When I stepped into the role of CEO last year, I doubled down on our mission at that time:

• Deliver the Shannon upgrade to Pocket Network, enabling permissionless demand, generalized data transport, and automated mint/burn tokenomics.
• Ship PATH, the reference implementation for a Pocket Network Gateway, based on our own battle-tested gateway.
• Launch new verticals on Pocket Network.

On June 3, 2025, we launched the Shannon upgrade. On November 4, 2025, we reached the 1.0.0 milestone for PATH, enabling anyone to launch their own permissionless gateway. As for scaling to new verticals, teams like POKT.ai are already building those integrations today.

With these accomplishments, Grove has made the decision to step away from directly operating or developing the protocol and our gateway, the Grove Portal. Throughout the month of November, the vast majority of Grove’s paid and public endpoint traffic will migrate to new public endpoints infrastructure hosted on https://api.pocket.network, ensuring the Pocket community continues to have the reliable access it needs. All of our remaining RPC and Validator infrastructure has moved to a new home: BuildInTheShade.com, which catalogues all of our past and present RPC-based partnerships and initiatives. This marks an important milestone: Grove is moving from Gateway to Application, from infrastructure provider to product builder.

Why Agents and Payments

For the past two years, Grove has been exploring the intersection of agents and payments, looking at how crypto and modern payment rails together can enable new coordination between humans, software, and machines. AI agents are here, and they need the ability to compensate the humans, creators, and services they depend on.

We have shared this vision publicly in talks and writing:

• AI Agents Are Coming (YouTube)
• AI Agents and the XRPL-EVM (YouTube)
• AI Agents and Payments (LinkedIn)

What We Are Building

Our next step is to make this vision concrete with a new product, The Grove API.

The Grove API is a simple, but powerful payments API that allows Humans and AI (agents, assistants, browsers, enterprises etc…) to tip, compensate, or pay humans and content platforms with a single API call. Behind the scenes, Grove will handle custody, routing, compliance, attribution, and automatic currency conversion, so developers and agents can focus on what matters.

Key features include:

• One API call to pay any creator or platform
• Support for stablecoins initially, with a fast follow for crypto, and fiat with automatic conversion
• Enterprise-grade attribution tracking, risk management, and audit trails
• Built on emerging standards such as x402 for agent micropayments and MCP for agent-to-service interoperability
• Support for attribution metadata (LLMs.txt, AI.txt, JSON-LD, etc.) so agents know who to pay automatically
• Designed for humans to tip anyone anywhere on the web for anything.
• Designed for AI use cases like training data compensation, inference usage, and rewarding content on the open web
• More on the larger vision can be found here: https://buildwith.grove.city

The mission is clear: to enable new forms of value transfer in the emerging world of crypto and AI, while giving both humans and agents a practical path to compensating creators and services.

What Happens Next

To make the transition smooth, here is what you can expect:

• Pocket Network’s public endpoints and related pages including docs, the status page, and chain pages have moved to https://api.pocket.network.
• Paid traffic will be sponsored by the Pocket Network Foundation during the migration period, and for a time afterward, through these new public endpoints.
• Grove’s customers have already been notified to make the transition in their apps, and have begun doing so since November 1, 2025.

To everyone who has trusted Grove over the years — developers, partners, and node runners — thank you! This pivot is not an ending. It is the continuation of the Pocket story, moving farther up the stack to where applications meet the end user.

Stay tuned. We are excited to share what comes next.

Grove’s Next Chapter: Moving Up the Stack was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That’s why we’re excited to release our Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation, now live on GitHub:

👉 https://github.com/buildwithgrove/mcp

What is MCP?

MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is emerging as the standard way to connect AI models and agents with external tools, APIs, and data sources. Think of it as a universal adapter for agents, enabling them to safely extend their capabilities in a structured, permissioned way.

By releasing an MCP server that integrates directly with Pocket Network’s decentralized RPC infrastructure, Grove is bridging the gap between agents ↔ blockchains.

Why This Matters

Most AI systems today rely on centralized infrastructure to access blockchains. That creates chokepoints:

• Centralized providers can throttle or censor access.
• Single points of failure introduce fragility.
• Developers and researchers are locked into proprietary platforms.

By connecting MCP to Pocket Network, we give AI agents:

• Redundant, censorship-resistant RPC across 60+ blockchains
• Permissionless access without needing to sign up for an API key
• Scalable infrastructure powered by thousands of independent node operators

This isn’t just infrastructure — it’s the foundation for a new class of autonomous, blockchain-native agents.

What You Can Build Today

Our open-source MCP server unlocks powerful new possibilities for developers:

• Trading Agents: Monitor mempools, surface opportunities, and execute trades trustlessly.
• Wallet Copilots: Query holdings, surface balances, and send POKT/ETH/XRP through natural language.
• Research Bots: Pull live token activity, governance votes, and protocol metrics in real-time.
• On-Chain API Discovery: Dynamically explore blockchain endpoints and interact with them through agent workflows.

These are just starting points — the real power comes from what the community builds next.

The Road Ahead

This release is one piece of a bigger vision: decentralized infrastructure for AI agents. We imagine a world where:

• Agents can discover and interact with on-chain APIs directly.
• Researchers can build trustless analytics pipelines without relying on centralized providers.
• Developers can experiment with autonomous systems that transact, vote, and coordinate on-chain.

By combining MCP + Pocket Network, we’re moving closer to that world.

Get Involved

The code is live and open-source:

👉 https://github.com/buildwithgrove/mcp

We’d love contributions, forks, and experiments. Whether you’re building a trading bot, a research agent, or the next agent-native dApp, this repo is designed to help you get started.

At Grove, our mission is to provide the infrastructure and incentives to power the emerging internet of humans + agents. This release is a step in that direction.

Let’s build it together.

Bridging AI Agents and Blockchains with MCP was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TL;DR

• 13 new Cosmos chains live; 15 more EVM and Cosmos chains coming soon
• WebSockets live on XRPL-EVM, BSC, and Base (expanding to more next month)
• Batching live for all EVM & Cosmos chains
• REST, CometBFT, and Cosmos interfaces now supported
• Free plans: 1M relays/month (up from 150k/day)
• Enterprise pricing for 10M+ relays/day

🌐 New Chains Live

AtomOne • Akash • ASI Alliance (Fetch) • Cheqd • Chihuahua • Elys • Jackal • Juno • Persistence • Router • SEDA • Shentu • Stargaze

🔮 Coming Soon

HyperEVM • Unichain • Arkeo • Babylon • Celestia • Cosmos Hub • KYVE • Namada • Neutron • Nillion • Passage • Provenance • Quicksilver • Side • Stride

⚡ Feature Highlights

WebSockets

Now live on Base, BSC, and XRPL-EVM. This is a soft launch — if you encounter issues, please open a ticket in Discord. Wider rollout is happening over the next month.

Batching

All supported EVM and Cosmos chains now support batched JSON-RPC requests, making your applications faster and more efficient. See the docs for details.

Interfaces

We’ve expanded beyond JSON-RPC to support REST, CometBFT, and Cosmos-SDK interfaces where available.

Relays

Starting September 11, 2025, both free and paid unlimited plans now include 1M relays/month. That’s up from 150k/day on free and 150k/month on paid.

🏢 Enterprise

If you’re running 10M+ relays/day, let’s talk custom pricing. Just get in touch and we’ll make it work.

🚀 Wrapping Up

This release marks one of our biggest expansions yet — with more chains, better performance, and more generous free tiers to help you build without limits.

13 New Chains + WebSockets, Batching, and 1M Free Relays was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today marks a major milestone for the XRPL ecosystem: the XRPL EVM Sidechain is officially live on mainnet. Developers can now deploy Ethereum-compatible smart contracts using XRP as gas — backed by fast finality, low fees, and native XRPL liquidity.

At Grove, we’re proud to support this launch with robust infrastructure: our Grove Portal and public RPC endpoints for XRPL EVM are available starting today. These services are powered by Pocket Network, delivering decentralized, high-availability access for developers building the next wave of cross-chain apps.

The XRPL EVM Sidechain isn’t just another EVM chain — it’s where Ethereum programmability meets battle-tested XRP stability. Combined with bridging from Axelar, real-time oracle feeds from Band Protocol, and a growing list of application partners, the ecosystem is ready for scale.

This is just the beginning. XRPL is now open for a new generation of apps — for humans and agents.

👉 Start building now: https://docs.xrplevm.org/

🔧 Use the free public RPC or mint your own endpoint instantly.

XRPL EVM is Live — Powered by Grove and Pocket was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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

1. March 28, 2025— Shadow Genesis (Pre-TGE Launch)
2. First week of April 2025: Ecosystem Onboarding
3. April: Migration and Cutover
4. 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!

Pocket Network’s Shannon Upgrade has been successfully Soft Launched! was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This month, we launched a refresh of our website — Grove.city — an aspirational look at not just what we do today, but where we’re headed. The protocol we’ve built, and are expanding on, Pocket Network, is evolving beyond blockchain RPC to power the next generation of permissionless systems, including LLMs, privacy protocols, social protocols, and storage protocols.

Explore the vision and services driving this transformation on our brand new services page and check out the roadmaps for our two open source products, PATH and the Pocket Network Shannon Upgrade on the brand new Roadmap page.

More Chains, More Power

We’ve also expanded Pocket Network’s capabilities with support for 8 new blockchains, providing more decentralized infrastructure to developers everywhere. The first seven chains are:

• Berachain bArtio Testnet
• Ink
• Linea
• Mantle
• Sei
• Sonic
• Tron

Growing partnership with XRPL

The 8th chain is the XRPL EVM Sidechain, for which we are running validators, and for which we will be the first public RPC starting the week of February 3, 2025.

2025 is our year!

We’re 1 month into the new year and our team of 9 has done all of the above, and has continued executing against our PATH and Shannon Roadmaps. We have more blog posts to come in February with updates on everything we’re doing, so watch this space!

Grove is kicking off 2025 with a new website, an XRPL partnership, and support for 8 more chains was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I met Mike on Twitter nearly 10 years ago, never in my wildest dreams did I think that that chance encounter would take me on this insane journey. From first hearing about the ideas of Pocket Network in 2017, to becoming an early advisor and Pocket DAO member, to joining the team overseeing engineering in the winter of 2021–2022, to becoming COO, and now taking on the mantle of CEO. It’s been an absolutely crazy ride, full of many unexpected twists and turns that come from working in a startup within the blockchain/crypto/web3 space over the last few years.

Though the Pocket Network Inc. entity has been around for nearly 7 years, we truly began hitting our stride when we relaunched our core product, the Portal, and simultaneously rebranded and re-founded the company in the summer of 2023 as Grove Redefines Our Very Existence Inc. — a recursive acronym on Grove. Mike laid out our mission back then and I aim to carry the torch to see it through.

Explicitly, our goals are:

• Launch Shannon in early 2025, the next generation upgrade to the most useful blockchain™, Pocket Network, enabling and incentivizing permissionless demand on this decentralized supply network.
• Launch an open source version of our Path API and Toolkit Harness (a.k.a. PATH — another recursive acronym) by year’s end, which is the white-labeled version of Grove’s Portal that has processed nearly a trillion blockchain transactions on Pocket Network.
• Unlock demand on Pocket Network via PATH by scaling it to support verticals beyond blockchain RPC (e.g., AI inferencing, Storage protocols, Decentralized social protocols, etc.)

Our CTO, Daniel Olshansky, recently simplified the above goals into the following one liner mission statement: Enable gateways by streamlining access to a decentralized supply network.

We are going to make sure Pocket Network outlasts us all, and the whole team at Grove, led by our newly minted Chief Information Officer, Fred Teumer, Daniel Olshansky, and myself will make sure that happens.

Ultimately, all paths lead to Grove 🌿

Steering Grove into the Future was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s Changing

Unlimited (Paid) Tier: We’ve combined the best features from our two paid plans, Auto-Scale and Enterprise, and are giving the best of both worlds — unlimited usage of all our features — without minimum commitments, at a fixed consumption based price of $2/million RPC requests (down from $7.45/million). You’ll get the following on the new Unlimited tier:

• Unlimited Transactions-per-second (TPS)
• Unlimited endpoints and apps
• Unlimited team member access
• No Compute Unit pricing: 1 request == 1 request (no matter how heavy)
• 24 hour log retention
• 30 day usage insights
• Endpoint privacy and security features
• Access to 50+ Blockchains
• First 100,000 requests per month are on the house

Free Tier: No credit card required. Everything above, but you’re capped at 100,000 requests per month. FYI, it used to be 100,000 per day on the old Free tier.

Migration Plan

The fun starts at 12pm ET on September 1, 2024.

• All accounts on the Auto Scale and Enterprise plans will be migrated to the new Unlimited plan.
• Invoices will be auto-generated and sent out to all users on a prorated basis for the amount of requests processed since their last billing cycle.
• Rolling 30-day billing cycles will be replaced with monthly billing.
• The first bill for the Unlimited plan will be generated and emailed on October 1, 2024, and on the first of every month thereafter.​

Questions

Open up a support ticket on Discord at: https://discord.gg/build-with-grove.

Pricing Update: More Value, Less Cost was originally published in Grove on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Typically, one can reference the path to their Bundle Resources file in the manner delineated below. In this specific example I attempting to obtain the path for Siren.bundle within my project that is also named Siren.

Bundle(for: Siren.self).path(forResource: “\(Siren.self)”, ofType: "bundle")

This works well when Siren is installed via CocoaPods, however, the bundle resource path is nil whenever the library is installed via Swift Package Manager. The reason is because the resources are only available via a new static property on Bundle called module, which is automatically generated whenever Siren, or any other package for that matter is installed via Swift Package Manger.

Therefore, if you plan to offer support for your open source library to be installed via Swift Package Manager, you’ll have to add a preprocessor definition named SWIFT_PACKAGE that checks to see if your packages were installed via Swift Package Manger. In there, you can reference the future to-be-auto-generated Bundle.module static property without any issues.

The final result looks like this, which as stated earlier, is lifted (with minor changes) from my Siren library:

I wrote this down in the hopes of helping someone else down the road as this took me an annoying amount of time to solve for my own needs.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post!

Simultaneously Supporting Bundle Resources in Swift Package Manager and CocoaPods was originally published in Arthur Sabintsev’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since 2006, I’ve spent countless hours developing free utilities for the web and for mobile devices. I started with small add-ons for Firefox 1.5 and have been churning out something new every year since then.

As I’ve gotten older, my life has gone through many professional changes. I’ve gone from being a hobbyist software developer during my days as a physics student at university to a full time software engineer at many amazing companies.

Recently, I made the decision to go into software engineering management and that requires a completely different skillset that I am excited to hone.

My personal life has also changed for the better. I’ve been married for the better part of the decade to a brilliant woman, and we have a wonderful daughter, with another child on the way. I’m very fortunate in that regard!

With that in mind, I now also have much less free time to contribute towards open source software development projects, be it mine or others.

Moving forward, I will only continue active feature development on Siren. As it so happens, I just released a complete rewrite of that library — please do check it out here!

The following projects will live on in maintenance mode, meaning that they will only receive compatibility updates, as needed, for Swift 5, iOS 13 and beyond.

• FontBlaster
• Freedom
• Guitar (only because it’s part of the Swift Source Compatibility Suite)
• Zephyr

As of this moment, all of my other projects on GitHub are officially deprecated — this includes one of my most popular repositories, Harpy. While working on v4 of Siren (Harpy’s successor), I realized that I’ve now been programming in Swift longer than I have in Objective-C. I also realized that there is no longer a need to maintain two repositories that achieve the same functionality, especially as Siren now has a new architecture that enables a customizable rules engine, something I do not want to duplicate in Harpy.

The bright side is that Objective-C is stable and that Harpy has essentially been untouched for most of this year, meaning that there is a good chance that the repository can live on for a long time to come without any work needing to be done.

At this time, I do not have plans nor a willingness to hand over Harpy, nor my other discontinued OSS repositories, to another developer or developers. Feel free to fork those repositories and continue using them as you see fit.

Thank you all for using and supporting my OSS and happy new year!

Future of my OSS Projects in 2019 was originally published in Arthur Sabintsev’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.