Relay Recap #102 features Polygon reclaiming the #1 spot, Arbitrum One RPC traffic lifting off, and several big moves on the relays per node rankings. This recap covers stats from February 9 - February 15.

Happy Friday! We’re back with another Relay Recap.

This week, we saw a big swing at the top, as Polygon jumped Ethereum to reclaim the #1 spot for the most relays serviced by Pocket Network. The two chains went in opposite directions, as Polygon grew its total relays significantly and went from a 26% share to a 32% share, while Ethereum had a drop in relays that took it from a 28% share to a 17% share.

DFKchain, BSC, and Harmony were some of the other big gainers in the Top 10 chains this week. Beyond some of these larger sources of relays, we saw strong growth from several of our other supported chains, as we saw the "Others" portion of the Relay Distribution chart bump up significantly (from a 7% share of total relays to an 11% share).

On that note, we were excited to see major growth from Arbitrum One RPC traffic this week, one of our more recently allowlisted chains. You can see the list of Chain Highlights below to get a better feel for some of the other chains that stood out this week as well.

Overall, relays were just about flat compared to last week, with a marginal decrease that was due in large part to a dip in Ethereum relays. This dip from ETH played a large part in the drop below 1 billion total relays on February 10th. After that point, though, daily relays trended mostly up for the rest of the period, including a push all the way over 1.3 billion on the 13th.

Throughout this period, the network serviced an average of 1.162 billion daily relays. The daily high for this time period was recorded at 1.325 billion on February 13th.

Overall, 8.13 billion relays were serviced during the week. This was a 0.4% decrease from the 8.17 billion relays the prior week.

Chain Highlights

Below are some of the chains with the top week-over-week relay growth. Images courtesy of POKTscan!

Arbitrum One ↗️ 1,023%

🦾 161 nodes servicing

📡 4,072 average daily relays per node

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Polygon Archival ↗️ 893%

🦾 613 nodes servicing

📡 6,491 average daily relays per node

OEC ↗️ 50%

🦾 2,418 nodes servicing

📡 907 average daily relays per node

FUSE ↗️ 30%

🦾 20,589 nodes servicing

📡 660 average daily relays per node

BSC ↗️ 27%

🦾 20,566 nodes servicing

📡 3,398 average daily relays per node

Boba ↗️ 25%

🦾 2,611 nodes servicing

📡 1,811 average daily relays per node

Polygon ↗️ 24%

🦾 21,088 nodes servicing

📡 17,779 average daily relays per node

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IoTeX ↗️ 23%

🦾 17,720 nodes servicing

📡 814 average daily relays per node

Meter ↗️ 23%

🦾 63 nodes servicing

📡 1,417 average daily relays per node

Harmony ↗️ 21%

🦾 20,787 nodes servicing

📡 1,580 average daily relays per node

Optimism ↗️ 21%

🦾 13,993 nodes servicing

📡 800 average daily relays per node

DFKchain ↗️ 20%

🦾 20,583 nodes servicing

📡 8,076 average daily relays per node

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Node Earnings

From February 9th through February 15th, we had Polygon fly past Ethereum in terms of POKT earnings, thanks to Polygon's growth in weekly relays and Ethereum's corresponding drop. Polygon has now opened up a wide margin, with DFKchain rounding out the Top 3 behind Ethereum.

DFKchain also established a bit more separation between it and Gnosis - xDai (which had 547.2k POKT earnings for the week), after multiple weeks in which the two chains had been virtually tied for the #3 spot in this metric.

In terms of average daily relays per node, we saw the following chains make the Top 15 list.

As shown above, the three big moves to take note of were Polygon Archival, Arbitrum One, and Klaytn.

In the case of Polygon Archival, the chain was able to fly into the Top 5 thanks to a nearly 900% increase in relays this week. That increase was due to a massive spike in relays on February 13th (shown in the Chain Highlights section above).

Meanwhile, Arbitrum One RPC traffic was up more than 1,000%, while the number of nodes servicing the chain actually decreased from 228 to 161 as well. These two factors combined (more relays divided among less nodes) helped rocket the chain up 24 spots and into the Top 10.

Lastly, supply and demand took over for Klaytn - after a spot in the Top 5 last week, the number of node runners servicing the chain grew nearly 300%, while relays stayed almost exactly flat. This bumped Klaytn down 10 spots, although it still hung on to a spot in the Top 15.

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Node Infrastructure

As of February 15th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 21,233 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 up about 0.3% from the previous week.

Note: PIP-22 and PUP-19 brought big changes to the incentives that shape Pocket’s node infrastructure, by way of introducing stake-weighted servicer rewards and increased validator rewards. We’ll likely continue seeing a consolidation of nodes, as node runners and providers combine stakes to take advantage of these incentive structures that were rolled out in v0.9.0.

New Collaborations This Week

We were also excited to announce some new collaborations and integrations this week, with both Bankless Card and Unstoppable Domains.

With Bankless Card, we are now working with them to decentralize part of their dApp's critical RPC infrastructure. By tapping into Pocket's fleet of nodes, payments and other transactions related to Bankless Card can become more censorship-resistant and immutable. You can read more about the news and check out our recent AMA with the Bankless DAO crew.

We also announced a new integration with Unstoppable Domains in the Pocket Wallet. Now, you can visit the Unstoppable Domains site, register a domain of your choice, and use it in place of a long, complex wallet address to send $POKT payments and transfers. The domain is yours forever, with no renewal fees, and helps you take control and ownership of your own digital identity.

Wrap Up

• Polygon completes its move back into the #1 spot.
• Arbitrum One RPC traffic starts to take off.
• Polygon Archival has a huge 1-day spike that takes it into the Top 5 for average relays per node.
• Diverse relay growth across networks, as 9 other chains post at least 20% relay growth.
• Announcing a new collaboration with Bankless Card, and a new integration with Unstoppable Domains in the Pocket Wallet.

Thank you for reading!