Optimism, Other Chains Are Gaining in Their Shares of Relays

Happy weekend everyone! We’re back with another Relay Recap. In the time frame covered here, Pocket Network relays took a sizable dip on POKTscan compared to the prior week, largely due to a temporary node configuration issue. On June 18th, a misconfigured node provider led to nodes failing to submit a portion of their proof/claim transactions. For anyone checking POKTscan during this time, this showed as a large dip in relays (see the chart below), even though there was actually no change in demand from apps.Application service was unaffected during this time, and a solution to prevent similar issues has been identified for the next release.Throughout the week, the network serviced an average of787 million daily relays, with the daily high for this time period recorded at 862 million on June 17th.

Overall, 5.5 billion relays were serviced during the week, representing a 20% decrease over the 6.9 billion relays the prior week. Again, this takes into account the configuration-related dip described above, although app demand was unchanged.

Chain Highlights

While most of the larger chains were down in total relays this week, Harmony nevertheless gained 5% in its share of total relays compared to last week, jumping from 21% to 26%. This placed it even with Polygon for the top share of relays across all supported chains. Gnosis - xDai and Ethereum, on the other hand, saw sizable drops in their share of total relays, dipping 4% and 3%, respectively.Optimism continued its strong start after recently being allowlisted on Pocket Network, with multiple days over 2.5 million relays during this week. After the network-wide dip on June 18th, Optimism closed the period with 4 straight days of increasing relays, including a weekly high of 2.55 million on the final day. The quick start from this chain has planted it in the top 15 relay chains across the network.In a week where relays from most chains were down, several of our smaller sources of relays bucked that trend and grew their totals this week. As you’ll see in the Relay Distribution graphic below, the “Other” sources of relays grew from 4% to 6% this week, a significant increase. Some of the specific chains accounting for this growth were:

• IoTeX: Relays up 31%
• Evmos: Relays up 23%
• Swimmer: Relays up 19%
• OEC: Relays up 16%

Remember to visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other chains that Pocket Network supports!

Node Earnings

From June 16th through June 22nd, each of the top 4 relay chains produced between 1 and 3 million in POKT earnings for nodes, with Polygon and Harmony neck-and-neck for the top spot at 2.7 million. The ordering of the top 4 remained the same as last week.

In terms of average daily POKT earned per node, the top 5 chains at the end of this time frame were:

• Polygon
• Harmony
• Optimism
• Gnosis - xDai
• Ethereum

While the top 2 remained the same from last week, Optimism swapped places with Gnosis - xDai to move up to 3rd in average earnings per node. Optimism’s strong showing on this list is due to its quick start (multiple millions of daily relays almost immediately after being supported), combined with the relatively low number of nodes servicing the chain. So far, Optimism has come out of the gates as a nice opportunity for the node runners who choose to service it to boost their earnings.

Node Infrastructure

As of June 22nd, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 48,997 active nodes across approximately 30 different countries, allowing the network to provide constant uptime and resiliency while supporting 50 different chains.

Wrap Up

• Total relays were down on POKTscan due to a node configuration issue, although app demand was unchanged. This issue has since been resolved.
• Harmony grew its share of total relays significantly, from 21% last week to 26% this week. This tied it with Polygon for the top spot.
• Optimism has continued its strong start after being allowlisted, and made its way further up the list of most profitable chains for node runners.
• Chains like IoTeX, Evmos, Swimmer, and OEC posted week-over-week relay growth, even while configuration issues resulted in decreases for most other chains.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!