Pocket Network (POKT)

From its partner's Fuse's blog (25-2-2021):

"Pocket Network can be thought of as a decentralized peer infrastructure layer for any compatible blockchain."

Basics

• Based in: 2017
• Started in / Announced on:
• Mainnet release: 7-2020
• From Our Network (19-6-2021):

"Pocket Network is a decentralized relay network that provides apps with RPC access to the long tail of blockchain networks using independent full nodes."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Bugs/Exploits

• From Our Network (19-6-2021):

"In May, the chain halted temporarily due to a change in transaction indexer but did not impact node count overall. Tendermint began treating nodes beyond the MaxValidators limit (5k) differently, causing a temporary spike in jailed nodes. PUP-8 upgrade increased the node limit to 50k to address this."

Governance

DAO

• Has a DAO (31-12-2021).

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].

Implementations

• Built on: Tendermint
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• From Ansem's Q1 report (1-1-2022):

"Their economic structure is setup to incentivize full node operators by paying them when developers need to use the network to access data for their applications. Many developers need access to high quality read/writes directly from blockchains, but don’t always have access to RPCs specialized for their applications. Pocket describes itself as an “Uber for servers” because you technically don’t know what *server* you will connect to when you query their network but they handle all of the service requests via their blockchain to provide users what they need. As more developers use the Pocket Network, node operators make more money from participating in the network, which in turn incentivizes more node operators to join the network.

Pocket Network’s economic system is very clever and it is designed in a way that reduces costs substantially for developers using the network. There are three main functions: staking, minting, and burning POKT. On the application side, you have the ability to put your POKT in escrow while you are using the protocol. For developers, instead of paying fees to a company for some infrastructure-as-a-service, with Pocket Network they can stake POKT up front for access to the network and then use the network until they remove that escrow. Because Pocket Network is not a centralized company that needs to charge fees to cover margin or pay for cloud hosting services, all of this overhead is removed and it is much cheaper for developers. Regarding nodes within the Pocket Network that service developer’s requests, they stake POKT for the right to do work within the network and they will earn a certain amount of POKT for each request that they serve from the application side."

• From its partner's Fuse's blog (25-2-2021):

"It incentivizes the maintenance of Validator Nodes that empowers dApps to interface with decentralized networks without a single point of failure. Pocket Network is decentralized because the information about the transactions relayed through it is stored on the Pocket blockchain-powered by Tendermint consensus. In simple terms, a dApp will ping a Dispatch Node, letting it know the blockchain it is trying to connect to. The dApp is then paired with 5 Validator Nodes who are running a full node on the desired blockchain. Each request from the dApp is routed to all 5 blockchain nodes, through the Validator Nodes, and the responses are sent back. The dApp then takes the 5 responses and finds the rational majority, ensuring they never have to trust a single node."

Upgrades

• From Bitcoin.com (28-7-2022):

"Pocket DAO, voters are implementing stake-weighted servicer node rewards, and by increasing validator node rewards by a factor of five."

Staking

• From its partner's Fuse's blog (25-2-2021):

"Pocket Validator Nodes stake POKT token to ensure desirable behavior and they are rewarded with newly minted POKT for each completed relay. A Validator Node can run full nodes on several blockchains at the same time. This enables the existence of multiple independent full nodes on the serviced blockchains being run professionally and reliably, just like they are by centralized cloud providers.

Applications taking advantage of Pocket Network also need to stake POKT. The amount that they stake will determine the number of relays that they can request each hour. At the current stage of development of POKT Network, the supported applications will have the right to a certain number of relays per hour indefinitely, as long as they continue staking, and they can withdraw their POKT at any time."

Validator Stats

• From Twitter (29-12-2021):

"The protocol had 600 nodes in January. Today we’re pushing 18,000."

Compliance

• From a list of projects that implements address checking, sanctions, TRM, etc (15-8-2022):

"Pocket Portal locking addresses associated with Tornado Cash"

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

• From Bitcoin.com (28-7-2022):

"Pocket’s protocol is serving approximately 1 billion RPC requests every day, and is on course towards a goal of supporting 100 blockchains before year-end. At the same time, as Pocket Network has seen explosive growth in the number of active nodes on the network (all the way up to almost 50,000 nodes in May of this year), infrastructure costs of the protocol have risen as well."

• From Twitter (29-12-2021):

"In the month of July we did 200M relays. We’re on track to break 5B in December. We’ve topped over $500M in revenue for nodes in 2021 and on track to break $50M for the month of December."

• From Our Network (4-9-2021):

"The network saw a historical average of ~4.5M requests a day pre-August. Now the network is printing an all-time-high of ~41M average daily relays. Key drivers for relays have been demand from Dark Forest players and Austin Griffith's scaffold.eth tooling for solidity developers. Pocket’s recent integrations of other chains has lead to an increasing diversification in which traction is being sourced including Fuse and xDAI."

• From Our Network (19-6-2021):

"Average daily relays on Pocket has averaged ~4m and ~1/3 of the network’s peak at 12m in April. Over the last four weeks, 142M relays have been driven by the Pocket Gateway. In May, node operators served 169.7M relays from blockchain applications."

Projects that use or built on it

• Fuse; partnered with it and will integrate it (25-2-2021).

Team, Funding, Partnerships, etc.

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Has 'a team of 25 full-time contributors.' (25-2-2021).
• Michael O’Rourke; CEO

Funding

• They received a grant from Tezos.
• Raised $10m from Arrington and Republic Capital (6-1-2022).

Partners

• From the Fuse blog (28-9-2021):

"The Fuse Foundation will exchange 750,000 FUSE for 250,000 POKT to broaden access to Pocket’s RPC call relay service for the Fuse ecosystem."

(:

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