I’m pleased to be taking on the role as Head of Operations at Pocket Network Foundation, and thank you for all of the very kind messages celebrating that. I’m excited to be able to meaningfully contribute to an area where the Foundation has had a particular need since its inception, and where my experience can make a real difference.
For as long as I’ve been a part of this ecosystem, the promise of a decentralized permissionless open data network has been a vision that I’ve believed in. The countless folks in this ecosystem that I’ve engaged with over the last five years can attest to the fact that I’ve been an evangelist for that concept, and how critical I believe it is to the future of not just blockchain, but of all open data.
When I first started in this industry, the internet was all personal websites strung together in loose networks like blogrolls, and being listed on a well read blog or added to a popular webring was about the single best way for your content to be seen.
Over the years, we’ve seen a massive centralization of the web. A majority of time online is spent inside the walled garden of one platform or another, and subject to algorithmic filtering or outright censorship. Access to portions of the web through services like CDNs can be cut off with the flick of a switch. Various regimes around the world have at one time or another limited the flow of data to serve their own purposes.
At the same time, the reliance on open data is expanding exponentially. With the rise of autonomous agents, and a growing agentic marketplace, even brief gaps in data access can cause millions in damages. Positions get liquidated. Trades fail. Mission critical systems are not there when they’re needed most. The millisecond time frame execution requirements of modern open data usage cannot operate reliably with even the most limited of downtime.
It’s a meme in crypto that “{my project} fixes this”, but it’s also a simple truth: Pocket fixes this.
As an ecosystem, we haven’t always performed as well as we should have. A lot of us are deep tech nerds, and infra is a dry subject to begin with, so our comms aren’t particularly hype friendly. Our tokenomics didn’t account for the rapid growth at the beginning, and took too long to adjust around that. And operationally, we’ve had a number of our own autonomous agents with gaps in critical communication. There are a lot of moving parts in our ecosystem, and collaborating effectively and efficiently requires a high degree of coordination. Ask anyone who’s been in one and they’ll tell you: DAOs are hard.
As we move forward towards the most significant upgrade of the protocol in its history, we have to be tightly aligned on purpose and knowledge, something that takes both quite a bit of work and absolutely well tuned systems when you have as many network actors as we do. From updating and distributing docs to upgrading the peripheral platforms in our ecosystem to testing the hell out of the migration process on testnet and coordinating the cutover, it’s all hands in the ecosystem on deck. I’m confident that our partners and providers will perform to the level required, and I’m looking forward to that big exhale that we all get once it’s done. I’m sure we all are.
But Shannon is a birthplace, not a destination. It represents the maturity stage of the protocol, where its users benefit from all of the lessons learned along the way. Our accelerator is launching the first cohort of what I hope to be an endless stream of new builders to our ecosystem, inspired by unstoppable open data, and a built-in model which incentivizes data sharing. The Foundation will need to grow to meet the expanding needs, and to do that, its access to capital has to grow. For that to happen, it needs to maintain tight transparent reporting, and demonstrate high operational efficiency. It needs to be as engaged on the technical details of the protocol as it is on the governance details. From an operational perspective, it needs to be every bit as boring in its reliability and predictability as the protocol is.
And that’s what I’m here for.
For everyone who has been here from the beginning, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your belief and continued support in our shared vision. For the new folks, you’ve picked a great time to come along for the ride. The opportunities we have in Shannon are near limitless. See you in the Discord.