Should GnosisDAO fund decentralized alternatives of Gnosis Chain pruned and archival RPC endpoints from Pocket Network for 18 months?
After speaking with stakeholders on both sides of the aisle, we have decided to publish a new proposal without the retroactive funding aspect. The previous years of service are a gift to the Gnosis community of users, developers, applications, and protocols. Thank you for the opportunity to demonstrate Pocket Network’s value proposition as the most redundant, reliable, multi-chain RPC layer by taking on additional traffic during Dark Forest rounds and the xDAI to Gnosis Chain transition (to name a few past examples).
Gnosis and Pocket stakeholders favor an 18-month service contract to fund continued access to decentralized RPC alternatives for both Gnosis Chain pruned and Gnosis Chain archival. It will allow GnosisDAO to steward this public good together with Pocket Network!
Summary
Pocket Network is a decentralized, middleware protocol focused on the RPC layer. Its 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 3 spot in terms of requests per day at ~130.6M daily average requests according to POKTscan!
Abstract
A decentralized RPC protocol is crucial for a blockchain that values decentralization such as Gnosis Chain.
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 (RCIs) we support are:
Gnosis Chain = 0027 (mainnet)
Gnosis Chain = 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.
Over the last year or so, Pocket Network has been serving 100M+ requests per day with an excellent average response time of ~150ms with success rates above 99% across all Pocket Portal regions. Moreso, in the Asia-Pacific region (most used region by Gnosis) the response times are as low as 40ms (lower = better & faster) 
According to POKTscan, there are currently 20,596 Pocket Service Nodes pointing to Gnosis Full Nodes for the 0027 Relay Chain ID and 2,695 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 subsidize a public good in the form of public RPC endpoints (available in the Gnosis Chain docs) without rate limits:
- https://gnosischain-rpc.gateway.pokt.network/
- https://gnosischain-archival-rpc.gateway.pokt.network/
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 150M requests per day at $0.0000020 throughput on an 18-month commitment with the option to renew on an annual basis:
- $164,250 USD for 150M Requests Per Day on a 18-month contract
That represents 3.65x in yearly savings (a 365% 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
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-southeast-1, us-east-2, ap-northeast-2, eu-central-1, ap-east-1, eu-west-3, us-east-1, eu-north-1, eu-south-1, eu-west-2, eu-west-1, us-west-2, ap-south-1, ca-central-1 | 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 funding, Pocket Network Inc will continue to support the Gnosis Chain network; however, in an effort to do so sustainably, PNI 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.
| Payment Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Payment Dates | Amount Due |
| Upon Proposal Passing (50%) | $82,125 USD |
| Upon Milestone Completion (50%) | $82,125 USD |
| Total (100%) | $164,250 USD |
PNI prefers payment in stablecoins, such as USDC or DAI, at this provided address from Pocket Network, Inc. → 0x5F1Feefc4BB7a414096cCF070BeEF94da8Ff88A6
Conclusion
Thank you to the Gnosis community for taking the time to read through and consider this proposal! I’m looking forward to your feedback and our discussion ahead of the forum poll & snapshot vote 
Sincerely,
Alberto Jauregui (@disruptbanksy on Twitter & Telegram)