Hello Pocket Network family! August was a month full of significant new protocol releases, DAO proposal implementations, new chain launches, event announcements, and much more. We’re here with a Monthly Recap to share some of the highlights with you.

Network Overview

We saw a slight pull-back in total relays in August, as 28.9 billion relays were serviced across Pocket Network (down just over 5% from July). While the month started out with 8 consecutive days over 1 billion daily relays, rounding out a 14-day streak going back to July, it wasn’t until later in the month (August 25th) that we cleared that figure again. In fact, on that day, we saw a near-all-time-high with more than 1.3 billion relays.This spike on the 25th, and several other big swings throughout the month, were often attributed to Ethereum’s volatility in relays. In fact, Ethereum had 5 days during August in which it cleared 250 million daily relays, but also had a number of days below the 100 million mark. Overall, though, Ethereum pulled into a much closer race chasing Harmony for the #2 spot behind Polygon this month, as Harmony lost some of its share of total relays compared to July.Polygon, on the other hand, was much more consistent than Ethereum on its way to taking the #1 spot for August. After spending the entire first half of July below 220 million daily relays, Polygon has been on a nice climb since then. Throughout August, relays were often around 240-250 million per day, and never dipped below 220 million.Meanwhile, chains like BSC and DFKchain were some of the other standouts in August, as they were each able to nearly double their proportional share of total relays compared to July. BSC in particular had a large week-long spike over 150 million relays each day, which was a big factor in helping the chain take the #4 spot for August (just ahead of Gnosis - xDai). DFKchain wasn’t far behind, landing in the #6 ranking for the month.

At the end of August, Pocket had 29,205 active nodes on the network, down about 19% from the end of July. Thanks to the extremely engaged community discussion of key proposals in the Forum, and the release of v0.9.0, the incentive structure for nodes has officially changed, and larger nodes can now reap more rewards. We’ll likely continue to see more node consolidation as node runners adjust accordingly.

See You in Bogota!

During August we also shared some exciting plans for Bogota in October - we’ll be participating in the ETHBogota hackathon and hosting our second edition of the Infracon event!The first Infracon in the Dominican Republic was a blast, and we’re pumped about building on that success with the second edition in Colombia. Infracon Bogota will be the #1 event for all things Web3 infrastructure, and will act as a showcase for all the trends and developments in the middleware protocols that are enabling builders today.The event will be taking place right in the midst of ETHBogota and Devcon Bogota, so there will be all kinds of opportunities to meet and learn from like-minded builders, community contributors, and project leaders in the space. Plus, we’ll have a pretty sweet afterparty to kick back and unwind!We can’t wait to see all of our community in person again! Make sure to pre-register now.

New Chain Support

We also announced support for 5 new chains in August:

• Klaytn Mainnet (0056): The “metaverse blockchain for all.” Currently about a quarter million relays per day.
• Polygon Mumbai (000F): Polygon’s testnet, used to deploy and test applications. Currently about 300,000 relays per day.
• Metis Mainnet (0058): An Ethereum Layer 2 rollup platform. Currently about a quarter million relays per day.
• Dogechain Mainnet (0059): Layer 2 for Dogecoin, with all the hype that comes along with the Doge community. Currently about 3.4 million relays per day.
• Meter Mainnet (0057): A rapidly growing hybrid Layer 1 and Layer 2 platform. Currently about 400,000 relays per day.

Note: interested in the next set of chains that we’re eyeing for support? Pocket’s upcoming claimed chains include: Starknet, Starknet Testnet, Polygon Super Testnet, Arbitrum, and Arbitrum Testnet.

Events, News, and Media

We had a number of events that we participated in with our community and partners throughout August, as well as news to share out. These included:

• Big plans for Bogota - our participation in ETHBogota and the second edition of our Infracon event!
• Pocket Network CEO Michael O’Rourke joined an AMA with our friends at Polygon.
• Michael also joined the Moonbeam team on an episode of Moonbeam Universe.
• Pocket Network CIO Arthur Sabintsev made an appearance on CNBC’s Crypto World.
• Highlights from our AMA with GoodDollar, and PR about this exciting partnership.
• Partnership with Klaytn for their KlayMakers22 hackathon.
• Fuse shared an article about their use of Pocket Network.
• An engaging, structured debate between multiple community members regarding the FREN proposal, as part of our Governance Town Hall series.
• An overhaul of the Docs pages, including a platform update and a re-skin.
• Multiple Pocket Core Contributors Hours (for v0 and v1), where the community was able to follow along with Pocket development updates.
• More of our weekly Node Runner Office Hours community calls.
• The Tampa Bay Times ran a feature on Pocket Network.
• Bankless Times spotlighted our support of NEAR.
• More info on the key changes brought by the v0.9.0 release.
• The release of our public roadmap for both the Supply and Demand sides.
• MEXC announced a Sign Up, Deposit, and Trade event featuring POKT.
• Our first edition of the POKTlog, a monthly “release notes” style update to provide transparency into core team progress.
• Sharing of Developer Bounties for the community to contribute.
• A detailed thread on PIP-22, how it came to fruition, and what it means for our network and community.
• Several videos with more details about v1’s four key modules: Utility, Peer-to-Peer, Consensus, and Persistence.
• Info on some of the benefits of Pocket Network Inc. (PNI) running more nodes internally.
• A blog about how contributions can be made in the form of DAO proposals, securing grants from other communities, and our newly proposed bounty program.
• More info about Pocket’s growing “sweet spot” in subnets.
• An official update on wPOKT, and a call with Ferrum to allow for questions from the community.
• Details on our plan to open source the development of a desktop wallet to the community.
• A survey to gather community input on how we can keep improving Pocket.
• An update on what we’ve learned from TriForce, and new paths forward for different contributor programs.

Engineering and Product Updates

The big story in August on the engineering front was our release of Pocket v0.9.0, which brought significant changes to our protocol. After pushing out the update towards the middle of the month and reaching 67% node adoption, we were able to activate two key features that were bundled with the release:

• Stake-weighted servicer rewards
• Non-custodial staking

Stake-weighted servicer rewards in particular are a huge change to the protocol, as node runners are now properly incentivized to consolidate stakes into larger nodes. This in turn has a significant positive effect on overall network costs and long-term sustainability.The release also provided mempool refinements, the ability to query accounts per height, and configurable AuthToken generation, all of which are changes that are bringing technical improvements to security and functionality.As mentioned earlier, a product roadmap was also shared with the public, showing our plans for both the Supply (decentralized infrastructure) and Demand (Pocket Portal) sides of the house.Additionally, community contributors looking to get involved on the engineering side can now explore our developer bounty program available through DeWork.Work is also chugging along with the Product team’s efforts to overhaul the Pocket Portal self-service features, as an overview and Q&A was offered in one of our Node Runners Office Hours. This overhaul of the Pocket Portal is still on track for a September launch, and will streamline and optimize the way that developers can get set up with Pocket endpoints and pay for service directly through the Portal.

Governance Discussions

There were several important discussions presented and further hashed out in the Forum throughout the month of August.

• PUP-22: Further Reduction of Emission Numbers (FREN). After much discussion, the FREN proposal was passed, locking in a continued reduction of token emissions over the course of the rest of the year. The first FREN adjustment was made on September 1st, targeting an emission rate of 1M POKT per day. Over the course of the rest of the year, this emission rate will gradually step down, eventually reaching below 700,000 POKT per day.
• PUP-23: Stairway to Sustainable Economics. After discussion throughout August, this proposal was passed unanimously, laying out the specific cost for app staking in advance of the Pocket Portal overhaul.
• PEP-42: Reward and Decentralise (RAD). PEP-42 aims to secure a budget for one-off contributor activities via a Pocket DAO bounty program through the end of 2022, with the initial goals of supporting contributions to the V0/V1 protocols and some small collaboration experiments between external contributors and core team functions.
• PEP-41: IDentify Efficiencies And Suggestions (IDEAS). IDEAS seeks to secure a small grant o prototype and test an incentive reward mechanism for community ideas and suggestions, providing more structure and transparency to this process.
• PEP-40: Stake Weighted Servicer Rewards (PIP-22) Development Reimbursement. PEP-40 proposed reimbursement to the Liquify team for their work on the deployment, optimization, testing, and implementation of stake-weighted servicer rewards, which were rolled out with v0.9.0. The proposal was passed unanimously.
• PEP-39: Economics R&D Funding. In this proposal, msa6867, an active participant in the Forum, proposed a monthly stipend of POKT from the DAO in return for providing economics R&D work on a more full time basis. After much healthy discussion and consideration of different paths for supporting individual work of this nature, the proposal was eventually rejected.
• PIP-25: Bridge to a multi-chain POKT - Ferrum Network Bridge Module and Fee Distribution Module Functionality. This proposal, authored by Ferrum Network, aims to show the technical and strategic alignment between Ferrum and Pocket regarding the building of a bridge, as well as the bridge’s use case and feasibility. The PIP has given the community and the core team a structured space to provide feedback, suggest changes, and determine next steps regarding the bridge.
• PEP-38 POKT Lint (re-submission). PEP-38’s purpose is to provide reimbursement for the development of POKT Lint, an open source tool that allows node runners to test their latency performance against every location the Pocket Portal is deployed. This proposal was passed unanimously.
• PIP-24: TransferStake. This PIP proposes a new type of transaction that allows nodes to transfer their stakes to another account (or node) without unstaking, an idea that has been brought up in past community calls. As it stands now, some of the technical aspects are being considered outside of the Forum, and the proposal will not go to a vote until there is more resolution on that front.

Thanks for checking out our Monthly Recap - until next time!