Weekly Relay Recap #49 ️

Over the last week (12/09-12/15) the Pocket Network protocol successfully relayed over 1.39 Billion relays application requests (up by 24.8%) & the number of staked nodes increased further to 15.2k nodes (up by 7%) when compared to last week!

Weekly Relay Recap & Analysis 👋

Relay growth continued this week after an AWS outage prompted some of the Harmony users to switch to Pocket’s public Harmony RPC endpoint. The spillover to Pocket Network due to the AWS outage caused the relays to peak at an all-time high of 216M relays on Friday, December 9th, 2021.Read more about it here:https://www.reddit.com/r/harmony_one/comments/ran9n5/the_state_of_rpc_performance_week_of_dec_6th/In the previous Weekly Relay Recap, we dove into how December started on a strong note with growth in relays all around. Increase in Harmony relays, a two-day community round of Dark Forest hosted by MarrowDAO, and an Ethereum dapp all contributed to strong growth in relays for December.From early on in December, we are seeing a consistent increase in Harmony relays. Even spiking to 147M relays in a single day, reminiscent of the early days in November.

The average daily relays rose significantly to around 198.5M relays for the past week.Over 3.88B relays have been processed in total throughout the last four weeks. The exact figures are displayed in the table below.

Node count continued to trend upwards; once again, adding more than 1000 nodes compared to last week.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 Pocket 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 both Polygon and Fuse, with xDAI trailing slightly behind but ahead of other blockchain networks. Here's the relay distribution change of the top blockchains from the last two weeks:

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

wPOKT

wPOKT dev log #4 was published earlier today!Here’s the quick download:

Boosty Labs has reached code completion of the wPOKT <> POKT token bridge. Audit up next.
The internal dry run of the wPOKT farming application only found minor UX issues, no major compromise of the main app functionality. Debugging up next.
A collective decision was made to leverage Gnosis Safe for a 5-of-7 multi-sig wallet, assuring a high threshold will secure the wPOKT contract.
An invitation has been extended to the community to participate in a public test that will help contribute to the improvement of the wPOKT product ecosystem.

For more details, read the full developer log here:https://bit.ly/wPOKTdevlog4

Governance Updates

There are two active proposals in Pocket’s Snapshot at this point in time:

PEP-17: Returning a Mistaken DAO Fee, Part 2 Electric Boogaloo
PIP-8: Use Coordinape for Contributor & Voter Onboarding

This proposal is under active discussion by community members:

PEP-16: Universal Contributor Income

Along with three new proposals added this week:

PIP-9: Consensus Rule Change - RC-0.8.0

Full proposal here:https://forum.pokt.network/t/pip-9-consensus-rule-change-rc-0-8-0/1351The proposal suggests some very important improvements to the Pocket protocol:

Non-custodial Operator address: Currently the private key where the node is running and the private key that has custody over staked POKT tokens are required to be the same. In cases where the community members are working with 3rd party service providers for running nodes, it means providing them full control of their funds. With this upgrade, the custody of the tokens and the rewards generated will remain with the wallet holder while the node can run independently, giving them full control of their POKT.
Removal of Force-Unstake ‘Burn’: If any Pocket Network node falls below the minimum stake (due to slashing) the punishment is burning all of their staked funds. The proposal suggests that if the node falls below the minimum stake of 15,000 POKT, the node will automatically initiate a 21-day unstake. This is a more befitting response to the infraction committed by the node and will put community members at ease knowing their POKT will not be burnt.
Non-Deterministic Invalid Evidence Fix: The evidence handling protocol in Tendermint is non-deterministic and occasionally causes invalid proposals. Historically, this symptom has caused blocks to be tens of minutes late. A patch would be released so there is true determinism in block production.
Handling of ReplayAttack Error: Relay ReplayAttacks are stopped at the protocol level under the ProofTx verification. However, the protocol is specified to punish the attacker proportionally to the probabilistic replays. The functionality though being present in Pocket Core, it is not working as intended. A patch to be released which fixes this bug.

PUP-10: Increase SessionNodeCount to 24

Full proposal here:https://forum.pokt.network/t/pup-10-increase-sessionnodecount-to-24/1352The proposal suggests to improve scalability and better utilization of the theoretical capacity of the network. By increasing SessionNodeCount, Pocket Network will simultaneously expand the network-wide relay capacity while optimizing for block production times and state size.This change also enables the Portal API to have a larger pool of Service Nodes to choose from in a session, when it applies its cherry-picking strategies creating a higher standard of quality of service for apps using the portal. Given that there would be 24 nodes taking part in a session now instead of 5 earlier, the spread of rewards will also be more uniform across selected nodes in any given session.

PEP-18: Node Launcher (and Node Pilot continued)

Full proposal here:https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-18-node-launcher-and-node-pilot-continued/1364The community members Shane Burgett and Ryan Burgett who are behind Node Pilot and Node Launcher are requesting for additional funds to help fund the operational expense of the last 7 months of developing Node Launcher as well as for setting up both the tools with 7 months of budget runway.Node Launcher, a node deployment engine is a programmatic platform that would act as a standardized toolkit developers could use to create other node deployment applications. Though not part of the initial proposal, the team’s desire is to grow this library to be an approachable tool for creating a new category of node deployment/management applications.Node Pilot is under active development and has been used by hundreds of nodes and with 150+ mainnet POKT validators while in beta. The stable release is expected in Q1’22.Read more about Node Pilot’s earlier proposal here:https://forum.pokt.network/t/pep-6-node-pilot-a-new-node-deployment-solution/940We are seeing active and engaging discussions by the Pocket Network Community on the forums. Join the discussion and share your opinion. Your voice matters and will be heard. You can do so by clicking the hyperlinks of any of the proposals.

Dev Updates

POKT Portal

Here are some key releases from Pocket’s product engineering team this week:New portal API regions are being launched to increase Pocket Network’s redundancy and reduce end-user latency. The first online is Frankfurt with many more regions to come in the next few days.New JSON error returns from the API: Now all errors returned from the API are properly JSON encoded. This will reduce errors from libraries that many app developers use as previously some of our API errors were not in JSON. All of our custom API error codes can be found in the README:https://github.com/pokt-foundation/portal-apiA number of updates and improvements have been published to the Portal API Cherry Picker service. To recap, The Cherry Picker’s basic function is to rate node service by latency and error rate. Here are the changes made the the Cherry Picker API:

Cherry Picker’s responsibility for error checking and penalization of the nodes for errors has been removed. Nodes that have temporary failures are now re-checked within just a few minutes for re-inclusion into the session.
Earlier the range of difference in latency between the nodes did not used to matter and the nodes ranking lower were assigned lesser and lesser % of the relays compared to their counterparts with even slightly better latency. Now, if the 2nd ranked node (by latency) is only a few milliseconds slower than the 1st ranked node, you will receive nearly the exact same amount of relays - weighting that more accurately represents real-world responses.

Read in more detail about the Cherry Picker API improvements here:https://forum.pokt.network/t/cherry-picker-improvements-dec-2021/1332Also, Algorand is now available in the Pocket Portal. Easily mint an Algorand RPC endpoint from the Pocket portal for your application! Here is a walkthrough:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFhwbG_Kq4

Community-developed Ecosystem Tools

NODE PILOT

Node Pilot releases v0.9.5! Here are the updates:

Improved shutdown process
Enables chain node updating without restarting
Fixed update button glitch

Check out all details of the release and know more about Node Pilot by going here.

Other Community Updates

Twitter Threads

Community member Miner49er put together a thread on the “flywheel effect” and how it pertains to the growth of the Pocket Network. Read it here:

Thread about #flywheels in cryptoland and why the @POKTnetwork is experiencing exponential growth in protocol capacity, adoption, revenue to $pokt node runners and, yes, token price, while many other protocols fail to keep the flywheel spinning. pic.twitter.com/81EYEqEAzm

— ☩𝔇𝔒𝔐𝔘𝔖☩ Miner49er🐙 (@miner05843298) December 11, 2021

Fractional Staking through POKT Pool

Last week, we shared how a long-term community member in Pocket Network, Joey Rosati started POKT Pool. The pool is getting a great response from the community members. Here are some recent stats:

The Pool has gone through 5 tranches of spinning up nodes. The latest one is happening today, spinning up 25 new nodes.
The total pool size has almost doubled to 800k+ POKT compared to last week when it was at 450k POKT.
The pool is running 54 nodes earning rewards daily

Any community member can take part as there is no minimum on how much POKT you can stake. You can hop into their Telegram channel and ask for more information.https://t.me/poktpoolPOKTOPUS Community Giveaways are sent straight to the POKT Pool so new members joining the POKT ecosystem can now immediately start earning rewards.This week’s #POKTSTORM community-driven giveaway ended just yesterday. Three lucky winners were picked to receive 2,000 POKT each!Follow the POKTOPUS channel for future giveaways.https://twitter.com/thepoktopusTogether, the community plans to self-organize 6 more #POKTstorm campaigns.If you’d like to donate to the community-led POKTstorm campaign, you can donate POKT to this address.The POKTopus Den Community Members added some cool merchandise this week with a series of branded shirts and hoodies. Check these out here:https://felonious-monk.creator-spring.com/listing/official-poktopus-gear

Node Runner Office Hours

This week’s Node Runner Office Hours spoke about:

The Governance proposals - PIP-9 & PUP-10 and how it benefits the node runners.
Ideas around wPOKT.
Improvements that Pocket Core’s Cherry Picker API brings for DApps and Node Runners in the Pocket ecosystem.

Watch the video here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn75N0_fEzsNode 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

Monthly Community Call

Pocket Network’s last community call of the year happened today where a range of topics, including protocol upgrades, DAO proposals, and community projects was discussed!In case you missed it, you can watch it here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axTSKcMnp9w

News

Pocket Network growth soars more than 300% in November

Pocket Network hit #1 on the industry-recognized Web3 Index after listing alongside major blockchain middleware protocols.This came at a point when Pocket Network generated $1.45M USD in demand-side fees and $29.5M USD total in overall network revenue in the past 30 days, which was 7 times higher than that earned by Arweave and 163 times that earned by The Graph during the month of November.Head over to Yahoo Finance to read about the entire coverage:https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pocket-network-growth-soars-more-213000816.html

Pocket Network gets mentioned in Techcrunch

Techcrunch recently wrote about how to understand where Web3 stands and what the future holds. They also reached out to some of the stalwarts in the ecosystem to hear their views.Lior Messika, Founder and Managing Partner of Eden Block, talks about the Pocket Network!Within the broader context of web3, we see tremendous growth across two distinct layers in the stack — infrastructure and applications. Unlike TCP/IP (a core piece of internet infrastructure that cannot be monetized) at the dawn of the internet, decentralized protocols and baked-in incentive systems make running decentralized infrastructure extremely valuable. Technologies like the Pocket Network manifest this in full force, with billions of relays per week. The Pocket Network provides decentralized infrastructure to an entire ecosystem — and compensates its node runners handsomely for the work. At the current state of relays, the forecasted annualized revenue of the network is in the hundreds of millions.Read it here:https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/14/7-investors-discuss-web3s-present-and-peer-into-its-future/

The Global Expansion of Web3 - An event by Republic.co

Does decentralization mean a compromise on efficiency and scaling or can the two be aligned?Michael O'Rourke, CEO & Cofounder of Pocket Network Inc; Omer Ozden, CEO & Founder of Rocktree Capital; Alex Ye, Managing Director at Republic Crypto; Lisa Carmen Wang, Host of Profit to The People, talk about the future and global expansion of Web3.0. They discuss:

How decentralization creates efficiency and scalability
How Web3 projects expand into Asia and Greater China
Why and how can anyone get involved in the expansion of Web3

They also talk about how the Pocket Network is killing it as a decentralized infrastructure provider to dapps, providing efficient and scalable access to the top blockchains in Web3 space.We thank Lisa Carmen Wang and Alex Ye for inviting us!Watch it here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsye7MZqVJ8

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 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.