In recent months we have seen prominent members of the crypto-community, from cypherpunk pioneers to well-funded startups come out of the woodwork with scathing critiques against Ethereum and other blockchain platforms for their diminishing full-node capacity and rapid reliance on single service providers for full node support. This is causing “centralization” in the space that prides itself so much on the opposite.

According to stats posted on “ The Burden of Infura “ although Ethereum usage is growing, nodes have dropped 50% this past year. Of those remaining, most are through single-service providers and rely on AWS as their foundation. The combination of these facts have worries mounting.

In response to the mounting worries, a well-known Ethereum startup launched “ Chaos Unicorn Day “ early April with the goal of raising awareness and stimulating the development of alternative solutions. With the latest release of Pocket Core MVP, Pocket Network is well positioned to be a critical piece of a two-pronged solution.

One, Pocket is building out a decentralized relay network for full-node infrastructure. The value of this relay network is that requests will be coordinated randomly across all node providers in an automatic way. In the event of a “Chaos Unicorn” coming in unannounced and disrupting a node (or service provider), the network redirects the requests to the next (random) valid node and the DApp keeps working without fail.

The differentiation of Pocket from other relay networks is that it is compatible with blockchain, by way of easy-to-build plugins for Pocket SDKs. This further de-risks DApps because they can run across as many chains (or forks) as they wish, guaranteeing the censorship-resistance, resilience, and the agency that we all aspire for. Not to mention, this opens the door for emerging multi-chain applications built seamlessly through a single interface.

The second prong of the solution is to make full-nodes easy to set-up and sustainable in the long term, through direct rewards, despite volatility. Projects such as DAppnode are building “plug and play” full-node boxes directed at everyday consumers. In addition to this “easy-to-setup” piece, Pocket will introduce an economic layer to it’s protocol that will incentivize full-node providers directly, providing them a sustainable model for years of growth.

The Pocket Core MVP release is the first step toward putting the D back in DApps ;P.

As a demonstration of Pockets capabilities for DApp development, we created a fully functional decentralized AR-game app for IOS, in partnership with AION Network called “Monster Chase”.

The game launched with MVP and already has traction in the AION/Pocket Communities with Monsters being placed and chased all over the world.

We encourage everyone to look more into this release roll-out, developer portal , and how it all ties into the Testnet release at the end of this year, by checking out https://www.pokt.network/pocket-core-mvp/ .

If you would like to speak with the team for an article, interview or partnership, do not hesitate to reach out at hola@pokt.network, or on telegram.

Some of the Tweetstorm

https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1091311361643237376

https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester/status/1070203807764832257

https://twitter.com/ethstatus/status/1110200773298831361

https://twitter.com/iurimatias/status/1109218799348342788

https://twitter.com/theonevortex/status/1105452851898179585

https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1084626956862279680

https://twitter.com/BMBernstein/status/1016691503501111296

https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1038059864562515968

https://twitter.com/fubuloubu/status/1083798931417583618

https://twitter.com/fubuloubu/status/1070368785734004742

https://twitter.com/oliverzok/status/1092869406571589632

Some of the Coverage

https://www.coindesk.com/the-race-is-on-to-replace-ethereums-most-centralized-layer

https://cryptonomist.ch/en/2018/12/05/ethereum-infura-node/

https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-developers-best-friend-centralized-trap/

https://www.btcwires.com/c-buzz/the-raging-debate-over-infura-the-most-centralized-part-of-ethereum/

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/01/10/the-burden-of-infura/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/83a34l/centralization_in_ethereum_infura_metamask/

https://medium.com/@itraynis/why-is-there-no-mention-that-infura-is-a-centralized-3rd-party-provider-designed-for-a-f353acbce926

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/12/05/cryptopia-in-crisis-billionaire-joe-lubins-ethereum-experiment-is-a-mess-how-long-will-he-prop-it-up/#77328c6e2f0a

https://cryptopotato.com/why-eos-dapps-are-dangerously-dependent-on-just-five-nodes/