Pocket Network enables applications and developers to access blockchain data in a decentralized environment. How big is the data economy today, and how large can Pocket’s role be, now and in the future? Discover how we’re moving from a Web2 standard to a Web3, multi-chain world with Pocket playing a crucial role.

How Much Data is Out There?

Whether we’re viewing through a Web2 or Web3 lens, data is at the basis of modern society, on every front. Recent statistics estimate that each person produces about 1.7 MB of data every second.By the end of 2020, the total data created, consumed, stored, and copied reached 59 zettabytes (a ZB is equivalent to 1 billion terabytes). This figure could reach 175 ZB by 2025. In less than three years, it’s estimated that various cloud storage services will host 200+ ZB of data.The rise of internet connectivity worldwide and the digitalization of everyday life are leading to this explosive growth. In 2013, there were 2.6 billion internet users. By 2021, that number had almost doubled to reach 4.66 billion.The behemoths of Web2 are capturing this growth, with the top 3 websites worldwide - Google, YouTube, and Facebook - accounting for more visits (152 billion monthly) than the other 47 largest outlets.Web3 is still nascent, but it will only lead to more data created every second, with one big difference: true decentralization and equitable protocols can shift us towards fewer monopolies, and give more power to everyday stakeholders in the data economy.

How Does Pocket Service the Data Economy?

At its core, Pocket Network is a data provider for the Web3 space. Pocket enables the transmission of blockchain data to a myriad of applications. This is done at scale by integrating new and popular blockchains while growing a decentralized node network to serve applications on those chains.This data going between nodes and applications is what we call relays. In a Web3 world, the process of data transmission, validation, and execution is taken care of by a network of decentralized agents. This approach:

• Eliminates single points of failure
• Provides more security and privacy
• Achieves true decentralization at an important layer of the stack
• Empowers stakeholders with meaningful incentives for participating in the protocol

In Pocket’s case, these requests for data (relays) are routed through a global network of RPC (Remote Procedure Call) nodes servicing dozens of supported chains.

Source: Mapleblock, Pocket Network Investment Thesis

Powering Billions of Data Requests from 50 Supported Blockchains

Despite the still-emerging nature of Web3, the rise of new blockchains and decentralized applications is already leading to a boom in data consumption. In the Pocket ecosystem, as shown above, this data consumption takes place via relay requests from applications, which are then serviced by RPC nodes.Simple wallet transactions are the most straightforward example of the type of data demands that are constantly being served by Pocket Network. Imagine you are using a crypto wallet and want to check your holdings. What happens then? The application needs to access blockchain data to reflect any balances.From there, the DApp has two options:

1. Use centralized infrastructure providers to access this data - this approach comes with sunk costs for developers, more risk of downtime due to centralized points of failure, and privacy concerns regarding applications’ data. If the centralized provider has an outage, users don’t see their wallet balance.
2. Use decentralized infrastructure through Pocket Network - this option enables developers to stake an asset (rather than pay a sunk cost) to provide data, enables constant uptime and resiliency thank to a truly decentralized network of nodes, and has a focus on privacy, since nodes are rotated in and out of sessions for different applications (and therefore only see a small portion of any given application’s data). Constant uptime for whenever that wallet balance needs to be checked.

With more DApps, higher crypto popularity, and more blockchains, data requests like the example above keep increasing. Pocket has been rapidly closing in on a weekly average of 1 billion daily relays, with weekly totals between 6 and 7 billion of late. The milestone of 1 billion daily serviced relays represented a 1,400% growth since just December of 2021.Pocket provides the infrastructure and the incentive system (through its native token) to service this constant demand of data.

The Potential to Become “AWS for Web3”

Current Web2 data production and consumption is astronomical compared to the emerging nature of Web3. Recent research estimates that we have more than 300 million crypto users, 4,000 DApps, and 1,000 blockchains. In contrast, total internet users surpass 4.5 billion, with seven out of the ten biggest companies in the world representing the status quo of Web2.However, as we transition from centralized services to their decentralized counterparts, across sectors ranging from finance to tech infrastructure, the need for multichain data servicing will increase.The growth potential of the decentralized ecosystem is therefore immense, while the infrastructure enabling this transformation will be one of the key agents of progress. Pocket is positioned to be a main actor in this evolution of the global data ecosystem, with the scalability to transmit more data between nodes and applications while growing its network.