Ethereum, Optimism, and DFKchain are Moving Up the Top 10

Despite still averaging a billion relays per day, Pocket relays took a small dip this week, pausing a multi-week trend of recent growth. More specifically, we had our longest ever streak of 1 billion relay days come to an end: the streak of 14 days is no more! We’re confident we’ve got many more runs like that in us, though…Throughout the week, the network serviced an average of1.04 billion daily relays, with the daily high for this time period recorded at 1.13 billion on August 4th.

Overall, 7.3 billion relays were serviced during the week, representing a 3% decrease over the 7.5 billion relays the prior week.

Chain Highlights

Ethereum relays continue to grow week-over-week, although they’re certainly taking a volatile path to get there. While Ethereum had a surge to clear 300 million relays on the first day of this period, it took a couple of separate dips following that, with a weekly low around half of that 300 million peak. Overall, the #3 chain posted another 14% gain in relays this week, which helped Ethereum to grow its share of total Pocket relays by 4%. Ethereum now represents 22% of all Pocket Network relays, placing it in a near-tie with the likes of Harmony and Polygon.DFKchain continues to post strong relay growth, with another 25% gain in relays this week. The chain had a steady rise to more than 45 million relays on August 8th, before taking a dip to close out the period. DFKchain now represents 4% of all Pocket relays, and has continued its trend of moving up a spot in the Top 10 rankings each of the last few weeks. The chain now occupies the #6 spot.After eyeing a Top 10 spot last week, Optimism has now secured a spot as the #10 chain for the week. Relays were up 41%, peaking near 16 million per day early in the week before taking a dip towards 13 to 14 million. Even with the dip, Optimism still showed a steady uptrend, beating last week’s daily high in every single day of this period.IoTeX was another chain that beat last week’s daily high in each day of this week. Thanks to a steady climb upwards during the week, IoTeX relays were up 17%, peaking around 5.7 million daily.Finally, Solana put together a very simple relay chart this week: “up and to the right.” Solana’s very consistent march upwards helped it to boost relays by 35% this week, as it was yet another chain that left last week’s daily high in the dust in every day this period. To close the period, Solana just barely missed 1 million daily relays.Remember to visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other chains that Pocket Network supports!

New Chain Support

During the time frame covered here, we officially allowlisted another new chain: Klaytn Mainnet (0056).Klaytn describes itself as “the blockchain for all who wish to build, work, or play in the metaverse.” The chain is working on Klaytn 2.0, aimed at further improving performance, decentralization, scalability, and interoperability within its metaverse focus. The Klaytn ecosystem has an emphasis on entertainment and games, with a number of projects built by creatives, studios, and enterprises.Developers can now get set up with Klaytn endpoints in the Pocket Portal, and node runners can service this chain to earn POKT rewards!

Node Earnings

From August 4th through August 10th, there were 3 chains whose nodes earned approximately 2 million POKT, with no other chains earning above 1 million POKT. This week featured another swap of the top 2 chains, as Harmony just barely edged out Polygon for the top spot. Meanwhile, ETH earnings grew from 1.6M to 1.9M this week, as the chain remained in 3rd place.

In terms of average daily POKT earned per node, the top 5 chains at the end of this time frame were:

• Harmony
• Polygon
• ETH
• Gnosis - xDai
• Klaytn

Like last week, we saw more reshuffling of this list during this timeframe. Harmony and Polygon switched spots in the Top 2, while ETH and Gnosis - xDai each moved up a spot. Osmosis saw its short run in the Top 5 average node earnings come to an end, and newly-listed Klaytn made a somewhat-surprising appearance in the list (thanks to a low number of nodes servicing the chain so shortly after it was allowlisted).

Node Infrastructure

As of August 10th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 31,820 active nodes across approximately 30 different countries, allowing the network to provide constant uptime and resiliency while supporting dozens of different chains.Note: PIP-22 and PUP-19 are bringing 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 see a consolidation of nodes in the near future, as node runners and providers combine stakes to take advantage of the new incentive structures. Be sure to catch up on the discussions in the Forum, and stay tuned for more from us on these important topics.

Wrap Up

• Ethereum continues to grow its share of relays, and is now neck-and-neck with Harmony and Polygon.
• DFKchain keeps its growth going, moving up to the #6 spot on the top relay chains.
• Optimism breaks into the Top 10, with relays up more than 40%.
• IoTeX and Solana both put up steady daily increases, with weekly relays up 17% and 35%, respectively.
• Newly-allowlisted Klaytn makes an appearance in the Top 5 list for average node earnings.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!