About

Pocket Network is an open protocol that provides developers with reliable, performant, and cost-effective RPC access to the open internet. They offer support for various blockchain platforms, including L1 blockchains, L2 rollups, Cosmos zones, Avalanche subnets, and Polkadot parachains. Their protocol connects apps to RPC node operators, ensuring reliable data access. Additionally, Pocket Network allows developers to earn rewards by deploying their RPC nodes and staking POKT tokens.

History

In 2016, the founding team began using Infura, the most popular API service for Ethereum, as they were developing smart contracts. Through their own experience, they saw the importance of Infura throughout 2016 and 2017 for Ethereum. Confident that there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of blockchains, shards, and sub-graphs in the future, the founding team began thinking about how to design a protocol that could provide a vertically and horizontally scalable infrastructure service in a decentralized manner. The initial insight was that apps and services being built on decentralized ecosystems are reliant on centralized gateways creating a centralized point of failure in otherwise decentralized technology stacks. As decentralized applications (DApps) continue to gain momentum among both crypto enthusiasts and regular users, several pain points are beginning to emerge for developers. It's not uncommon for developers to end up making trade-offs between cost-efficiency, decentralization, privacy, and quality of service. Given the sheer number of Web3 applications that will be in need of public blockchain and public data as well as the diversification of blockchains that are in need to offer that public data, the size of the Web3 data infrastructure market is anticipated to be significant. To date, we have seen centralized blockchain infrastructure drive API calls to blockchain data in the tens of billions by being able to easily implement, maintain, and develop data networks. However, the costs associated with those centralized providers are significant. Several cases of critical service outages in recent years, rendering essential software like MetaMask unavailable. Institutional clients are not spared either, even with the capacity to pay for premium services. Outage events like these clearly highlight the risks of single points of failure from both a redundancy and security standpoint. At the same time, app developers don't have the resources, expertise, or time to host their own full nodes. Together, this has led to an over reliance on a few, centralized providers.

Pocket Network is a Decentralized Solution

Pocket Network efficiently reorganizes blockchain infrastructure and addresses the paradox of decentralized network running on centralized infrastructure, here is how the network is becoming antifragile and preparing to be setup to scale to support billions and maybe even trillions of API request daily:

• Cost: It eliminates the need to overpay for access to blockchain data through platforms like Infura and AWS, by providing an easy-to-integrate network of relay nodes. Unlike other API providers, Pocket Network allows applications to lower their bandwidth costs to near zero by staking POKT tokens once for the relays they need.
• Performance: Decentralized infrastructure also helps to address the downtime and latency that comes with using centralized node providers, since nodes are incentivized to provide good service and correctly fill requests in a timely manner — or risk being penalized.
• Privacy: applications don't pass data through a centralized intermediary when communicating with the blockchain. As a result, they can better protect the integrity of their own and their users’ data, ensuring no centralized entity can store, sell, or misuse it.
• Multi-chain: Pocket Network eliminates the need to manually integrate and maintain infrastructure to support different blockchain networks, such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and more. Adding a new chain is as simple as adding a line of configuration code.
• Uptime: through its massively redundant node network, which ensures applications maintain as close to 100% uptime as possible
• Egalitarian: All applications have the same priority in the network, with the only difference being the number of API requests they can submit based on their total staked POKT. Likewise, all nodes are given an equal shot at being selected for a session regardless of the size of their stake, ensuring rewards are evenly distributed across the network.