02: It’s Raining $POKT

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02:1 Harmony Updates

The Pocket engineering team successfully deployed an update this week to all public RPC endpoints to provide the “stickiness” required for the public Harmony endpoint outlined in last week’s update. According to Pocket’s weekly recap on Friday, this will also address some Metamask errors that had been reported, which means if you haven’t setup a custom Pocket endpoint in Metamask yet, now is a good time to make the switch. The stickiness update means that the Pocket team expects Harmony transactions to start increasing again, and will make noderunners aware of the turn up once they’ve communicated with the Harmony team this week.

Additionally, the fine folks at NodePilot have submitted a proposal over at talk.harmony.one to add Harmony Validation to Node Launcher, an open source Docker deployment engine that drives their one-click node deployment and management platform. There is a detailed discussion in the comments regarding the technical capabilities of the solution, and its place in the ecosystem, so I encourage all my ONE folks to read the proposal and comments, and add your own. I know how much ease of node deployment on Pocket has been requested in the Harmony community, and this solution not only meets the need, it’s been battle tested in the Pocket ecosystem.

Despite a slight drop off in relays across the entire network due to the holiday, Harmony (blue) remained the top relay source for Pocket, followed by ETH (red), then Fuse (green).

02:2 Community, Ecosystem and Governance

Poktscan developer Jorge Cuesta pushed a bunch of big updates this week around enhancing the user experience, performance, and making it easier for those with larger node clusters to track individual and cumulative node reward performance. The changelog includes:

* Fixed Explore page
* Fixed Date Range overlay that was not able to be click due to a zIndex issue with the table lines.
* Fixed Persistent Nodes Selection on Node Runner page. Now you can use Node selector to filter and select first time, after that your selected nodes will be persisted on the localStorage and load next time you came to same Node Runner page.
* Fixed total miss calculation on Node Runner Performance table.
* Fixed and issue that nodes that does not produce any relays yet are not returned on Performance Table
* Added Clear filter button on Node runner page
* Added Error Toast notifications for a better understanding of what is going wrong on Explore and Node Runner pages
* Added better Title and more summary information in Node Runner.
* Added Column Filter for tables on Node Runner
* Added Search text field for tabled on Node Runner
* Enhance sizes of Summary and Top chains cards on Node Runner
* Duplicate database and website hardware resources for a better response time.

Of particular interest to those with 5+ nodes is the ability to paste a comma separated list of addresses into the clipboard to generate a cumulative awards table:

This “at a glance” view of cumulative earnings and per-chain performance is an incredible improvement to reporting capabilities which have mostly been relegated to count-only single node lists or roll your own py scripts. And, the pasted node list is saved in localstore, so its persistent without requiring a login.

I took over hosting the Noderunner Office Hours call this week on the Pocket Discord, and the Unofficial community showed up in force. We talked bare metal config, general node performance, and the use of –useCache with pocket start for significant improvement of CPU usage on pocket relays. In our next Office Hours call on 12/1, we’ll have rock star engineer BenVan on the call to give us the current state of hardening and scaling your Pocket node infrastructure, an update to his original presentation in April. Understanding node network architecture is critical to optimal performance of your cluster, so you won’t want to miss it. RSVP on Discord at the link below:

Noderunner Office Hours – 12/01/21

The Pocket team also launched their devlog this week, the first in a series of ongoing updates for wPOKT development and launch. Make sure you’re subscribed over there to stay up on the timeline.

02:3 Airdrops, Airdrops, Airdrops

The first community-led #POKTSTORM airdrop kicked off in time for Thanksgiving last week, starting with a 1000 pokt giveaway to 10 wallets that was quickly joined by community member @ethen_ and doubled to 2000 pokt total.

10 wallet addresses were picked via a random number generator, and some new future stakers were born.

Other members of the Pocket community have stepped up to contribute to the airdrop pool, so we’re going to run 9 more giveaways between now and the launch of wPOKT. This week, we’ll be doubling the rewards to 400 pokt each to 10 wallets, for a total of 4000 pokt. The donation pool and all airdrop transactions will be trackable through the public wallet address, to ensure transparency and fairness. Watch for a details tweet on Thursday, and airdrop on Friday.

02:4 /dev/null

When I talk about crypto with friends and family, one thing that comes up frequently is concern over energy use in blockchain, and their perspective of the space is very monolithic. When I look around at the modern product landscape in web3, I see a lot of focus on optimizing for high energy efficiency, and hear those concerns discussed in DAO calls, but I don’t see anywhere near enough sharable content being created outlining how those chains are working to mitigate energy use. For every “Solana tx uses less energy than two Google searches“, there are a billion “CRYPTO (BTC) IS DESTROYING THE WORLD”, and there’s little room for nuance in the conversation.

Someone on Twitter recently said that the real work of the DAO was in the nuts and bolts “stuff that’s gotta get done” work (paraphrasing here), and a big part of stuff that’s gotta get done is educating about how we want crypto to be better too, and that we’re supporting projects we believe help do that. If you’re writing those kinds of articles about your project, specifically in regard to energy efficiency, I’d love to read them. Tag me when you share them. And I’ll be doing my part to talk more about that in the future as well.

That’s all for this week, kiddies. See y’all at the #POKTSTORM.