On June 3rd, 2025, Pocket Network performed a hard fork into the Shannon upgrade, the culmination of four years of learning and two years of active development work. The upgrade, which made Pocket a Cosmos native chain, unlocked three key areas of functionality:
- Fully permissionless network access, allowing anyone anywhere to stake directly to the protocol for throughput.
- Permissionless data source addition, allowing anyone to add their data source to the protocol, and be paid when it is accessed.
- Any open data type supported, meaning that it is no longer restricted to RPC. Any JSON message can be relayed, with WebSocket support.
Prior to the upgrade, the Morse version of the network had served nearly 900 billion relays, a level of throughput capable of supporting payment networks the size of Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal. For many, the launch of the Shannon upgrade was an end goal in itself, an upgrade that proved that the Pocket ecosystem was strong enough to both transition to sound business fundamentals in its revenue model, and to coordinate the massive amounts of effort required to completely shift to Cosmos cryptographic keys while maintaining the network’s historical state. But, as I wrote in my previous update in February:
Shannon is a birthplace, not a destination.
We have always had an audacious vision for Pocket Network; we strongly believe that unstoppable open data is a core requirement of web3, and that applications which are not decentralized and permissionless from top to bottom do not fulfill the expectations of web3 ethos. We know that in the past, we have failed to meet that ethos ourselves, with portals representing single points of failure. Now that we have fixed those issues, it’s time to establish Pocket’s place in the global data economy as the most censorship-resistant and self-healing data delivery network in existence.
It took nearly five years to reach just under a trillion relays. The next trillion will come in half that time.
The underlying technological accomplishments of Pocket to date are nothing short of revolutionary. Pocket was the first decentralized RPC network, and it is once again the first fully permissionless and decentralized open data network. But to prepare for the coming explosion in growth, we have more work to do. We have to establish Pocket’s use cases in easy-to-understand messaging that helps drive adoption, and with simple onboarding that doesn’t require an engineer. We have to make DevRel a core focus, with strong support for stakeholders on both the supply and demand sides of the ecosystem. We have to build tooling which helps inform decentralized network participants on how to optimize their infrastructure according to the network’s needs, and which provides their customers with simple and intuitive interfaces to stake and delegate. And as a foundation, we must work to secure the long-term sustainability and solvency of both the Foundation and DAO’s treasuries so that we can guarantee our continued ability to invest in the growth and refinement of the protocol’s ecosystem well into the future.
Pocket Must Be Universal
To many, or even most of the participants in the ecosystem currently, there’s a fairly predictable paradigm to how Pocket works: a bunch of noderunners stake nodes connecting to a blockchain node using $POKT non-custodially allocated by holders. A gateway establishes endpoints for that blockchain, and a dapp consumes data from that blockchain through the protocol, most often for use in defi platforms, wallets, and other common crypto functions.
Literally none of that description should be the default expectation for the future.
With the Shannon upgrade providing the ability to support any type of open data, any form of distributed application can share data using Pocket as its data delivery layer. Small-scale implementations of Pocket will become common, where a limited number of data nodes use lightweight access points to the protocol to synchronize distributed data from sensor arrays. Privacy-oriented web protocols similar to TOR may use Pocket nodes to support self-healing routes to data. Communications protocols like Signal can run proxy relays using Pocket, maintaining connection even when other centralized chat apps are down hard. And automated agentic systems will use Pocket for real-time data access to prevent the financial and operational impact of even short-lived connection failures.
In every one of these scenarios, the consumer and supplier of that data are much more closely linked than they were, and the primary user of the utility token is the actual entity which requires its utility. This changes the dynamic around acquiring $POKT significantly, shifting from speculators to network users as the primary driving market force, creating a healthy economy based on real-world usage of the protocol.
While noderunners and gateways will continue to play a critical supporting role in the health of the network at large, Pocket becomes a commonly used utility for any application which requires distributed open data. Its ease of use and permissionless access mean users may not even be meaningfully aware of the greater ecosystem around the protocol, solely interacting with the network as a user for its functionality. They will buy their own $POKT to stake for access, to stake their supplier nodes, and to stake their data source, and they will receive a rebate for their usage in the form of node rewards and owner rewards from relay mining. Because of that multi-rebate functionality, their implementation will become cheaper the greater their relay volume.
In essence, Pocket becomes a web utility framework similar to WordPress, where they click the one button installer, and begin accessing data, without ever reading the forum where developers spend hours working to optimize the underlying functionality.
While the network functionality is expanding, the existing enterprise-class use cases will continue to grow. Pocket is already the data provider of projects like the XRPL EVM Sidechain, and will continue to branch out into verticals like financial service providers, currency systems, and other places where distributed computing systems are used, expanding vertically and horizontally simultaneously. Tradfi payment systems process trillions of relays per day. Pocket is well equipped to provide that underlying backbone. As DePIN sees wider adoption, the need for decentralized data delivery becomes greater, and on a mature, battle-tested network that CTOs can rely on.
Pocket Must Be Easy
If there was one thing I could tattoo on every ecosystem developer’s chest, that would be it. Pocket must be easy to use, easy to provide for, and easy to build for. Casual retail investors should be able to stake or delegate without a 90-page instruction manual. Defi should not require two bridges and a wrapping token. Data owners must have an easy way to post their data to the protocol without needing a command line interface. Infra operators should have both a simple interface to stake and operate nodes, and clear network analytics that make their management and deployment decisions easy, resulting in high performance and low latency for QoS considerations. And developers should have a pluggable environment to build in with most common tasks abstracted into readily available open source packages.
Many of these goals are underway already. The Igniter framework, which allows close to one-click staking for any noderunner, has been in development since September and will be released in the coming weeks. A native explorer and network health dashboard are in progress, with the beta version of the explorer getting significant use over the course of the Shannon migration. Once IBC support is implemented, a near-term goal that we expect in the next month, an Axelar bridge will be built and integrated into a native multichain dashboard, providing real-time cross-chain token data for defi users. Keplr integration is currently in progress, bringing all of the standard Cosmos functionality into the Pocket ecosystem, including its wallet and multisig, and governance/validator tooling.
The governance tooling is part of a bigger process that must be easy: DAO participation. While the current governance system is much vaunted for its low Gini coefficient, it’s also incredibly complicated to get a vote in. Despite thousands of wallets in the ecosystem, there are fewer than a hundred tokenized voters, and fewer than half of them are actually active in the ecosystem. Token holders have no direct representation at all. And to call the current forum “clunky” would be kind. Our governance systems need to be modernized to reflect the actual network stakeholders, and not be running on 2020 tech.
For engineers, there shouldn’t be any need to reinvent the wheel. There are many common API structures out there for working with data, and we need to build common integrations in our open source repo to support them in fast-tracking Pocket powered applications. Just as Apple’s app store drove the growth of the app economy by subsidizing app development, we will subsidize integrations built on the Pocket SDK which provide data management tools for storage, analysis, and transformation, and deploy them on package managers like NPM and Yarn. Pocket will be another common developer utility included from the command line during the initial setup of application development.
Pocket Must Be Sustainable
As I noted in the introduction, Pocket enabled its Shannon tokenomics on May 1st of this year, locking the network into a net-zero inflation where mint equals burn. In simple terms, users pay for data, data providers are paid by users, and there’s no magical internet money printed outside of that business transaction. High inflation, while useful in attracting supply-side participants, has a high long-term price in terms of currency debasement, and we’ve seen that effect firsthand. When you factor in transaction fees, the network is slightly deflationary, a statement that many top 10 proof-of-stake chains can’t make.
But sustainability is about more than just a tokenomics model. The Foundation’s F-Chains II program maintains nodes on the network to ensure throughput for low traffic and startup chains, and to maintain high QoS and regional coverage. It subsidizes the noderunners participating with a large revenue share. And in doing so, it also generates income for the Foundation which will cover operational costs without requiring additional subsidy from the DAO treasury.
We expect to be revenue neutral by October of this year.
The aggressive right-sizing of the Foundation budget, accomplished with scalpel precision by our comptroller, combined with a sustainable recurring revenue program, will allow the Foundation to operate with the safety of a long runway, while keeping DAO allocations firmly focused on expenses and programs that directly benefit the ecosystem and its participants. Pocket is a technology product, not an academic exercise, and its resources should be focused on technology outcomes, not whitepapers about experimental governance models. We’re here to be the backbone of the world’s data delivery system. We’re going to act like it.
In the four months since I took the lead at the Foundation, we’ve seen a lot of goals accomplished. It feels good to reflect on that, and once everyone is past all of the moving and upgrading and tuning of the fork, I hope we can all take a well deserved break and give ourselves a hearty pat on the back. What we’ve achieved is incredible, and in the face of quite a bit of skepticism. It’s taken countless hours of often thankless work, from a community that pulled together around our belief in what the future of decentralized data looks like. We all deserve recognition for that. So, let’s take a moment, and celebrate what we’ve done.
And then let’s get back to work.