Relay Recap #111 features another huge week from Polygon Archival RPC traffic, BSC showing strength in the Top 5, and an update on Portal v2. This recap covers stats from April 13 – April 19.
Happy Friday! We’re back with another Relay Recap.
For starters, Polygon Archival RPC relays didn’t just rest on their laurels after last week’s 151% gains. The chain stepped on the gas this week, posting a huge 762% increase in relays. Meanwhile, we saw super consistent performance across the board from the rest of the supported chains, with total daily relay counts mostly hovering between 1.2 and 1.3 billion (we had one day this week that cleared the 1.3 billion mark).
Archivals and testnets are also showing no signs of slowing down from recent strong performances. Polygon Archival, Ethereum Goerli, and Polygon Mumbai have all been flexing their relay muscles, making their way into the top gainers list this week.
As far as the Top 5 chains go, BSC had the most gains, with a 23% increase in relays. Ethereum and Polygon, on the other hand, shed about 3% of their share of total relays to other chains.
Beyond the Top 5, we also saw Meter relays more than double, and Arbitrum One with a big week of its own, racking up over 40 million weekly relays. And let’s not forget Optimism, which moved past 200 million daily relays and had its second especially strong week in a row.
Also of note was Kava making a huge leap into the top 10 for earnings per node, while Meter and NEAR had their own big movements in the same metric.
Throughout this period, the network serviced an average of 1.26 billion daily relays. The daily high for this time period was recorded at 1.336 billion on April 14th.
Overall, 8.8 billion relays were serviced during the week. This was a 5% increase from the 8.4 billion relays the prior week.
Heads Up: Portal v2 upgrade starts next week!
Before we go too much further, make sure to mark your calendars – next week is the beginning of the Portal v2 upgrade!
It’ll take approximately 2 weeks to launch our new product and move across cloud providers. On April 26th, starting at 12pm Eastern / 4pm UTC, the Portal UI will be unavailable for 2 hours while we migrate our Portal database from AWS to GCP. We’ll be monitoring the database for 24 hours and migrating our first region from AWS Ireland to GCP Madrid on April 27th.
We expect no interruptions to servicing relays during the migration process. However, if you do notice any relay interruption, please notify our team immediately. And if you spot any anomalies or issues with the Portal or the Network, reach out via https://support.pokt.network/. You can keep tabs in Discord for all the latest info as the upgrade progresses!
Now back to the weekly stats…
Chain Highlights: Polygon Archival RPC Traffic Booms
Below are some of the chains with the top week-over-week relay growth.
The green percentages show total weekly relay growth, while the charts show the two-week trend in relays per node. Images courtesy of POKTscan!
Polygon Archival ↗️ 762%
🦾 2,445 nodes servicing
📡 11,382 average daily relays per node
Meter ↗️ 115%
🦾 142 nodes servicing
📡 2,817 average daily relays per node
Ethereum Goerli ↗️ 82%
🦾 1,517 nodes servicing
📡 1,563 average daily relays per node
NEAR ↗️ 71%
🦾 569 nodes servicing
📡 1,205 average daily relays per node
Polygon Mumbai ↗️ 59%
🦾 2,115 nodes servicing
📡 1,695 average daily relays per node
Arbitrum One ↗️ 46%
🦾 5,577 nodes servicing
📡 1,032 average daily relays per node
Optimism ↗️ 31%
🦾 13,809 nodes servicing
📡 2,141 average daily relays per node
Metis ↗️ 24%
🦾 468 nodes servicing
📡 1,099 average daily relays per node
BSC ↗️ 23%
🦾 20,376 nodes servicing
📡 5,535 average daily relays per node
Node Earnings
From April 13th through April 19th, we once again had no change in the Top 3 rankings for total node earnings, with the gaps between Ethereum, Polygon, and DFKchain staying just about the same as well.
In terms of average daily POKT per node, we saw the following chains make the Top 15 list.
As you can see, Kava was the biggest story for this metric this week. This was due to a big day of relays on the 13th, as the chain cleared 4.2 million relays before coming back down to less than 1 million relays per day for the rest of the week. With the chain still being relatively new on Pocket Network, and less than 300 nodes currently servicing it, this big day of traffic was enough to make the chain fly up this list.
While the top 6 stayed exactly the same, we did have a couple of other big movers beyond Kava. Meter had a strong, consistent week, with relays easily topping last week’s high in every day of this period. Relays more than doubled overall, while the number of nodes servicing the chain actually decreased a bit, helping to move Meter up 7 spots in the rankings.
NEAR was an interesting case this week. The chain actually had a great increase in relays, up 71% from last week, but this was complemented by the number of nodes servicing the chain also increasing dramatically. While there were around 150 nodes servicing the chain last week, we saw a huge jump up to more than 700 nodes this week. All in all, the 71% increase in relays was more than balanced out by the greater number of nodes servicing the chain, causing NEAR to drop down 6 spots to the outer edge of these rankings.
Node Infrastructure
As of April 19th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 20,775 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 0.22% from the previous week.