Today POKT Network announces the launch of our open source Gateway Server.

This powerful tool makes it easy for any RPC provider or application to quickly spin up a Gateway to our decentralized network of c.15k nodes, in 22 countries, supporting 50+ chains. Our decentralization enables unmatched scalability and resilience, all at just $0.85 / million requests. But interacting directly with a decentralized network isn’t easy. 

Or at least it wasn’t. Until today.

Introducing the Gateway Server

The Gateway Server is an all-inclusive kit that was built by Nodies. 

It draws on the experience they built in 2 years operating in POKT Network, as well as  prior experience as AWS infrastructure engineers, and it distills everything the learned building their own POKT Network Gateway and open-sources it for the good of the ecosystem.

To run a RPC node yourself for just 1 of the major chains is heavy on compute: taking up to 64GB of RAM, 12TB of Storage, and 32vCPUs and relying on expensive talent that is scarce. With Gateway Server you access our decentralized network of c.15k nodes on 50+ chains with just 1GB of RAM and Storage and 4vCPUs.

What’s in a Gateway Server?

POKT Network's self-hosted Gateway Server is a lightweight HTTP Server that integrates with the POKT Network protocol and maintains a familiar HTTP JSON-RPC Server interface for your applications (and any customer applications) to send and receive RPC requests. 

The Gateway Server enables developers of all kinds to interact with the POKT Network protocol and engage with 50+ blockchains without the need to store terabytes of data, require heavy computational power, or understand the POKT Network protocol specifications.

The Gateway Server ensures:

• Easy Deployment: simple docker-compose file with minimal dependencies to spin up single tenancy HTTP endpoints for each blockchain that POKT supports. 
• Hyper Efficiency: an optimized POKT client leveraging FastHTTP and FastJSON for efficient computational resources, memory footprint, and minimal latency.
• Quality of Service (QoS) Algorithms: QoS checks and node selection and routing algorithms to optimize latency and request success rates.
• Metrics: Prometheus metrics for success, error rates, and latency for sending a relay to the network.

But does it work?

Nodies is already using the Gateway Server for public endpoints powered by POKT Network. 

Sending 5bn requests with 99.9+% success rate and <100ms P50 latency.

Nodies leverage POKT Network for hyperscaling and failover, as well as to expand their offering from 22 to 50+ blockchains, all without increasing infrastructure staff or compute footprint. But, there is no need to take our word for it, you can learn more about deploying the Gateway Server and contributing to its open-source codebase at our GitHub repo or in our Docs.

What’s next?

Gateway Server generates a single-tenancy HTTP endpoint for each blockchain that POKT supports, so that it can be plugged into different multi-tenancy architectures. Existing RPC providers who want to become gateways will already have a multi-tenancy architecture, so they would simply add the Gateway server as a blockchain node to their load-balancer rotation.

However, our goal is to ensure the barrier to entry is as low as possible. So work is already being undertaken by Raid Guild and Liquify to create open-source reference implementations (demos) of the full-stack user-facing gateway that includes authentication, multi-tenancy endpoints, and more.

We’ll continue to make it as easy as possible for new operators to build a Gateway to our decentralized infrastructure. When the Shannon upgrade deploys to mainnet (targeted for end of Q2) building a Gateway will become fully permissionless. 

And we’ll be ready. 

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