After a brief hiatus due to the chain issues that we experienced last week, we’re back in action with another Relay Recap this week. This one does come with a bit of an asterisk though - as you can see in the chart below, this week of data includes October 27th, a day in which the chain was still halted for many hours. Although all relays were still being serviced during the halt, the relays handled by the altruist network didn’t show up on POKTscan (our “source of truth” for the Relay Recaps), so we have somewhat incomplete data to report this week.Keeping that in mind, we can take the total numbers for this week with a fairly large grain of salt.With that housekeeping out of the way, we were happy to see relays get back to mostly normal numbers following October 27th, with the daily totals staying above 1 billion from the 29th on. In fact, we saw multiple days this week where relays pushed towards the 1.2 billion mark.Throughout the week, the network serviced an average of985 million daily relays, with the daily high for this time period recorded at 1.18 billion on October 29th. Again, the average of 985 million is skewed by the low number of relays on October 27th, which was due to the chain still experiencing issues and relays being serviced by the altruist network.

Overall, 6.9 billion relays were serviced during the week, representing a 9% decrease over the 7.59 billion relays the prior week.

Chain Highlights

Goerli Archival had a huge week, as relays went up more than 19x compared to the prior week. After being allowlisted on October 10th, the chain had been doing about 25,000 daily relays. Following the halt, Goerli Archival surged to more than 700,000 daily relays to end this period, taking a volatile path with spikes and dips to get there. This huge surge propelled Goerli Archival all the way up to the #1 spot in average daily relays per node, as you’ll see later in the article.OEC was another top performer, with a 55% jump in relays this week. After the chain did not clear 2.5 million relays in any day in the prior week, OEC closed this period with 5 straight days over 3 million relays.Avalanche also had solid relay gains this week, with 10% growth compared to the prior period. Avalanche was able to climb above last week’s high in each of the last 3 days of this period, and cleared 30 million daily relays on Halloween.Lastly, Ethereum was also able to grow its relays by 6% this week. The chain had a quick bounce-back after the chain issues on the 26th and 27th of October, and was able to stay steady mostly between 250 and 350 million daily relays (just about where it was before the halt). With relays from several other chains being down this week, this performance helped Ethereum to boost its share of total relays from 21% to 25%, and put some more distance between itself (in the #2 rank) and BSC (in the #3 rank).For the developers out there, remember to visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other chains that Pocket Network supports!

Node Earnings

From October 27th through November 2nd, we saw both Polygon and Ethereum clear 1 million in POKT earnings, with overall earnings down due to the chain issues that spilled into this period. This ordering of the top 3 remained the same from the prior Recap.

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

• Goerli Archival
• Polygon
• Ethereum
• BSC
• Gnosis - xDai

Goerli Archival was the big story on this list, as the low number of nodes (30) servicing the chain were rewarded for the 19x increase in relays during this period. Beyond Goerli Archival, the list stayed mostly the same compared to the last Recap, with the rest of the Top 5 simply being bumped down a spot, and Boba losing its temporary spot on the list.

Node Infrastructure

As of November 2nd, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 26,753 active nodes across more than 20 different countries, allowing the network to provide constant uptime and resiliency while supporting dozens of different chains. This total node count was down marginally (just over 100 nodes) since the last Relay Recap.Note: PIP-22 and PUP-19 have 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 new incentive structures that have been rolled out in v0.9.0.

Wrap Up

• Relays shift back to service nodes, after being handled by the altruist network during last week’s chain halt (which impacted the data for this Recap).
• Goerli Archival relays have a 19x explosion, helping the chain move into the #1 spot for average daily relays per node.
• OEC relays jump 55%.
• Avalanche and Ethereum post solid relay growth while many other chains saw decreases.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!