Recently, Pocket Network crossed the 1 billion relay milestone. We didn’t get here alone and owe it all to our growing list of trusted infrastructure providers and individual node runners Decentralized providers are important, allowing networks to sustain high levels of uptime and redundancy even if one or multiple nodes go offline due to something like power outages to things as extreme as political censorship.

THE NEED FOR DECENTRALIZED INFRASTRUCTURE

In any blockchain protocol, a solid foundation of enterprise-grade node infrastructure providers ensures a healthy baseline of quality service.It’s crucial for applications using Pocket Network as a decentralized network provider to know they’ll be served by some of the best node operators in the biz.This, alongside the long-tail of sovereign node runners, establishes a high level of resiliency.Pocket Network is redundant by design. Even if one node was to go offline in a session with an application, it would still be served by the other four nodes in that session. At a minimum, Web3 applications should be using Pocket as an extra layer of redundancy and resiliency, like MyCrypto or EthersJS for example.With more than a third of all Ethereum nodes hosted on US centralized providers like AWS, the Ethereum network could see delays or outages like we saw when Infura suffered an outage late last year.But enough about us! Traditionally, infrastructure has been considered invisible, so we’d like to take the opportunity to shine a light on the trusted node infra providers serving applications within our ecosystem.

PLEASE, GIVE A BIG ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR:

Figment — https://figment.io/Launched in 2018, this Canada-based infrastructure company provides enterprise-grade node and staking infrastructure to help build the next generation of blockchain and Web3 applications.Skillz — https://skillz.io/French-based Skillz was born due to the enthusiasm of Cofounders Laszlo and Groussard, who both have been in the blockchain space since 2016. Skillz specializes in providing a platform that lets businesses deploy and manage blockchain infrastructure.“When we met with Michael at the Berlin Blockchain week in 2018, we were instantly convinced of Pocket Network decentralized infrastructure vision and technology. 2 years later, we are proud to help Pocket early adopters deploy validators since the mainnet launched. We’ve been iterating to improve our service quality with infrastructure optimization and an upcoming UI/UX overhaul with a brand new staking dashboard. But that’s not all, we are actively developing cutting-edge products around POKT and wPOKT and we’re eager to share them with the community. — Laszlo Szabo, CEO”Chainflow — https://chainflow.io/stakingChainflow’s a smaller, independent, yet very capable Web 3 infrastructure provider.Chris Remus, Chainflow’s founder has 20+ years of telecom and IT infrastructure experience in secure, mission-critical environments for large financial institutions, as well as defense and security agencies.He founded Chainflow in 2017 as one of the first few validators to join the early Cosmos testnets.Since then, Chainflow’s gone on to support over 10+ staking networks on mainnet. Chainflow’s completely bootstrapped and hasn’t taken any outside investment, allowing Chainflow to remain independent.Chainflow is a strong believer in POKT’s mission, as it doesn’t make sense to build a decentralized revolution on centralized infrastructure. This is why Chainflow has pledged to never run more than 10–15% of the POKT nodes in the network at any one time.Rivet — https://rivet.cloud/Rivet markets itself as an easy blockchain gateway with “cloud-based Ethereum API’s that truly just work”. Based entirely on open source code, Rivet offers affordable and scalable infrastructure for any crypto project.Tuku Dev — https://tuku.dev/With Tuku deriving from Maori origin, Tuku looks to service international clients in a decentralized manner. From San Francisco to Tokyo, clients can expect hardware and infrastructure to create a “freer default state for humanity”.Simply VC — https://simply-vc.com.mt/Supporting over 20 networks, Simply VC offers secure validators and nodes as well as blockchain development and project support. Based in Malta, Simply VC has been supporting projects since 2013.Background:Our genesis block on the Pocket Network was early on, during phase one of the public testnets. Initially, we provided Pokt and Ethereum data, and later expanded into providing data of XDAI and the Ethereum testnets. The data we provide is independent from any cloud provider and sourced from our own blockchain node infrastructure, hosted in our private datacentre. I have also had the privilege of taking part in governance decisions on the Pocket DAO.Why are you a Pokt node runner?Supporting the Pocket network is very much in line with our team’s strategy. We believe that the future of decentralized finance requires a set of independent, geographically distributed nodes operating their own private infrastructure. The fact that most DeFi apps and blockchain networks rely on cloud infrastructure puts this vision of a decentralized future in jeopardy, by centralizing services to a handful of cloud providers. Simply Staking’s infrastructure relies on no one but us.Francesco Cremona — DevOps Engineer at Simply StakingBlockspacesBased in Tampa, Blockspaces gives projects a competitive advantage in the crowded blockchain industry. From strategy assessment to ecosystem management, business ecosystems can quickly integrate with Blockspaces.“”BlockSpaces has supported the Pocket Network since its earliest stages. We know the vital importance of decentralized infrastructure and how critical it is to maintain the security, resiliency and censorship resistance. We’re excited to see a strong market of others that care about this as much as we do.”Chainstack — https://chainstack.com/Chainstack provides managed services for the blockchain along with an intuitive UI to enable anyone to be a power user. Chainstack’s mission is to do their part in creating a developer-friendly platform to support the creation of a resilient and accessible Web3 ecosystem.C0D3R — https://c0d3r.org/C0D3R is an infrastructure-as-a-service platform that runs Pocket Network validator nodes in data centers across the world. Their nodes support Ethereum, Ropsten, Goerli, Rinkeby, xDai, Kovan and BSC.C0D3R has also built a community-facing network statistics page called Pulse of Pocket Network as well as the more recent Node Explorer tool!Easy2Stake — https://www.easy2stake.com/Just like the name suggests, Easy2Stake supports a host of POS networks through their validators and nodes to help stakers scale their passive income. Stakers simply stake their crypto, while Easy2Stake handles the day to day operations.