Pocket Network is pleased to announce that we are meta-tier sponsors of the legendary ETHDenver running from 11-20th Feb. Pocket is a habitual hackathon sponsor and in previous years great results from events like ETHOnline by ETHGlobal showed us the benefit of showcasing to builders to experiment with and adopt our protocol into their web3 development stack. For example, ETHOnline hackathons have produced some great Web3 products in the past that have used Pocket Network, such as Blockhook and Li.Finance Bridge Aggregator Analytics and Blockhead, among several others.Pocket Network is supporting the ETHDenver Hackathon by providing free-tier integration with applications and comprehensive multichain support, pivotal for the multichain world we now operate in.Any developer on our supported blockchains can benefit from using Pocket Network’s globally-distributed network of nodes and we believe the ETHDenver Hackathon will provide ample opportunity to see this claim realized.

What is Pocket Network?

Pocket Network is the TCP/IP of Web3 node infrastructure – a multi-chain relay protocol that incentivizes RPC nodes to provide DApps and their users with unstoppable blockchain network access.Pocket Network is a protocol encouraging users to run full nodes through crypto-economic incentives. This means that anyone can earn revenue by spinning up a node and serving traffic (relays) through that network. These nodes further decentralize the blockchain infrastructure, protecting it and their apps from downtime if centralized alternatives go down. Node runners earn POKT by servicing relays and securing the network.Economically speaking, Pocket Network provides tremendous incentives to all its users. As more requests from applications are routed through the protocol, the node runners earn more revenue since POKT is minted in direct proportion of relays served. This makes setting up a node a valuable venture, which in turn, attracts rational market participants to purchase POKT and stake POKT to run a node in order to capture an equal opportunity to serve these application requests and get paid POKT by the protocol for that work.The POKT tokenomic flywheel!

How do I start with Pocket Network?

A simple 4 step process for developers:

1. Create an account for the Pocket Portal.
2. Mint an RPC endpoint of any of the 21 supported blockchains for your application.
3. Integrate the RPC endpoint into your application.
4. The Pocket Network protocol autonomously matches your blockchain application with 8 random nodes through a session.

For a more detailed guide, follow along with this quick setup guide. Also, here is a great walkthrough from ETHGlobal to help you interact with the portal:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8CBa9KyOb8

Why mint an endpoint from Pocket Network?

In just a few clicks, developers can spin up reliable, censorship-resistant RPC endpoints for any of the supported blockchains (currently 21 blockchains; the most popular included). This includes:

• Ethereum Mainnet
• Ethereum Mainnet Archival
• Ethereum Mainnet Archival with Tracing
• Ethereum Testnets (Kovan, Rinkeby, Ropsten, Goerli)
• Solana
• Polygon Mainnet
• Polygon Mainnet Archival
• Gnosis (xDAI) Mainnet
• Gnosis (xDAI) Archival
• Avalanche
• Avalanche Archival
• Harmony Shard 0
• Fuse
• Fuse Archival
• Algorand Mainnet
• Algorand Archival
• Evmos Testnet
• IoTex Mainnet
• Pocket Network Mainnet

Developers are able to easily switch between blockchain networks by simply clicking on it from a dropdown menu. Using the Pocket Portal, developers can enjoy blockchain network RPC endpoints with no contract, no arbitrary rate limiting, and no hidden fees.Pocket Network offers a generous free-tier account for any developer to take advantage of; each account is given up to 2 endpoints and up to 1M requests per day, per endpoint - powered by the GigaChad Free Tier.The free-tier offers a no-risk option for Hackathon participants to enjoy our decentralized autonomous node infrastructure before committing to larger relay limits and POKT staking. Providing a free tier for web3 application developers on Pocket Network has been key in our recent exponential growth. The protocol and its participants have benefitted from the network effect, stress testing and continuous feedback stream that this initiative has produced.Pocket Network has been aggressively expanding support for new blockchain networks. The Pocket team is streamlining the process to add support for additional blockchains even quicker!

The Portal to the Multi-Chain Metaverse

The POKT Portal has recently received a couple of improvements that provide a better service for blockchain applications, tools, and services.

Multi-Regional API

The POKT Portal API has been deployed to multiple regions across the globe.This significantly reduces latency for applications requesting blockchain data from the Pocket Network protocol. If an application is using an endpoint from the POKT portal, the traffic routes to the API location with the lowest latency for the client.

MOAR Nodes

The Pocket Network protocol autonomously and randomly assigns 5 nodes from the network in a session with an application (or client). In the event, a node was to go offline, then the application would still be connected to the other four nodes in that session. In the even unlikelier event, all nodes were to go down, then the app would automatically get paired with another set of 5 random nodes by the protocol through a mechanism called session tumbling.The session tumbling mechanism allows for much greater application security and privacy as the same service nodes will only service the application for a certain amount of time (4 blocks, roughly ~1 hour).In a recent update, the number of nodes per session was increased to 8 at the protocol level, then 12 shortly after that. At this point in time, the SessionNodeCount has been increased to 24 nodes per session as proposed in the approved PUP-10.More nodes mean a higher degree of randomization, and by extension more security.The increase of nodes per session enables the Portal API to have a larger pool of Service Nodes to choose from in a session. Coupled with Cherry Picking strategies, it creates a higher standard of quality for applications using the POKT Portal.In short, speed is the name of the game. The fastest nodes get a larger percentage of the relays, and therefore more POKT rewards. So the multi-regional deployment of the POKT API would allow for a wider geographical range of randomly-selected nodes to compete in a session for relays and rewards, especially if there are more nodes closer to the paired client (application). Applications benefit from a reduction in latency (faster service) and an additional layer of redundancy because of the bigger distribution of nodes per session.Also, larger sessions expand the network-wide relay capacity, as well as, optimize for block production times and state size of the Pocket Network blockchain. For node runners, this means their nodes have more opportunity to be chosen in a session with apps since every Service Node that has staked the minimumIt’s a win-win-win situation for the applications, the nodes, and the protocol!

Extra Stickiness

Back in November 2021, the Pocket engineering team solved a common problem with how some applications are configured to deal with nonce and block height.As Aave shares in their docs, if the error is not coming from your web3 wallet then it may be due to the Ethereum node it is connected to. For centralized RPC services, which consist of many servers and load-balancers, a previously submitted transaction may not be present on the server the application is currently connected to. The application tries to fetch a nonce from a “different” node.In other cases, an application expects the block height of a node it’s calling to be the same as the last node it called, even if it’s calling historical data for which recent blocks are relevant. It’s something that many, if not most, web2.5 infra providers suffer from. They would (and do) fail the test, so the Pocket engineering team is super excited to have solved the stickiness issue.Selective Node Stickiness has been enabled for all our public endpoints. It essentially enables applications to keep talking to the same nodes in the session. Transactions “stick” to the nodes. This will mitigate the errors seen lately with MetaMask when interacting with smart contracts and dapps. It also came in handy for Dark Forest players in the most recent DFDAO community round! As a high-throughput blockchain game, players make transactions in quick succession throughout the round. Pocket Network handled that with ease. If you’d like regular updates on POKT Portal development and progress, sign up for the Portal newsletter!

Anything else?

Yes, apply to participate in the ETHDenver hackathon!If you plan to use Scaffold-ETH to build your project, a sponsored Pocket Network endpoint was included in it’s load-balancer so you can rest assured that your team will have an extra layer of redundancy.

🏗 scaffold-eth is back up and running smoothly with our new RPC. (And @POKTnetwork added too!)

✏️ Please add rpc.scaffoldeth back into your builds if you removed it!🔥 Master branch is now upgraded to the latest ethers.js so burners work on EIP1559 networks again too!🛠🚢🚀 https://t.co/wqnA8HrRjl— AustinGriffith (@austingriffith) August 10, 2021

Check out this Scaffold-ETH speed run by Austin Griffith to learn how to go from 0 to 100 in less than an hour!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P1mIlKGFMsThe ethers library offers default API keys, ensuring it works out-of-the-box. Pocket Network sponsors Ethereum network bandwidth to EthersJS, alongside three others, as a community resource. It’s perfect for low-traffic projects and for early prototyping. If you plan to use the ethers.js library for your team project, learn how to use Pocket as your default node provider with your freshly minted endpoint!The Pocket team is so excited to see what the hackathon teams will build using Pocket’s infrastructure. For developers, it is a great opportunity to test out the future of decentralized node running. We hope it will enable all builders to imagine the many ways that our digital footprints can be decentralized and made censorship-resistant.Pocket Network empowers the users, the developers, and the node runners.Lastly, stay tuned to our social channels to see the bounties offered to the top-performing hackathon teams. And find us on the 2nd floor of the main venue. There will be swag! Until then, join our community and get involved with the discussion in Pocket’s Discord.