Weekly Relay Recap #46 ️

Over the last week (11/11-11/17), the Pocket Network protocol successfully relayed over 795.9M application requests & settled at 12,101 nodes!

Weekly Relay Recap & Analysis 👋

This week’s relays continued to trend downwards alongside the overall dip of the crypto-market, a reversal is expected as the general market picks back up but also as the protocol continues to aggressively support additional blockchain networks and the portal continues to organically onboard new decentralized applications/tools/services.Let’s dive a little deeper into the small dip in relays. The drop in relays is mostly attributed to Harmony's public RPC, which was routing some of its traffic through Pocket's decentralized network of Harmony nodes.Working with Harmony, Pocket engineers opted to exclude Pocket from the rotation while the team investigates an issue with the public RPC's configuration, in which it expects the block height of a node it's calling to be the same as the last node it called, even if it's calling historical data for which recent blocks aren't relevant.This type of behavior is predictably going to have a hard time using a diverse network of nodes. However, it is not inevitable; as far as we can tell, all other Harmony apps are still using Pocket, because they don't rely on this same "stickiness".The Pocket engineering team continues to work with the Harmony team in investigating this issue and see if the Portal can replicate the stickiness that Harmony's public RPC expects. When that effort is successful, Harmony's public RPC will be able to reinstate Pocket into the public RPC rotation and continue giving Pocket a larger chunk of the traffic for nodes to serve.The average daily relays have hovered around ~114M for the past week, the first week we’ve dipped below 1B weekly relays since achieving the milestone.Although, it’s important to highlight another major milestone: the network now has over 12k nodes, roughly 2k more nodes than the previous week. That makes Pocket Network one of the most decentralized protocols in terms of overall node count!

Over 3.5B relays have been processed in total throughout the last four weeks. The exact figures are displayed in the table below.

For those interested in diving deeper into the metrics, one can find them on C0D3R’s Pocket Network Charts.The pie chart below shows the distribution of all POKT rewards minted over the past week between the service nodes, block producers, and the DAO.

POKTscan shows Harmony continuing to lead the blockchain pack in the number of relays routed through the Pocket Network protocol. Followed by Ethereum, then a close race between Polygon and Fuse, which are both slightly ahead of xDAI.

What do you think the lineup will be like next week? Share your thoughts on Twitter!

Updates

GovernanceThe levels of engagement on the forum are at an all-time high. It has been a very active period for the POKT DAO and community!There are 3 active proposals up for voting on Snapshot:

• PEP-13: POKTscan App
• PEP-14: POKTwatch
• PUP-9: Gigachad Pocket Portal Free Tier

New proposals are up for community feedback:PIP-7: Consensus Rule Change - Validator/Servicer Split & Validator ConsolidationValidator nodes and Service nodes are currently bundled, which means nodes eligible for servicing relays are also eligible for block production. Pocket Network Inc. proposes to change this with the RC-0.7.0 release to address block space limitations (max block space is 4mb) that’re approaching as the network gets closer to 18k validators.Before this limit is reached, the protocol will need to implement a new consensus rule benching validator nodes outside of the top MaxValidators parameter but continue participating as service nodes (processing relays).In combination with this, the Core Protocol team proposes that Max Validators should be lowered from 50k to 1k, which translates to only the top 1k staked nodes would be eligible for block production while every other node would be able to continue servicing relays. It also means that service node counts can remain unbounded; as matter of fact, lowering the validator count enables service node counts to go far higher than they could have otherwise.PIP-8: Using Coordinape for ContributorAt the moment, there’s only one class of stakeholder (i.e voter) in the DAO and it is high-friction to join. Becoming a Voter in the DAO requires completing a series of quests to level up and verifying their identity on BrightID.The level of friction involved is undermining the potential engagement of new and existing contributors in our community. Therefore, the Governance lead Jack is proposing that Pocket recognizes 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!PEP-16: Universal Contributor IncomeBuilding off the previous proposal mentioned above, the only way that Contributors can get paid by the DAO is by submitting grant proposals to fund their work retroactively. This means that contributing to the DAO requires taking on a fair amount of risk and opportunity cost. Distributing a fixed percentage of the future DAO revenue on a monthly basis would provide contributors with more stability and ultimately engage more contributors overall.To start with, the distribution of this revenue would be determined by Coordinape. This forms the foundation for Universal Contributor Income within the Pocket Network ecosystem!Join any discussion and share your opinion on the forum by clicking any of the hyperlinked proposals. Your voice matters, it will be heard.Community-Developed Ecosystem ToolsNode PilotNode Pilot upgraded to v0.8.12 and released Node Launcher earlier this week!It’s the easiest way to RUN and OWN and MONETIZE your nodes, plus it just got a lot easier.Node Launcher (NL) is the 1st open-source deployment engine of it’s kind. Developers can now programmatically deploy and control blockchain nodes in NodeJS using Docker. NL can be used to standardize the deployment of any blockchain node or validator. It’s the primary driving force behind Node Pilot.This new release includes but is not limited to:

• New synching status for Pocket nodes
• New versions of xDAI and Avalanche
• A better boot process
• Assign unique peer ports for all chains
• Expanded logging to catch errors during node setup

Join the Node Pilot Discord to chat with the team.POKTSCANLast week, the POKTscan team announced the release of the newest version of POKTscan!It now comes with new reward tools (by node and by chains) as well as a new makeover. With the addition of webhooks, you can see Discord notifications on the network, feed, and jail channels. This demonstrates what’s possible to create. For example, the team has built a daily summary bot for the Pocket Network community server.Even more recently, the POKTscan team delivered a new feature: app stake/unstaking/unstaked & staked app tokens.Join the POKTscan Discord to chat with the team.POKTwatchPOKTwatch is a new Pocket Network blockchain explorer with a slick user experience and a simplistic user interface!Users will be able to see the POKT over-the-counter price, node/app counts, as well as both the latest blocks with the number of POKT minted and the latest transactions with the number of POKT sent. Also, users can search by address, transaction hash, and block.Check it out for yourself:https://www.poktwatch.io/The POKTwatch team plans to add new features such as viewing pending transactions and network analytics. Viewing pending TXs is something many in the community have a need for, which POKTwatch would improve on this UX significantly.Career OpportunitiesAs the Pocket Network ecosystem grows, the POKT team is looking to expand. Here are three new job positions that are now available:Dev Rel LeadCommunity LeadBD representative

News

RockTree Capital & Pocket Partner for Asia AccelerationThe other week Pocket Network partnered with RockTree capital to provide strategic support as part of an aggressive growth strategy into Asia as the protocol expands node count, blockchain infrastructure, and crypto-media activity.https://bit.ly/POKTpartnerswithRockTreeCapitalIoTeX Ecosystem SpotlightAdam hops on the IoTeX Ecosystem Spotlight to talk about the benefits of Pocket for both node operators running IoTeX nodes and developers building IoTeX dapps. Watch the timestamped Pocket segment below:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReIibEn3pKYWallStreet NinjaPocket Network delivers multi-chain support through a unified interface to the unstoppable finance suite WallStreet Ninja.

Official announcement coming soon!Tally Community CallTally is a community-owned and community-operated web3 wallet, which makes them a perfect partner for the community-governed web3 infrastructure protocol!In an effort to decentralize their RPC layer, they’ve invited Pocket Network to speak and present during their upcoming community call today at 2 PM EST.

It went really well :)Pocket Network Monthly Community CallEarlier today, at 12 PM EST, we had our largest community call to date!The planned topics include:

• wPOKT Update
• Ledger Update
• PIP-7: Validator/Servicer Split & Validator Consolidation
• PIP-8: Using Coordinape for Contributor Onboarding & Incentives
• PEP-16: Universal Contributor Income

If you missed it, active community member Jinx (aka POKTopus) live-tweeted the community call and shared his own commentary on it throughout the session. You can catch up by reading through this Twitter thread:

POKT LIVE TWEET

— Poktopus 🐙 (@thepoktopus) November 19, 2021

Also, the community call recording has been recently uploaded to our YouTube Channel. You can watch it here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0vNkF2jgC4RSVP for the next community call on December 17th Friday at 12 PM EST:https://bit.ly/DECcommunitycall

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

Apps & App UsersIf 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.NodesDon’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.