An update from Grove on Shannon Beta TestNet, PATH, the Past & the Future
👋 If you’re not ready to spend ~10 minutes reading, I suggest you bookmark this post and return to it later. You won’t regret it. It’s more than an update; it dives into the problems Pocket & Grove solve.
You’ll get a sense of where Shannon Beta TestNet is, but also get historical and technical context on why we need Pocket Network, what Grove’s responsibility is in all of this, and what PATH is. If you’ve ever had any of these questions, you’ll get some — not all — of the answers here.
Table of Contents
1. Pocket Network: Can you remind me why we need this again?
tl;dr Network requests need to be relayed over the internet. There is no widely adopted open-source protocol that incentivizes network relaying at an enterprise-grade quality of service.
In the crypto industry, it’s easy to forget that RPCs and APIs extend beyond a full node or an EVM JSON-RPC specification.
Since the 1970s, Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) have been the mechanism by which any two online actors communicate. Application Programming Interface (APIs) emerged around the same time to provide structure defining how this communication should happen.
In simpler terms, you can think of RPCs as the phone line (i.e. the medium) that connects two people, while APIs are the shared language (e.g. English) they use to understand each other.
Whether you’re an AI agent sending funds, a signal proxy relaying a private message, or a database providing data, the request and response use structured APIs over a network-based RPC.
An observation you should take from the diagram above is that payments and limits are not built into the foundation of RPC and APIs. More on that later. But, to summarize, RPCs and APIs are simply needed to mediate communication between a Client and a Server.
In fact, in Moxie’s — founder of Signal messenger — instant classic Web3 First Impressions blog from 2022, he talks about how centralized servers are the crux of the Web3 industry:
A server! But, as we know, people don’t want to run their own servers. As it happens, companies have emerged that sell API access to an ethereum node they run as a service, along with providing analytics, enhanced APIs they’ve built on top of the default ethereum APIs, and access to historical transactions. Which sounds … familiar. At this point, there are basically two companies. Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain. In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura!
Three years later, Infura and Alchemy have a lot more competition in the market from new infrastructure providers, but the problem remains. However, it might not be a problem as much as a lack of a user need for anything different.
Decentralized servers are not the goal, it’s just a means to an end. What matters is that a Remote Procedure Calls are Reliable Performant and Cost-effective. This observation is what gave rise to the RPC Trilemma.
Here’s a thought experiment… If everything is cheap, scalable, efficient, private and uncensored, we can theoretically have one “mega-server” in a single country, like Canada, respond to all RPC requests. But, if they up the price, reduce their performance, track your information or censor you, then the degree of decentralization needs to dynamically adapt, through a proper incentive mechanism.
This leads us to remember why we’re here in the first place:
Decentralization is a byproduct of a permissionless and incentivized system.
By building an open-source protocol (permissionless) that is incentivized ($POKT), we enable a marketplace of RPC providers that can serve open-source APIs and relay network requests.
In the short-term, the product competes on price and quality with centralized providers. In the mid-term, it serves as the middleware for other open protocols or relay networks. In the long-term, it aligns with the crypto ethos of providing privacy, security and censorship-resistance when the need arises.
2. Timing: What happened since 2017?
tl;dr With lots of organizational changes and shifts in the industry, Shannon Development kicked off in September 2023. A year and a half later, we are executing and on track.
With Pocket first being conceived by the founding team in 2017, a question I often get is why things are where they are today concerning development and timing.
The diagram below captures all of the twists and turns over the years from a solely technical protocol point of view.
Without going into all the details, Morse (v0) is a 5-year-old Tendermint fork that needs to be deprecated ASAP.
In early 2022, we spent a couple of years building everything in-house by being too early in the crypto industry, but we pivoted at the right time in the right direction. You can read about it here. In retrospect, a year and a half later, it was 100% the right decision and we have even more confidence in the stack we chose today than back then.
We consciously chose to pause all feature development until we rebuilt the foundation. It’d be great to do both, but we have to prioritize with the resources we have. Mark Zuckerberg recently talked about how their team had to do something similar with a full rewrite taking a year and a half after they IPOed. They had to fully pause all feature development until it was done.
[…] We’re going to pause feature development of the company, because it’s hard enough to do a rewrite. Right? If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape [who try to add features while doing a rewrite]. They basically just never terminated.
We are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of this, and our backlog of customer needs and ideas is fully loaded.
3. Grove: What role does it play in Pocket Network?
tl;dr Grove is the core R&D Labs team for the Pocket Network protocol and PATH — a suite of tools that enables Pocket Network for enterprise-grade use cases.
Pocket Network has a large ecosystem with different entities filling different roles: service operators, ecosystem stewards, builders, researchers, validators, etc.
Grove’s responsibility is to steward the ecosystem as Pocket Network’s core R&D Labs team
As we wrote in one of our previous announcements, our mission is to: Enable any API Gateway to settle nework traffic on a permissionless supply network while maintaining enterprise-grade quality🌿
We achieve this with 2 goals:
- Build a protocol, Pocket Network’s Shannon upgrade, that attracts and incentivizes high-quality supply (infrastructure providers) of open data sources and services through crypto-economic incentives.
- Build a suite of tools, PATH (Path API & Toolkit Harness), that abstracts away the nuances of a permissionless supply network so it is as reliable as centralized infrastructure for enterprise customers.
Today, we’re running a gateway, Grove’s Portal, that’s limited in extensibility, on top of a protocol that’s limited by scalability. It’s gotten us far, but it can’t take us much further.
To show how far it has gotten us, here’s a message we got from one of our customers earlier this year:
Oh we love Grove gateway services. Planning to use them more heavily. But the reliability is important. BTW, Infura is not 100% reliable either.
At Grove, we’re collectively leveraging cumulative decades of experience in managing a live protocol and maintaining a live Gateway. Few can attest to doing the same. We’re in our second act. It's akin to a presidential candidate who is starting their second term and can jump straight into execution mode without having to learn the ropes.
PATH is under very active development and will come fully loaded with everything from quality-of-service, to rate limiting and user auth so anyone can leverage Pocket Network directly while maintaining the optionality they need. One of our goals with PATH is to enable enterprises to adopt Pocket seamlessly without sacrificing reliability; see our SLAs and existing partners.
Here’s a diagram showing the 4 different modes an application can access
- Dependent: Use Grove’s Portal directly without thinking about it; we’ll use PATH behind the scenes.
- Grove Hybrid: Use Grove’s services directly; we’ll use PATH behind the scenes.
- PATH Hybrid: Use PATH directly, bypassing Grove, and settling traffic on Pocket Network yourself.
- Independent: You’re not using Grove, PATH or Pocket Network. Should we have an intervention?
4. Shannon & PATH: What’s happening with development and migration?
tl;dr We’re focused on load testing, migration, documentation and launch blocking edge cases.
In the Alpha TestNet update from August, we published a visual roadmap. Today, I’ll get the the point quickly by simply summarizing where we’re at and what we’re focused on.
Before I do, recall that our PATH Roadmap and Shannon Roadmap have been public on GitHub since day 1, are updated every week, and are the source of truth for almost all of the technical work our team is doing.
I am confident in saying that if Pocket didn’t have the legacy of a mature ecosystem, and if Grove didn’t have existing enterprise customers, both PATH and Shannon would be in a shippable (MVP) state today.
However, the virtue of building on top of an existing ecosystem comes with the overhead of migrations and other considerations. Our Q1 focus is to ensure the following for both PATH and Shannon:
- đź‘· Technical Soundness: Permissionless Demand. Permissionless Supply. Scalable Relays. No bugs. No chain halts. Morse feature parity. Sound tokenomics. Limited scope of new features on launch.
- 📑 Clear Communication: Easy-to-follow onboarding documentation. Easy-to-use tooling that’s opinionated but also configurable. Streamlined support channels. As simple as possible, but no simpler.
- 🏂 Seamless Migration: We’re working closely with the Pocket Network Foundation across multiple work streams related to the Morse to Shannon migration. This spans three pillars: technical, operational and legal. A chain migration is non-trivial under any circumstance, but the fact that we’re using a different cryptographic key scheme introduces additional nuances and complexities. As a comparison, there are analogs we can draw from both the Ethereum Beacon chain as well as the Bitcoin cash fork. That said, we’re focused on making this as simple and seamless as possible.
- 🚀 Foundation for Innovation: Going into 2025, we’re focused on building a platform from day one, leveraging the best available tools while staying pragmatic about what to build in-house. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we’re using proven open-source technologies like the Cosmos SDK and Envoy Proxy as building blocks. This lets us focus our efforts on innovating where it truly matters — creating a system that’s interoperable in Web3, extensible in Web2, and adaptable to emerging trends like DeFi, SocialFi, AI Agents, LLMs, and enterprise applications.
We’ve touted some of the technical advancements that Shannon is bringing in the past. Without reiterating the details, the diagram below captures a high-level overview of how things like Relay Mining and Gateway Abstraction on Shannon play with PATH to enable Grove, Sovereign Apps or other gateways like Liquify.
This is the platform that’ll enable incentivizing and enabling any permissionless RPC over any open API.
5. You: How can I get involved?
tl;dr Visit our docs & follow commoddity.medium.com who will be releasing a three-part series exploring Shannon & PATH.
There are three simple ways for you to get involved:
- Get your keyboards
- Provide feedback
- Tell your friends
Our documentation is under a very active work-in-progress and we’re working hard on making it simpler. In the meantime, Pascal — one of our backend engineers — will be releasing a three-part series explaining Pocket, PATH and how the different types of services he was able to deploy using our tooling.
Eventually, path.grove.city and dev.poktroll.com will be self-explanatory and easy to follow. Until then, use the links below as a starting point.
Where do I get started with the Shannon Protocol docs?
Where do I get started with the PATH Gateway docs?
- Go to the introduction page
- Make your way to the environment setup
- Reach the Shannon Cheat Sheet guide
Where do I leave Feedback
If there’s just one thing you need to remember is that PATH and Shannon are going to make 🎇
