Hello again, Pocketeers! We’re back again with another Relay Recap - call this one an "Infracon special."In the time frame covered here (May 12th through May 18th), Pocket Network relays showed a brief pull-back from the 1 billion daily relays mark, followed by a climb back up towards 900 million daily relays.Throughout the week, the network serviced an average of859 million daily relays, with a dip below 700 million on May 15th. After that short-term dip, however, daily relays climbed for each of the remaining three days of this time frame, closing out on May 18th with 887 million relays.The daily high for this time period was recorded at 981 million on May 12th.

Overall, 6 billion relays were serviced during the week, representing an 8% decrease over the 6.5 billion relays the prior week.Note: In case you missed it, Pocket Network nodes are playing a role in powering Ankr’s protocol, together helping to grow the role of decentralized infrastructure and providing yet another source of consistent relays for Pocket.

Chain Highlights

Swimmer Mainnet started its first week of relays with Pocket Network (more on Swimmer later in this post) by providing about 32 million weekly relays, which placed the chain just inside the Top 10 chains in terms of relays serviced. We’re excited about the potential for Swimmer and the associated ecosystem!BSC Mainnet continued its strong growth trend of recent weeks, jumping up to 170 million relays for the week (a 78% increase over last week). This was good enough to grow BSC’s proportional share of Pocket Network relays by one percentage point compared to last week.Polygon Mainnet saw its leading share of total Pocket Network relays dip from 32% last week to 26% this week, with relays from the chain down about 20% week-over-week. Daily relays took a large dip on May 15th, down to about 165 million, but finished the rest of the timeframe steadily trending upwards and back above 220 million.As Polygon’s share of total relays took a dip, Harmony Shard 0 and Gnosis - xDai were two of the chains to pick up a larger slice of the pie. Each chain grew its weekly share of total Pocket Network relays by 2%. This tightened up the “race” at the top for the highest proportion of relays on the network, with Polygon finishing the time frame at 26%, Harmony at 24%, and Gnosis - xDai at 23%.Finally, we saw fantastic growth in some of the chains looking to crack into the double-digit millions of daily relays. You’ll see in the graphic below that the chains included under “Others” jumped from 3% last week up to 5% this week. One big reason was the growth of Avalanche Mainnet relays, which were up about 72% compared to last week. DFKchain Subnet and IoTeX Mainnet also showed strong relay statistics, particularly after they each had their own dips on May 15th. After that dip, DFK and IoTeX finished the timeframe with daily relay totals that were 78% and 166% higher, respectively, than their mid-week performance. We love seeing this kind of growth in these chains, as they wind up to potentially play a larger part in Pocket Network’s total relays.Remember to visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other chains that Pocket Network supports!

New Chains Supported on Pocket Network

We’ve continued to work relentlessly to support more blockchains on the network and boost the capabilities of application developers.Last week, we were proud to announce support for two new Relay Chains on back-to-back days. First was NEAR Mainnet (RelayChainID 0052). NEAR is a sharded, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain that is built for ease of use and scalability. Some of its developer-friendly features include:

• Block production times under 2 seconds
• Vastly lower transaction fees compared to other chains
• 30% of gas fees paid out to smart contract developers
• Interoperability with Ethereum using the first trustless bridge ever created
• EVM compatibility
• Free education courses and live teachers via their NEAR University
• Project funding through a Grants Program

As Michael O’Rourke, co-founder and CEO of Pocket Network, noted, “it’s a win-win-win scenario for NEAR apps, NEAR nodes and the Pocket Network protocol.”NEAR RPC endpoints are available for developers in the Portal. If you’d like a deeper dive on running NEAR nodes, you can also find more info via NEAR's Node Docs.

The day after we announced support for NEAR relays, we had another launch to share - Crabada’s Swimmer Mainnet (RelayChainID 03CB). Swimmer Network is a dedicated gaming blockchain built on Avalanche, and brings a frictionless experience for both gamers and developers. They have grants for both community developers and for new games, helping to promote growth in the ecosystem.Like NEAR, Swimmer endpoints are available in the Portal!

Node Earnings

From May 12th through May 18th, each of the top 3 relay chains produced well above 3 million in POKT earnings for nodes, with Polygon crossing the 4 million POKT mark.

In terms of average daily POKT earnedper node, the top 5 chains at the end of this time frame were:

• Polygon Mainnet
• Gnosis - xDai
• Harmony Shard 0
• Fantom
• FUSE Mainnet

Node Infrastructure

As of May 18th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 47,792 active nodes across approximately 30 different countries, allowing the network to provide constant uptime and resiliency while supporting nearly 50 different chains.

Wrap Up

• Total relays took a quick breather this week after the 1 billion daily relay milestone, but have already been back on a positive, upward trend since May 15th.
• Newly launched chain Swimmer came out with a strong performance during the week.
• A decrease in relays from the top chain, combined with an increase in some of the sub-10 million chains, reshuffled the proportional shares of relays across the network.

We look forward to seeing our awesome community at Infracon, kicking off today!