Meaningful decentralization is how we become Unstoppable and, as per our ecosystem thesis, we drive towards that along 4 axes: supply, demand, capital markets, and governance.

Decentralizing POKT Network’s:

• supply: provides uptime and unstoppable delivery, it underpins our superior uptime

• demand: enables exponential innovation and unstoppable access to the protocol

• governance: creates an unstoppable, engaged, and aligned community of builders
• capital markets: unlocks unstoppable liquidity and ease of access

Decentralized supply and governance have been key strengths of the project since our launch on mainnet in 2020. Last week we announced major progress along our demand access. This week we’re excited to announce the decentralization of our capital markets.  Centralized capital markets have led to high costs resulting from poor liquidity and have created a significant barrier to entry for newcomers and a source of friction for existing community members.

POKT, the lifeblood of the POKT Network ecosystem, deserves better.

wPOKT: Ethereum x Pocket Network

By wrapping POKT as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, we unlock access to Ethereum’s best-in-class DAO and DeFi infrastructure and make our token available without friction.  Talent and capital can flow from Ethereum to Pocket (via wPOKT) to pay for blockchain bandwidth directly and/or to participate in the network as a servicer or gateway.

TL;DR POKT gets superpowers, and Ethereans have frictionless on-chain access to the world’s first decentralized RPC.

Together we are better 🤝

How did we design and build wPOKT?

First, a special shout out to the amazing folks at Raid Guild for leading the technical development of the wPOKT bridge, the associated smart contracts, and the front end for the DAO-sponsored liquidity incentives. The public discussions and specs for wPOKT and the DAO-sponsored liquidity incentives are detailed here and here.  See below for the design principles we followed when building wPOKT:

• Community comes first: given the choice between technical efficiency – when it comes to things like liquidity pools – and community participation, we choose community participation.

• Never let perfect be the enemy of good: this initial version of wPOKT is an MVP, technically solid but without additional bells and whistles. It’s a fully functional version of wPOKT and its accompanying bridge that we can then iterate on.

• Don’t distract from the north star: wPOKT has been designed to require as little additional overhead as possible because our ecosystem focus is on the protocol revenue north star. This is why you need to connect your wallet to ensure you cannot input the incorrect transaction memo for example.

So, what benefits do we expect to see?

Liquidity

Better liquidity and lower slippage will make it easier for new participants to enter POKT Network’s ecosystem and for existing participants to pay their bills with their hard-earned POKT.

While future iterations of wPOKT will consider different chains and alternative solutions such as Uniswap v3, we chose to launch this first version of wPOKT on the venue that 1) had the highest liquidity, and 2) was as easy as possible for our community to participate in.  Consequently, the first wPOKT liquidity pool will be on Uniswap v2 on Ethereum.

Uniswap v2 is very easy to use. It is also arguably the most battled-tested contract in DeFi, so it’s very secure. If you want to contribute to the liquidity for wPOKT, read more here.

Permissionless

Sockets are permissionless. But it doesn’t always feel that way when POKT Network’s Foundation still needs to be the one that pays the bills at the end of the month.  Thanks to platforms like Hats Protocol and other similar offerings, community members with the right governance powers – permissionless does not mean unrestricted – could switch on and off Socket payments in real-time.  And with our community living and breathing on Ethereum, we can start to open up more of our DAO Ops by leveraging platforms such as Coordinape, Jokerace, and so much more.

Automation

The POKT Protocol has no smart contracts, meaning no native programmability. Combining smart contracts with wPOKT will lead to major automation and efficiency benefits for POKT DAO’s operations. For example, we plan to use Hedgey for streaming all monthly Sockets payments. It won’t be long until contributors receive a portion of their rewards every single 13-second block: no more chasing for payments or waiting for an arbitrary end-of-month payment date!

We can also leverage tools like oSnap by Snapshot to trigger payments to contributors immediately after a DAO proposal is passed.

Transparency

Storing more and more of the DAO and the Foundation’s treasury in SAFEs on Ethereum enables real-time accounting and oversight. As the on-chain data is permissionless and easy to manipulate, we expect to see many community dashboards covering different aspects of the DAO’s finances.

See the screenshot of Aave’s Treasury Finances on Dune Analytics below as a taster for what is possible:

How can you participate in wPOKT?

The first step is to connect to the bridge with your POKT wallet – Ledger or Sendwallet initially, with other wallets to be integrated as and when ready – to mint wPOKT on Ethereum. See the docs here.

Next, from Monday 9th October you can buy or sell wPOKT on the Uniswap pool. You can also add some liquidity to the pool to earn a share of all trading fees. From Thursday 12th October you can stake all wPOKT/ETH liquidity positions into a DAO-sponsored liquidity incentives contract to earn some additional wPOKT. See here for more details on providing liquidity to the Uniswap pool. Once you’ve done any of the above, tweet about it using #poktober. And please teach others how to do the same!

Where can I learn more?

Check out the docs for the wPOKT bridge and the docs for providing liquidity on Uniswap.

Join our community call this Thursday 5th October at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT/ 8pm BST.

We are also running a Twitter Space on Wednesday 11th October at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT / 8pm BST. It will be a vibe. We have friends of POKT Network – new and old – coming along to talk about what brought them to POKT Network, what’s next for us, as well as everything from open source values, DePIN, decentralized governance, and building in crypto more generally.

In the meantime, please continue the conversation on Twitter, on Discord, and share more about what brought you to our ecosystem, what you love about POKT Network, and what excites you the most about our future.

Wishing you a very merry POKTober from everyone at the Foundation.

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