Pocket Network’s Shannon Upgrade has been successfully Soft Launched!
On Friday, March 28, 2025, Grove soft-launched the Shannon Upgrade — the next evolution of Pocket Network! As of 2pm US-EST (GMT-4), the first blocks on the new Pocket Network chain had been successfully produced!
By the time of this publication of this piece — 9:45am US-EST on Monday March 31, 2025 — over 4000 blocks have been produced. One of the first proof-of-concept explorers for the new Pocket chain, vendored by Stakenodes, shows the following:
A big congratulations goes to Daniel Olshansky, Grove’s CTO and Pocket Network’s Head of Protocol, and his team of world-class engineers for developing this zero-to-one innovation over the last 18 months! If you haven’t already, you can read more about the technical mission and journey here.
So what happens now?
Table of Contents
- March 28, 2025— Shadow Genesis (Pre-TGE Launch)
- First week of April 2025: Ecosystem Onboarding
- April: Migration and Cutover
- Afterwards
March 28, 2025— Shadow Genesis (Pre-TGE Launch)
- Launched the new version of Pocket Network as a new blockchain, built using Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, and Ignite CLI.
- Grove is running the initial set of validators to produce empty blocks.
- All parameters have been set to zero and will be tweaked over the course of the next month ahead of the migration (see below).
First week of April 2025: Ecosystem Onboarding
Observability
- New block explorers managed by the community will go live.
- Links & details here
Security
- Additional validators will be onboarded by the community
Exchange Support
- CEX’s deploy support for the new chain and prepare for cutover
- DEX’s notified that the change is coming
Fast-follow protocol integration and ecosystem alignment efforts will kickoff
- IBC Integration with the Cosmos Hub
- Axelar for EVM Bridging
- Noble for Stablecoin Support
- Babylon for Bitcoin Re-staking
- EigenLayer for AVS Support
Marketing
- Marketing activities will begin in earnest
April: Migration and Cutover
Network Actors
- Services (onchain IDs) will be permissionlessly allowlisted by Grove for backwards compatibility with the the same set of ~60 services Pocket Network supports today
- Suppliers (i.e. Node Operators) will begin staking the new Pocket Network clients (i.e. Relay Miners) to begin processing user requests
- Applications (i.e. Gateways) will begin onboarding and utilizing Grove’s new gateway SDK, PATH, and start sending requests directly to the network while providing enterprise grade SLAs
- Grove will begin shifting a portion of its production traffic to the new network
Tooling Support
- Pocket (Shannon) will be added to the Cosmos Registry
- Pocket (Shannon) will be added to Keplr Wallet and Soothe Wallet/Vault
Parameter Adjustments
- Onchain parameters will be adjusted to enable token minting & burning by Suppliers and Applications/Gateways, respectively
- Cutover parameters will be reviewed and set (stake minimums, tx fees, etc.)
Morse → Shannon State Migration
- A snapshot of the existing Pocket (Morse) state will be exported
- Reconciliation of tokens will take place to account for tokens minted during the Shannon Shadow Genesis testing and onboarding phase
- Final reconciled state will be imported to the Pocket (Shannon) chain
Migration and Claims Website
- Claiming Website launches and claiming of POKT (1:1) on the new chain will commence
- CEX’s drop support for Morse POKT and adopt Shannon POKT
- DEX’s add support for Shannon
Afterwards
After the migration, Grove, and other community members, will continue executing against the Shannon Roadmap. A more user-friendly, non-technical version of that Roadmap will be shared in April as well.
This migration comes with a lot of new features and enables broader ecosystem alignment. More importantly, it’s just the first step to enable the team at Grove to execute and iterate on new features we’ve been receiving from our customers.
Pocket Network’s Shannon upgrade and Grove’s PATH SDK is the foundation to enable APIs with enterprise grade SLAs to any open data source or service through permissionless incentives.
Thank you all for your continued support!
