Happy weekend everyone! We’re back with another Relay Recap. In the time frame covered here, Pocket Network relays consistently hovered right around the 1 billion mark, with 3 days in the “3 comma club.”Throughout the week, the network serviced an average of993 million daily relays, with the daily high for this time period recorded at 1.05 billion on July 18th. So close to a 1 billion daily average!

Overall, 7 billion relays were serviced during the week, representing a 4% increase over the 6.7 billion relays the prior week.

Chain Highlights

Ethereum continued its strong recent performance this week, growing relays by 60%. In fact, a large surge during the week was good enough to earn Ethereum the #1 spot in daily relays on July 18th, before giving way to Harmony and Polygon for the remainder of the days during this period. Overall, Ethereum grew its share of total relays significantly, from 14% last week to 21% this week. In turn, Harmony’s share of total relays was down 10% compared to last week, as Ethereum took a bigger slice of the pie.DFKchain had a huge week, increasing its relays in every consecutive day of the period. This steady growth resulted in a 161% increase in relays compared with the prior week, and helped DFKchain to more than double its share of relays across the network. Thanks to this performance, DFKchain also moved up to the #8 spot out of all supported chains (120.1 million weekly relays).Optimism was a very similar story to DFKchain - relays increased in every day of the week, and the chain doubled its proportion of total network relays. The percentage growth of relays wasn’t quite as pronounced as DFKchain, but Optimism nevertheless closed the week with a 74% increase compared to the prior recap.Moonriver also put out eye-popping numbers this week, as the result of a massive 3-day spike in relays to start the period. While daily relays for most of the past 2 weeks have typically been around 300,000 for Moonriver, the chain suddenly averaged about 5.6 million relays between July 14th and July 16th. Although Moonriver returned to the 300,000 range afterwards, that spike helped the chain to grow relays by a whopping 810% week-over-week.Moonriver’s jump, combined with the steadily increasing relays from DFKchain and Optimism, helped to grow the “Others” category of chains (see the graphic below) from 7% last week to 9% this week. As always, it’s exciting to watch chains like this grow their usage of Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure, and work their way up the chart of top relay chains.Lastly, BSC put together a strong uptrend of relays throughout the week, closing the period with 63% relay growth week-over-week. This helped to bump up BSC’s share of total relays from 4% to 6%, and earn the chain a spot in the top 5 for the week (edging out FUSE for the 5th spot).Remember to visit the Pocket Portal to get set up with RPC endpoints for these and other chains that Pocket Network supports!

Node Earnings

From July 14th through July 20th, there were 3 chains whose nodes earned more than 2 million POKT, with Harmony setting the pace at 2.5 million in POKT earnings.

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

• Harmony
• Polygon
• Ethereum
• Gnosis - xDai
• Evmos

This ordering of the top 5 stayed the exact same from last week, with no chains moving up or down the list. However, it’s worth noting that Moonriver’s big 3-day spike vaulted it just barely outside of the top 5 list for this week, placing it in the #6 spot at 3.03 POKT.

Node Infrastructure

As of July 20th, Pocket Network’s decentralized infrastructure included 35,644 active nodes across approximately 30 different countries, allowing the network to provide constant uptime and resiliency while supporting more than 50 different chains.Note: PIP-22 and PUP-19 are bringing big changes to the incentives that shape Pocket’s node infrastructure, by way of introducing stake-weighted servicer rewards and increased validator rewards. We’ll likely see a consolidation of nodes in the near future, as node runners and providers combine stakes to take advantage of the new incentive structures. Be sure to catch up on the discussions in the Forum, and stay tuned for more from us on these important topics.

Wrap Up

• Ethereum weekly relays jump 60%, and the chain temporarily takes the top spot in daily relays.
• DFKchain and Optimism each grow their relays every consecutive day of this week, doubling their proportion of total network relays.
• Moonriver sees a massive 3-day spike, increasing relays by more than 800% week-over-week.
• BSC grows weekly relays by more than 60% and claims a top 5 spot.
• As Ethereum and others grow their share of relays, Harmony takes a corresponding dip.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!