Hello Pocket Network family! May was another jam-packed month of developments for Pocket Network, and we’re here with a Monthly Recap to share some of the highlights with you.

Network Overview

As you’ve probably heard by now, May brought us the awesome milestone of 1 billion daily relays. It’s a moment we were excited to share with the community, as the first of many more daily billions to come!Overall, there were about 27 billion relays serviced on the network during the course of May, up 25% from the 21.6 billion serviced in April. In fact, we closed the month of May with 16 straight days of relays over 900 million, a streak that has continued throughout the beginning of June. This builds on a dramatic growth trend that we’ve been seeing in relays since early March, proving the utility of, and app-side demand for, Pocket’s decentralized infrastructure.

At the end of May, Pocket had 47,912 active nodes on the network, up about 7% from 44,825 at the end of April, further adding to the resiliency of the network.

Infracon

One of the huge highlights of May was our Infracon event in the Dominican Republic. This event was a great chance to meet with our community in person, as well as have tons of important conversations and share updates on our vision and ongoing projects. Our CEO Michael O’Rourke shared his vision for how Pocket Network and decentralized infrastructure fills a “supranational” need in our society, and the rest of the conference was packed full of important discussions around development updates, governance, community tools, and evolving Pocket’s economics.We’re already looking forward to the next Infracon!

New Chains Supported, and the Path Forward with Triforce

We also announced support for several new chains in May, including:

• Evmos Mainnet (0046)
• Swimmer Mainnet (03CB)
• NEAR Mainnet (0052)

You can get set up with endpoints for these new chains today via the Pocket Portal.On a related note, we shared with our community some of the details about one of our most exciting ongoing initiatives, Triforce. Triforce will allow Pocket to extend our efforts beyond the core team, and utilize community members to help launch, grow, and maintain new blockchain traffic to our network. The initiative allows community members to work together in “Shards,” each of which include Marketing, Dev-Ops, and Marketplace representatives, to grow our sources of relays and further utilize Pocket’s decentralized infrastructure. Triforce will be a major part of Pocket’s path to 100 supported blockchains, and we’re excited to watch this initiative evolve with an ongoing collaboration between Pocket Network and our engaged community members.Jessica Daugherty, Lead Program Manager at Pocket Network, shared some of her thoughts on how the Triforce initiative will shape network growth:

"With all of the recent chain launches that we’ve been able to support, including 3 that resulted from the work of Triforce shards, the road to 100 chains feels clearer than ever. As we continue to partner with our extraordinary community on the Triforce initiative, we are excited to have them guide network growth alongside the Pocket Network team. Each Triforce shard member brings unique skills, strategies, and perspectives that allow us to embed deeply into each chain community through stronger collaboration, support and relationships."

Events, News, and Media

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

• Cointelegraph spotlights Pocket Network’s support of NEAR
• Messari highlights Pocket Network in its review of Web3 infrastructure token incentives
• Mapleblock’s Investment Thesis for Pocket Network
• OKC Podcast 0xTalks with Michael O’Rourke
• Fantom AMA with Fantom CEO Michael Kong and Pocket Network CEO Michael O’Rourke
• Cadena Community AMA with Arthur Sabintsev, Head of Engineering at Pocket Network
• Drops DAO integrates with Pocket Network
• Europa and Digital Twin leveraging Pocket Network for their decentralized infrastructure needs

Developer-Focused Updates

We’ve also made some recent updates focused on improving the developer experience with Pocket Network, including:

• Contract and RPC Method Based Endpoint Security. The Portal now has functionality to only allow relays to specified EVM compatible contracts and RPC methods. Before this, developers who wanted to deploy their interfaces to IPFS and other decentralized storage solutions would have been exposed to other applications being able to use their endpoint for free. By allowing for the endpoint to only support a specified list of contract addresses and RPC methods, anyone hoping to extract free service from that endpoint would be limited to effectively only using it for interacting with the smart contract in the same way the interface is.
• Improved Chain Selection. The Portal now makes selecting multiple chains for a single application more straightforward. Apps have access to all of the chains currently supported in the Portal, and these improvements allow for a clearer process of finding the URL for the chain.

Governance Discussions

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

• Open Letter on Economics. Bumpy market conditions are a catalyst for important economic discussions, and this letter presented some of the ideas that are top of mind for achieving long-term sustainability for token holders, node runners, and applications. Evolving the tokenomics of POKT means evaluating the balance between “sources” (avenues where POKT is minted or becomes liquid) and “sinks” (systems that take POKT out of circulation). Among other points, this letter touches on the development of self-staking tooling; increasing minimum stakes and validator counts; decreasing network costs; stake-weighted session selection; and consolidation of stakes. Note: this open letter was supplemented with PUP-15: GOOD VIBES - A New Economic Policy for Pocket Network, which was put forth in the Forum last week.
• PEP-33: Triforce Shard Income Proposal. This proposal outlines how Triforce shards can be incentivized with supplemental income that is tied to relay performance. There are 5 factors that incentives can be based on: relay growth on the shard’s chain; maintenance and service of the chain; relay retention; brand awareness for Pocket Network in the chain’s ecosystem; reliable and consistent service in handling issues and responding to questions as they come up. Given how heavily the Triforce initiative will involve the community, make sure to chime in on the proposal with any thoughts or ideas that you’d like to share!
• PEP-34: Triforce Shard Budget Proposal. While PEP-33 outlines ongoing incentives for Triforce shards, PEP-34 aims to provide working budgets to help shards launch for new blockchains. Budgets would be split between each shard member as needed, with a plan to adjust budget targets in the future, based on the experience of the first “tranche” of Triforce shards. The proposal provides examples of both acceptable and unacceptable forms of spend for DevOps, Marketing, and Business Development tasks, with a focus on enabling each shard to achieve their most important deliverables. Again, make sure to join this important conversation and share any insights that you’d like to add to the discussion.
• PEP-31: Scholarship Fund. This proposal acknowledges the opportunity to support the community in furthering education, disseminating knowledge, and financially supporting the Pocket ecosystem. The proposal would have the DAO allocate funds to send to the Foundation periodically, which can then be released on an as-needed basis. One benefit of this proposal would be facilitating the support of smaller projects without the overhead of a DAO vote associated with each and every one.
• PUP-14: Increase MaxValidators. PUP-14, proposed by Addison and Pierre of Thunderhead, suggests an increase in the MaxValidators parameter (from 1,000 to 5,000) to improve the economic security of Pocket Network. This parameter determines how many of the top nodes (by staked amount) are considered Validators. This proposal would be one potential path forward to even further bolster the network against attackers and malicious actors by significantly increasing the amount of POKT required to obtain network control.
• PEP-30: POKT DEX. This proposal is aimed at a multi-token DEX in which token holders and node runners can swap their tokens out for non-native tokens from the blockchains that Pocket Network supports. This DEX would function as an alternative means of liquidity for POKT token holders, and help to add more demand to the supply-demand equation.
• PEP-32: POKT Tools. PEP-32 seeks reimbursement for the development of POKT Tools, a community resource with a focus on node runners. POKT Tools aims to help node runners manage and monitor their nodes, and track the rewards that they’ve earned. This includes diagnostic tools for functionality and latency, integration with other ecosystem tools like wallets and block explorers, and more.

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