I think you’ll find that much has changed in the ecosystem. We’ve been working towards a fully permissionless network for a long time, and your timing is great: our hard fork to the Shannon version of the protocol happens on Tuesday. Shannon is a ground up rewrite of how Pocket works to solve many of the earlier technical difficulties that resulted in needing a Portal to manage QoS and chain availability.
The old docs are getting completely rewritten too. They were, quite frankly, a mess.
Here are the new docs in progress:
Anyone can stake as a node (supplier), service, app, or gateway, with zero humans involved in the process. SDKs like PATH simply provide a quick start toolkit for a lot of common functions. We have more variations on the way, including DevDAO spinning up their ecosystem on Pocket shortly after the upgrade. By the end of the year, we’re targeting having dozens of special purpose SDKs to support many types of apps, allowing developers to fast track apps that rely on decentralized data for their back end.
We strongly believe in the cypherpunk ethos, which is why Shannon has removed any requirement for permissions or trust whatsoever. Literally everything is on-chain, including the burn you pay for using the network. And our tokenomics now treat it exactly as one might expect: no tokens are minted except as a function of the burn for an end user’s usage.
I’ve been on a ton of podcasts talking about my beliefs around decentralization, and what I call the “Free Speech Tech Stack”: fully permissionless stacks from top to bottom that are impossible to censor in any meaningful way. Shannon has been built with that ethos at its core.