket Network.

wPOKT

Pocket Network announced wPOKT in early Q2 ‘21, a micro-economy looking to bring innovative tokenomics and unstoppable infrastructure to Ethereum Dapps and Protocols.Since then the team has been working hard to ensure a unified, coordinated, and smooth launch. Dev log #7 was published earlier today!Here is the summary of developments till now and key updates from last week:

wPOKT farming app has been built by Raid Guild and is ready to go.
wPOKT farming app and POKT <> wPOKT bridge to be released alongside each other.
The POKT <> wPOKT bridge by Boostsy Labs is currently undergoing it’s 1st pen test (CertiK), with the 2nd one (Packet Labs) coming up next.
The Multi-chain bridge connecting native POKT to Ethereum/EVM compatible networks for wPOKT is under development by Ferrum Network.
PIP-10: Security by Anonymity Option voting period is nearing an end; so far, it has 5 unanimous votes in favor for it.
Selection of volunteer community signers for the Gnosis Safe 5/7 multi-sig. Read more about it here.

Sign up for email updates and alerts at https://wrapped.pokt.network/Read the full developer log #7 here:https://bit.ly/wPOKTdevlog7

Other Community Updates

Long-term community member Lex Moskovski put together a thread on twitter this week based on historical numbers and performance of Pocket Network and its blockchain data. Read it here:

@POKTnetwork is a crucial piece of Web3 infrastructure, finally starting to get a glimpse of recognition it deserves.

We have spent a couple of months crunching its blockchain and this thread is a tl;dr of the tens of gigabytes of data.$POKT🧵 [1/19] pic.twitter.com/cOBWB0rruu— Lex Moskovski 🐙 (@mskvsk) January 5, 2022

NODEy & POKTopus

Meet Nodey and Poktopus! They are your friendly neighborhood Pocketeers for answering all questions you have about Pocket Network.You can learn fundamental concepts of Pocket Network from Nodey’s “What is” series here:Chapter 1: What is Pocket Network?Chapter 2: What is an Application?Chapter 3: What’s a Node?Chapter 4: Network layer of $POKTChapter 5: What is a Session?Administered & founded by a long-term community member Chris Jenkins, The Poktopus Den is the unofficial community of Pocket Network with over 1,700 members on Telegram and 2,700+ followers on Twitter!Hop in and ask your queries and see them answered by our community.Join Telegram - https://t.me/UnofficialPoktFollow on Twitter - https://twitter.com/thepoktopus

Fractional Staking by POKTpool

Stay up to date with POKT by subscribing to their Substack newsletter and following their Twitter account @POKTpooldigest. Join their discord channel to know more and take part in fractional staking!https://discord.gg/7ZKfEJUR

Node Runner Office Hours

This week’s Node Runner Office Hours spoke about:

Node Pilot now works on the Windows platform as well.
Quick recap of the benefits of accessing infra via Pocket’s RPC Endpoints compared to configuring similar service from a cloud provider like AWS.
PUP-10 proposal which allowed for increase in nodesPerSession to 24 will see a phased launch with the number of nodes being increased gradually. The code is currently in staging and is being reviewed. The first phase of increase in number of nodes is expected to happen in this week.
If your transaction hash is not reflecting on 3rd party websites, then make sure to check on Pocket Explorer.
A lot of currently requested relays from apps are coming from the Frankfurt region. Recommendation is to keep the nodes spread across major regions.
xDAI chain has been giving peaks of relays as the Dark Forest activity picks up. Node runners are advised to watch this space and keep their nodes staked for xDAI relays.
Quick pointers and several options on how to run a Pocket servicer node from scratch.

Watch the video here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYs3qiMjRb8Node Runner Office Hours is a weekly community call that happens every Wednesday at 1 PM, EST. Head over to the Pocket Network discord channel to subscribe to the call next Wednesday.https://bit.ly/POKTARCADEdscrd

News

Crypto Infrastructure Firm Pocket Network Raises $10M

Pocket Network gets into a strategic partnership with Republic Capital, RockTree Capital, Arrington Capital, C2 Ventures, Eden Block, Zee Prime Captial, and others to expand adoption and node coverage, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region.This news has picked up traction across multiple publications, such as, but not limited to:

#redPOKT giveaway

To start the New Year, we have, for our amazing community - a $POKT Airdrop!You can participate by going here:

Announcing 📢 “Lucky RED POCKET Envelope” Airdrop for our amazing @poktnetwork growing community.

Grand Prize Winner will get 8,888 POKT!With 100 more lucky 🧧 winners!Check out the details NOW in the comments link to WIN! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/dRFsJvEwKY— Pocket Network | Is Hiring 👀🚀 (@POKTnetwork) January 6, 2022

Thank you all for making it until the end. You are true Pocketeers. Wish you all a very Happy New Year and best of luck for an equally awesome 2022!And stay tuned for more such exciting updates 👀

Announcement of announcement… 🔜 pic.twitter.com/Wz258nIvX1

— Pocket Network | Is Hiring 👀🚀 (@POKTnetwork) December 31, 2021

What can you do to drive relays and add nodes to the network?

Apps & App Users

If you care about privacy and decentralization, replace the default network provider in your MetaMask wallet with actual decentralized node infrastructure by adding a Pocket-powered RPC endpoints for Ethereum, Avalanche, xDAI, Fuse, and/or Polygon through the custom rpc settings!Try out any of these other apps listed in the Conscious Dappitalism page within our new docs.You can also earn a skill-role in our Discord community server for dogfooding any of those applications by completing a quest within the POKT arcade.

Nodes & Node Runners

Don’t know how to run a node? Check out the Node Runner docs above to learn how.Try out Node Pilot, it’s the most user-friendly option to spin up both base layer blockchain nodes and Pocket nodes.If you run into any issues, a community of node runners (and our support team) would be happy to help. If you’d prefer to not run a node yourself, check out the forum for a list of node providers offering their services to people interested in participating in the ecosystem.

How to purchase POKT to stake?

When you are ready to take the step forward in supporting decentralized node infrastructure and earning Pocket’s native cryptocurrency for serving apps then visit any of these community-established OTCs:https://forum.pokt.network/t/secondary-markets-for-pokt/629They are the best way to buy or sell POKT; and it helps nodes cover the cost of their infrastructure. Join either private telegram channels (requires telegram) and message the admin to get started. Note that there are fees associated with the OTCs to help cover their costs and that neither Pocket Network, Inc., the Pocket DAO, nor the Pocket Foundation receives any of these fees nor any proceeds from the sale of POKT through the OTCs.