Introducing Pocket Network
The first automobile ever to be invented is largely credited to Karl Benz in 1885. While the industrial revolution led to an explosion of automobiles and a boom in road construction in the 1920’s, the Federal Highway Act was not signed into law until 1956. This was the basis of the interstate system in the United States many of us know today. The original portion of this plan was not completed until 35 years later. This means that from the inception of the first automobile, it took over 100 years to fully build out the infrastructure that led to efficient individual movement around the United States.
Comparatively, the infrastructure for the blockchain industry is nowhere near having an efficient interstate system. Pocket Network is a blockchain agnostic, decentralized infrastructure protocol — any individual can spin up a node for any cryptocurrency and earn the POKT token. By connecting apps to every decentralized network, like highways connect cars and people to cities, developers can easily and quickly build peer to peer applications using the set of open source SDK’s being built on our Github.
Infrastructure is really important
Blockchain infrastructure is one of the most important aspects of developer and end-user adoption. In April 2017 Infura went from servicing 175 million API requests a day to over 1 billion a day by year’s end. That’s over 1,100% growth in less than 8 months. Because Infura and Metamask lowered the friction for developers to build and users to access, we saw the explosion of ICO’s really take off. We saw CryptoKitties clog the network for a week. The world got to see the power of blockchains in full effect.
The growth is clear. We believe that the key reason for Ethereum’s growth in 2017 was due to the ease of accessing decentralized applications with Metamask and MyCrypto and the ease in which developers could create these decentralized applications using Infura.
While the team at Pocket Network loves what Infura has done for the ecosystem, there are some limitations to what they can do. For one, Infura is Ethereum only. Though the Pocket Network is a series of contracts on Ethereum, we believe in leveraging the power of other decentralized networks.
Pocket Network is infrastructure for any and every blockchain that someone is willing to spin up a node for.
Infura is also centralized. While this has its advantages, Infura is also a single point of failure for most of the Ethereum Ecosystem. Pocket is fully decentralized infrastructure. Any person can spin up a node for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, or any other blockchain they wish. Our open source libraries aim to lower the friction in spinning up these nodes.
You can think of the Pocket Network as a blockchain agnostic, decentralized Infura.
If you are a developer wishing to spin up your own node, we’ve got our alpha version of it out released on Github. You can see the list of available nodes on our dashboard.
A Mobile Metamask
Having all this infrastructure available for any blockchain would be useless if it was difficult to access, so we are building a suite of open source iOS and Android SDK’s that will address this issue.
With a couple lines of code, you can install the SDK’s into your project. They will provide the interface to handle creating wallets, creating transactions, signing and sending transactions.
You may be asking yourself, how is the team going to handle adding all of these new and different cryptocurrencies being created? We are creating these SDK’s as a plugin system, so if the community wants to add their own crypto, any developer can go ahead and add the given module with the proper cryptographic functions into the repository. This will allow the SDK to service the long tail of blockchains.
Find out more
We are extremely excited to be putting out more code and content very soon. We are working on finishing up our white paper with the full specification of the protocol, but in the meantime check out our 1 pager or Github at https://github.com/pokt-network. If you are interested in participating in the Pocket Network as a developer or Relay Node, please signup through https://www.pokt.network/ or follow us on Twitter @POKTNetwork.
Cheers,
