25: The Year of the Pocket

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25:1 A Year in Review

Looking back over the last twelve months, it’s clear that…nah. You were all here for that. I’m not going to do a whole post about the protocol. No point. Here’s what I do know: we were the first, we’ve spent the most time troubleshooting this space, and I trust this team to get out in front of the problems new folks in the space haven’t even thought about yet. That being said, it is pretty damn extraordinary what the Pocket team has accomplished over the last year. The protocol felt very raw a year ago, and there was a lot of talk about how how difficult it was to stake on the network. A year later, and most folks don’t even remember that phase. The engineering team at Pocket has done a helluva job revising and improving the protocol, and between their effort and the community contributions like LeanPocket, the protocol grew up this year. None of this would have been possible without the DAO guiding the growth of the protocol, so hats off to the entire community. At the end of the day though, this community doesn’t need a recap because we were here the whole way. Are you a $pokt evangelist that wants to coordinate with others? DM me and we’ll add you to the Poktopus Army Discord.

25:2 Data Should Be Free

We have seen countless examples this year which support the importance of open data and open relays, and the thesis which drives Pocket’s core philosophy of building an open and decentralized web3 has been proven out countless times. That core philosophy is why Pocket is sponsoring the OpenData Hackathon, and why you should care. From their blog post:

The hackathon is off to a great start largely thanks to the support of our collaborators and sponsors, including Ocean Protocol, Pocket Network, our founding supporter Gitcoin, TrustaLabs, Supermodular, and TrueBlocks. Each of the partners also provides technologies and expertise that can be useful to hackathon competitors who are rewarded for their use of decentralized technologies. Because of this – we’ve asked each of these sponsors to join us on a Twitter Space during the hackathon.

Here is the schedule – click on each URL to see the time in your time zone and to set a reminder via your Twitter app:

Your boy Poktopus is going to be jumping in a Twitter Space on Thursday at 21:30 UTC (along with Pocket OG Ming), so come hang out and let’s talk about the decentralized future.

 

25:3 It’s So Easy To RPC

We’ve been excited as hell about the contributions we’ve been getting from our community bounties, but it’s not often we get something that can fundamentally become a core part of the developer documentation. The latest community bounty contribution by  KSunny deserves a callout, not only for the production value, but also for how clear and clean the process has been made:

Awesome job making a piece of content that matters, Sunny.

25:4 /dev/null

Last year, “in it for the tech” was a meme. Everyone who hoped for a quick turnaround (I hope) took their margin and bounced, while those born in the bear kept on as business as usual. While capitulation is a useful market trigger analysis, we’re still so early that core participation numbers are far more important than speculative charts. The winners in this next cycle make crypto onboarding easy, and it’s our job to do everything in our power to help. So while it may be easy to dunk on people who didn’t play this cycle as good as you, it’s self defeating.

I’ve made it a mission to operate on “a rising tide lifts all ships”, and it’s not a hard ruleset to live by. If you work to make the whole market grow, and you’re a part of that market, you benefit from the growth. This seem pretty easy peasy to me. Investors do complicated things to hedge their bets, but betting on your marketplace at large covers a lot of different positions.

I wish I could give an end date to the bear, and tell everyone it’s going to be OK, but I can’t. All I know is this: the decentralized future is ABSOLUTELY the path forward for scalable tech.

Anyways, that’s all for this week. See you on Twitter.