2025 will be remembered as the most significant in Pocket Network’s history. On June 3rd, we completed the Shannon upgrade, the culmination of four years of learning and two years of active development. This wasn’t just a software release. It was a transformation. Pocket is now a modular, Cosmos-SDK-based universal data fabric, and the implications of that shift are still unfolding.
By moving away from the legacy Morse system, we achieved what we set out to build from the beginning: fully permissionless network access. Anyone, anywhere, can now stake POKT and provide infrastructure. Anyone can add a data source. Anyone can build a gateway. The gatekeepers are gone. And with that, the tenure of Grove as our primary engineering arm came to a close. Pocket is now entirely community-built and operated, in the true spirit of open source.
Sound Money, Real Business
On May 1st, we hit a milestone that many in crypto never reach: mint-and-burn equilibrium. Pocket is now running on a net-zero inflation model. In simple terms, users pay for data, data providers get paid, and there’s no magical internet money being printed outside of that transaction. When you factor in transaction fees, we’re actually slightly deflationary, a statement that many top-10 proof-of-stake chains still can’t make.
To make this sustainable for enterprise adoption, we standardized pricing at $1 USD per 1 Billion Compute Units. This decouples infrastructure costs from token volatility, giving developers the predictable, low-cost pricing they need to build at scale. And as the year closed, we put forward a proposal to push further, minting 2.5% less than the amount burned, transitioning Pocket to a fully deflationary economy.
The KRW market listing on Upbit brought both liquidity and global visibility. POKT is now firmly positioned as a foundational asset in the DePIN sector, and we intend to keep building on that momentum.
A Year of Firsts
Shannon landing was the headline, but the work didn’t stop there. Consider what we accomplished:
- Serviced more than a trillion Compute Units worth of relays in a single day through the network. That’s throughput capable of supporting payment systems the size of Visa or Mastercard.
- Announced our partnership with GetBlock, expanding our reach in the infrastructure market.
- Took over serving the public RPC channels, launching a new dashboard to display appstake data and allow direct public RPC support.
- Launched the Foundation Partnerships program, enabling blockchain foundations to sponsor throughput on the public RPC portal at wholesale cost.
- Onboarded PnyxAI as our first directly integrated LLM service, establishing a model for massive CU burn with non-blockchain data. LLM services register in the 50,000–500,000 CUPR range versus the 1K–5K we typically see for blockchain services. This is a glimpse of where the real growth lies.
Building the Machine
With Shannon live, we shifted focus to the people and processes that will carry the protocol forward. Otto Vargas joined as Head of Protocol, and we established community engineering processes to coordinate open source development across the ecosystem. The results showed up in the fourth quarter: substantive performance improvements in the PATH SDK and the relay miner.
An overservicing bug that undercounted relays for payment was identified. It’s slotted for fix in version 1.31, tentatively scheduled for mid-January. That release will include an overpayment cycle to make up for lost rewards for noderunners, stakers, and validators. We don’t pretend bugs don’t happen. We fix them and make it right.
Network growth hit expected targets. Arbitrum is now the fastest-growing user of the network, recently averaging more than 200B CUs per day. We expect to hit a daily average of 1T CUs in the near term as we drive direct growth through the Foundation Partnerships program.
The Landscape Is Clearing
A lot of projects have taken a swing at our space. Many aren’t around anymore. Others have pivoted to treating data access as a loss leader, a strategy that only works until the money runs out. Pocket stands poised to benefit from the clearing of the landscape as a battle-tested solution on a mature blockchain.
Q4 was a rough quarter for blockchain broadly, but that’s precisely when decentralization proves its value. When AWS fell over for a day in October, high-availability applications blew out their annual SLA requirements in a single incident. Multi-cloud isn’t enough. You need a decentralized access layer. And Pocket is the only protocol positioned to deliver that at scale.
As the market stabilizes and recovers, increased demand means increased need for Pocket to pay for throughput. Savvy network users will stock up while the market is weak.
What We’re Pushing Toward
We continue to drive toward our key objectives:
Expanded exchange access through tier-1 exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. The Upbit listing proved the appetite is there; we intend to keep that momentum going.
Greater adoption through our Foundation Partnerships and an entirely new business development funnel. We’re not waiting for projects to find us.
Enhanced messaging telling the world that fully permissionless, decentralized data access is a reality—and it can be acquired through Pocket at a better price than most competitors.
How You Can Help
If you’ve read this far, you’re already invested in what we’re building. Here’s how you can move the needle:
- Introductions to foundations we support to increase sponsorships and throughput of our public RPC portal.
- Referrals to new projects who have the opportunity to build from the ground up on Pocket.
- Introductions to stablecoin issuers who we can partner with to provide ecosystem data at scale.
Looking Ahead
We’ve put in long hours this year getting through the network upgrade, and the debugging and tuning that followed. The late nights, the debugging sessions, the community calls—all of it was in service of getting Pocket to where it is now: a permissionless, self-sustaining, community-operated network that actually works.
We’ve all hung through a lot of work and up-and-down years to get here. The skeptics have been loud. The market has been brutal. And yet, here we are, not just surviving, but positioned for our strongest year of growth yet.
Let’s make 2026 our year.