GIP-75: Should GnosisDAO retroactively fund POKT-powered Public RPC endpoints for Gnosis Chain pruned and Gnosis Chain archival?

disruptbanksy · January 19, 2023, 10:02pm

GIP-75: Should GnosisDAO retroactively fund POKT-powered Public RPC endpoints for Gnosis Chain pruned and Gnosis Chain archival?

Let’s do this!
Make no changes

0 voters

GIP: <to be assigned>
title: Should GnosisDAO retroactively fund POKT-powered Public RPC endpoints for Gnosis Chain?
author: Alberto Jauregui (alberto@pokt.network)
status: Phase-2
type: Funding
created: (2023-01-19)

Hello, Gnosis Community!

My name is Alberto Jauregui. I represent Pocket Network Inc. (PNI), and would like to move this grant proposal into phase-2 for a community poll ahead of submitting to snapshot. I’ve purchased GNO in advance to be prepared for phase-3.

Summary

Pocket Network is a decentralized, middleware protocol focused on the RPC layer. Our goal is to provide blockchain application developers with a privacy-preserving, multi-chain gateway on top of the Pocket Network protocol that allows dapp developers to mint reliable, fast RPC endpoints for the 40+ blockchain networks supported, including both Gnosis Chain pruned and Gnosis Chain archival.

Over the last month, Gnosis Chain has carved the number 2 spot in terms of requests per day at 195M daily avgerage requests according to POKTscan!

Abstract

By sponsoring a pokt-powered Public Gnosis Chain RPC endpoint, GnosisDAO and Pocket Network would continue to contribute to the decentralization, increased resiliency, and censorship-resistance of the Gnosis Chain network. All the while, continuing to incentivize Gnosis Chain node runners with $POKT tokens for serving Gnosis dapps.

Public RPCs are a public good, we hope to share in the responsibility together with the GnosisDAO of maintaining these high-quality public goods on behalf of Gnosis Chain users. The Pocket Network team and community have been a long-time supporters of the Gnosis Chain.

We’re proud to continue supporting Gnosis!

Motivation

The current set of Gnosis Relay Chain IDs (RCIs) we suport are:

Gnosis Chain = 0027 (mainnet)
Gnosis Chain Archival = 000C (mainnet)

The POKTdao allowlisted Gnosis Chain (0027) on 07/06/21, with Gnosis Chain Archival (000C) shortly after on 08/26/21). Since the allowlist date, Pocket node operators earned 55.6M POKT from servicing over 38.9B Gnosis Chain mainnet read/write requests. See this spreadsheet for a breakdown of relays drive and POKT earned:

Over that time, these Gnosis RCIs developed to become one of the more populated, stable, and higher-performant pools of nodes. Our network of node runners easily handled several spikes, including a big spike to 243.6M requests on a single day recently in JAN 2023.

According to POKTscan, there are currently 22,379 Pocket Service Nodes pointing to Gnosis Full Nodes for the 0027 Relay Chain ID and 2,561 Pocket Service Nodes pointing to Gnosis Archive Nodes for the 000C Relay Chain ID. This demonstrates the POKT node incentives at work!

The POKTdao supported node deployment solutions through funding grants such as Node Pilot and DappNode to make it super easy to spin up and monetize Gnosis full/archival nodes within the Pocket Network protocol.

Rationale

Pocket Network Inc. staked POKT on behalf of the GnosisDAO to subsizie a public good in the form of public RPC endpoints (available in the Gnosis Chain docs) without rate limits:

We’ve simplified our model this year to mirror a traditional SaaS-like tiered structure, which is much more affordable. To sweeten the deal, we are offering the Gnosis DAO team and community a massive discount on a 200M requests per day throughput on a 1-year commitment with the option to renew on an annual basis:

$135,997 USD for 200M Requests Per Day on a 1-year Contract

That represents 4.8x in savings (a 480% discount) compared to the original offer!

In case a buffer is wanted/needed, as traffic continues to grow, we’d like to extend another option to purchase additional bandwidth at the discounted price of $0.0000018640 per request throughout the contract period.

Public RPCs are a public good, we hope to share in the responsibility together with the GnosisDAO of maintaining these high-quality public goods on behalf of Gnosis Chain users.

The GnosisDAO will be able to monitor and manage the public RPCs through our Pocket Portal as they see fit, including the ability to enable additional security features such as allowlisting user-agents, origins, smart contracts, and methods.

Implementation (Completed)

In return, Pocket Network agrees to these milestones and deliverables:

Milestone	Deliverable	Completion Date
Launch Support for Gnosis Chain Mainnet	Allowlist Gnosis Chain Mainnet (0027) within the Pocket Network protocol	Completed
Launch Support for Gnosis Chain Mainnet Archival	Allowlist Gnosis Chain Mainnet (000C) within the Pocket Network protocol	Completed
Spin up backup infrastructure for Gnosis Chain Mainnet	PNI to spin up and maintain backup infrastructure for Gnosis Chain (mainnet)	Completed
Spin up backup infrastructure for Gnosis Chain Archival	PNI to spin up and maintain backup infrastructure for Gnosis Chain archival (mainnet)	Completed
Public RPC for Gnosis Chain Mainnet	Provide Public RPC endpoint for Gnosis Chain: https://gnosischain-rpc.gateway.pokt.network/	Completed
Public RPC for Gnosis Chain Archival Mainnet	Provide Public RPC endpoint for Gnosis Chain Archival: https://gnosischain-archival-rpc.gateway.pokt.network/	Completed
Integrate Gnosis Chain Mainnet into the Pocket Portal	Provide developers the ability to mint private RPC endpoints for Gnosis Chain in the Pocket Portal: https://www.portal.pokt.network/	Completed
Integrate Gnosis Chain Archival Mainnet into the Pocket Portal	Provide developers the ability to mint private RPC endpoints for Gnosis Chain Archival in the Pocket Portal https://www.portal.pokt.network/	Completed
Multi-Regional Support	Public RPC available across 14 regions: ap-east 1, ap-northeast 1, ap-northeast2, ap-southeast-1, ca-central-1, eu-central-1, eu-north-1, eu-south-1, eu-west-1, eu-west-2, eu-west-3, us-east-1, us-east-2, & us-est-2	Completed
Dynamic, Interactive API Docs	Add Gnosis Chain calls to Pocket’s interactive API docs	Completed

If we are unsuccessful in our proposal to secure retroactive funding, PNI will continue to support the Gnosis Chain network; however, in an effort to do so sustainably, we would introduce per second rate limits on the Public RPC that would channel users and developers to our paid tier in the Pocket Portal where costs would be passed on directly to Gnosis builders outside the free tier of 250k requests per day.

PNI prefers payment in stablecoins, such as USDC or DAI.

GnosisDAO Snapshot

Phase 2 Proposals: Please ignore this section, and leave as is. It is used for Phase 3 proposals.
Phase 3 Proposals: Add a link to the corresponding GnosisDAO Snapshot poll you’ve created.

Thank you Gnosis community for taking the time to read through and consider this proposal! I’m looking forward to the results of the forum poll

Sincerely,

Alberto Jauregui (@disruptbanksy on Twitter)

Business Development @ Pocket Network

POKTdao Voter

Future GnosisDAO Governance Participant

If you are interested in learning more about Pocket Network, here are a few links:

Website: https://www.pokt.network/

Portal: https://www.portal.pokt.network/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/POKTnetwork

Discord: Pocket Network

Governance Forum: Governance - Pocket Network Forum

ethen · January 20, 2023, 10:58am

Pocket Network is offering a great service to the crypto community. We should all be supporting projects that are moving the space towards decentralization.

RawthiL · January 20, 2023, 3:01pm

Supporting true decentralization is key for web3 growth. The Pocket Network has been serving almost 150M relays daily with great response times below 150 ms and success rates above %99.8 across all of the Pocket Portal. Moreover, in the asia-pasific region (the most used by Gnosis) the response times are below 10 ms!. The Gnosis Chain archival is also supported by Pocket Network, with response times ~200ms and success rates of 99.9% (which is great considering that requests are harder to process!).
Supporting this kind of decentralized and high quality service is positive for all the crypto community.

(The metrics are measured within the pocket network, clients should add their response time to the Pocket Portals, which is variable from client to client)

disruptbanksy · January 20, 2023, 7:39pm

well said

for those curious about our incredibly low-latency, here’s a community-built tool that measures it:

refri · January 21, 2023, 1:56pm

Fully in support of this. Rpc diversification is a prerequisite for decentralization and the amount asked for seems reasonable to me.

Iannn · January 27, 2023, 2:13am

Just to give anecdotal evidence to why this should be supported, I am a pocket node runner who started in April, and my development and sysadmin skills have grown tremendously over the last year. Thanks to the incentive to monetize my infrastructure, I’ve been learning about lots of different blockchain projects as I dive into their docs and discord to add them to my fleet. I have helped other node runners during and after the merge to get their nodes in sync, both within the pokt ecosystem and within the gnosis ecosystem (and others), which led me to taking over a handful of gnosis validators for someone who became too busy to keep up with it after his validators went down after the merge. So now I’m a gnosis validator and contributing to securing the chain thanks to the pathway that pokt provided to lead me to this point.

refri · February 20, 2023, 9:55pm

isn’t it time to go to phase-3?

edit: and a pip (poket improvent proposal) to @disruptbanksy : make your token tradable at a dex on an evm chain (glad if it wil be gc), weird to see only cex as trading places on coingecko.

m3rlin5ky · February 21, 2023, 11:13am

@refri You are mentioning an important point. POKT as an decentralized RPC infrastructure provider relies heavily on centralized exchanges → If they would unlist the token, the value of the network could drop to zero because people would get a token that can’t be converted on marketplaces anymore. Even if its highly unlikely, this single point of failure could be targeted by government organisations like the SEC. Anyway… Pocket Network is an awesome project with a huge community and it plays an important role as decentralized RPC provider. I am in favor of a retroactive funding, if POKT would be tradable on Gnosis Chain. @disruptbanksy You guys could also talk to Agave, maybe POKT could be used as collateral on their platform.

refri · February 21, 2023, 10:03pm

Cause it’s not ERC-20, as I understand it, but a totally seperate chain (haven’t looked into it deeper till now), it will need some kind of new bridge, but should be feasible to build this to move pokt from pokt.networkchain to gc. But also I am wondering if this (bridging to any EVM chain, not necessarily gc) haven’t been discussed before by the pokt team? Curious to get some insight from @disruptbanksy

disruptbanksy · February 22, 2023, 4:00am

Yes!

I’ll be updating the proposal to phase-3 and publishing on snapshot tomorrow.

The PNI team and I have been chatting with stakeholders over the last few weeks.

On a personal note my wife caught a flu last week so I’ve been taking care of her. I got sick in the process, but I am starting to feel a bit better now so I should be good to go soon.

You should check out tpokt and wtpokt (on Polygon) by the Thunderhead team.

tPOKT = staked POKT in Pocket service nodes run by the Thunderhead team. wtPOKT = wrapped tPOKT so it can be traded on a DEX like Uniswap v3 as well as be leveraged on other DeFi protocols.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/wrapped-thunderpokt

Feel free to put in a Request for Proposal (RFP) in the Pocket Network forum for a non-stacked wrapped version of POKT. However, the team is heads down with v1 development so I don’t think it would be prioritized until after that. If you’re curious about v1 POKT, you can read the docs here:

wPOKT was in the works back in 2021 but the PNI team didn’t feel comfortable moving forward with it → https://wrapped.pokt.network

disruptbanksy · February 22, 2023, 4:17am

I get we’re you are coming from. I personally prefer using self-custodial wallets and DEXes myself. BUT there a several OTCs that were available prior to CEX listings, and are still available to this day.

As well as, tPOKT and wtPOKT on Polygon ^ !

Once v1 Pocket is launched, I believe the PocketDAO would be encouraged by the community to proliferate the POKT token across multiple blockchains, both EVMs and non-EVMs like Cosmos-based chains such as Osmosis. I would be one of the many advocates.

I don’t think it should be conditional. That’s not part of this proposal.

If anything, that’s a completely separate proposal.

To re-highlight, v1 POKT development is the priority right now so it would probably have to wait until afterwards.

That’s a great idea! I love the concept of using POKT as collateral

disruptbanksy · February 22, 2023, 11:39pm

GIP-75 published on snapshot:

https://snapshot.org/#/gnosis.eth/proposal/0xe051f12c56d14985f6851e179feae8c8c40f7c7702df3f58affbb2a67641eebf

wimo.eth · February 23, 2023, 2:52am

I like Pocket Network. But TLDR is what that GNO stakers deserve a reach aroudn dude. What about airdrop of some of the pocket tokens to validators? Reject until there is more cush offered. I’d like to be on my way to be a pocket node validator too.

KaRmA40 · February 23, 2023, 9:12am

hello everybody please help me what to do

justin-1kx · March 1, 2023, 4:05pm

We at 1kx completely agree that a decentralized RPC service is crucial for a chain that values decentralization like Gnosis, and we are therefore supportive of sponsoring a POKT-powered Public Gnosis Chain RPC endpoint. By utilizing a decentralized RPC service like Pocket Network, Gnosis Chain can ensure that its network remains highly resilient and censorship-resistant on every level.

As investors in both Gnosis and Pocket Network, it’s great to see that the GnosisDAO and Pocket Network are working together to maintain these public goods and incentivize Gnosis Chain node runners with $POKT tokens for serving Gnosis dapps. The proposed plan to subsidize public RPC endpoints for Gnosis Chain with a large discount on a 200M requests per day throughput on a 1-year commitment is a great step forward in this collaboration.

We fully support this proposal and hope to see continued collaboration between GnosisDAO and Pocket Network in maintaining these high-quality public goods for the benefit of Gnosis Chain users.

disruptbanksy · March 14, 2023, 6:28pm

Thank you for the support Justin

After speaking with stakeholders on both sides of the aisle, we’ve decided to publish a new proposal without the retroactive funding aspect. Gnosis and Pocket favor an 18-month service agreement to fund continued access to decentralized RPC alternatives for both Gnosis Chain pruned and Gnosis Chain archival.

It’d be great if you could reshare your comment in this new hyperlinked proposal

Should GnosisDAO fund decentralized alternatives of Gnosis Chain pruned and archival RPC endpoints from Pocket Network for 18 months?

disruptbanksy · March 14, 2023, 7:00pm

I think that would have complicated the proposal IMO as this one was focused on serving the users of Gnosis Chain. However, I like the direction you are headed with onboarding Gnosis Validators to the Pocket Network ecosystem to put their nodes to work and earn an additional stream of revenue/income.

I recommend adding your idea to the community suggestions section of Pocket’s DeWork: