Relay Recap #110 features a huge week from Polygon Archival relays, diverse growth in mainnet RPC traffic, and several chains moving up 5+ spots in the POKT earnings rankings. This recap covers stats from April 6 - April 12.

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

This week, although we had a slight dip in total relays, we had several mainnets post strong results, including Meter, NEAR, Osmosis, Celo, Optimism, and Metis (all of which grew relays by more than 20%). For some of these chains, this performance was enough to help them make big moves up the Top 15 rankings for POKT earnings per node - more on that below.

The biggest relay gains went to Polygon Archival, as the chain jumped from 9 million relays to more than 22 million relays, a 151% increase.

We also saw growth in 4 of the Top 5 chains, as Ethereum was the only one of that group that didn't see increased relays this week.

• Polygon ⬆️ 6%
• DFKchain ⬆️ 10%
• Gnosis - xDAI ⬆️ 3%
• BSC ⬆️ 1%

Also of note this week was the retiring of a number of public endpoints, as we continue to drive traffic towards private endpoints in the Portal. The public endpoints that were retired included:

• BSC Archival
• Boba Mainnet
• FUSE Archival
• Harmony
• IoTeX
• OEC
• Polygon Archival
• Polygon Mumbai
• Solana
• Swimmer

If you were using the public endpoints on these chains, make sure to head over to the Portal to get set up with your own private endpoints, which come with a generous free tier of daily relays.

Throughout this period, the network serviced an average of 1.2 billion daily relays. The daily high for this time period was recorded at 1.245 billion on April 6th. 

Overall, 8.4 billion relays were serviced during the week. This was a 6% decrease from the 8.9 billion relays the prior week.

Chain Highlights

Below are some of the chains with the top week-over-week relay growth.

The green percentages show total weekly relay growth, while the charts show the two-week trend in relays per node. Images courtesy of POKTscan!

Polygon Archival ↗️ 151%

🦾 330 nodes servicing

📡 9,762 average daily relays per node

Ethereum Ropsten ↗️ 57%

🦾 132 nodes servicing

📡 645 average daily relays per node

Meter ↗️ 55%

🦾 146 nodes servicing

📡 1,251 average daily relays per node

NEAR ↗️ 33% 

🦾 170 nodes servicing

📡 2,349 average daily relays per node

Ethereum Goerli ↗️ 32% 

🦾 1,096 nodes servicing

📡 1,191 average daily relays per node

Osmosis ↗️ 31% 

🦾 278 nodes servicing

📡 1,081 average daily relays per node

Celo ↗️ 29% 

🦾 205 nodes servicing

📡 1,221 average daily relays per node

Optimism ↗️ 24% 

🦾 13,854 nodes servicing

📡 1,625 average daily relays per node

Gnosis - xDAI Archival ↗️ 24% 

🦾 2,615 nodes servicing

📡 629 average daily relays per node

Metis ↗️ 21% 

🦾 482 nodes servicing

📡 871 average daily relays per node

Evmos ↗️ 16% 

🦾 15,003 nodes servicing

📡 607 average daily relays per node

Ethereum Rinkeby ↗️ 14% 

🦾 216 nodes servicing

📡 182 average daily relays per node

Polygon zkEVM ↗️ 12% 

🦾 238 nodes servicing

📡 3,283 average daily relays per node

DFKchain ↗️ 10% 

🦾 20,205 nodes servicing

📡 7,580 average daily relays per node

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Node Earnings

From April 6th through April 12th, we had no change in the Top 3 rankings for total node earnings, although the gap between Ethereum and Polygon was tightened up a bit compared to last week.

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

For Ethereum Goerli, the big move up the rankings was due to a combo of 32% weekly relay growth, plus node runners rolling off from servicing the chain - more relays split among less nodes. Early last week, there were around 1,400 node runners servicing the chain, while we wrapped up this period with about 1,000 node runners servicing the chain.

Meanwhile, NEAR, Optimism, and Osmosis made strong moves of their own, thanks to each chain increasing weekly relays by about 20 to 30%. NEAR also had some node runners move away from servicing the chain, but not as pronounced as what we saw with Ethereum Goerli.

Also of note was Polygon Archival jumping Polygon for the #2 spot, thanks to a 151% increase in relays. However, on the last day of this period, we saw the number of nodes servicing Polygon Archival jump from about 220 all the way to more than 950, so the chain's hold on the #2 spot may be short-lived.

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Node Infrastructure

As of April 12th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 20,821 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 0.08% from the previous week.

Wrap Up

• Polygon Archival relays jump 151%.
• Growth throughout most of the Top 5 chains.
• Diverse growth in mainnet RPC traffic helps several chains make moves up the Top 15 rankings for earnings per node.
• Several public endpoints retired - get your private endpoints in the Portal!