Emphasis on why it’s a secret check! We will start by incorporating our secret checks based on our clientele’s requests and needs, and we expect that other gateway operators will do the same. For us this is a fine balance between gamers and ensuring that we are able to ensure to our clients a specific level of assurance quality and security. It is very possible that in a world of gateway verse, some gateway operators will be more strict, and some gateway operators (i.e. non-profit or loss-leader gateways) may be less strict. Nodies DLB sits in between offering Pocket as a decentralized offering to our client base and accelerating Pocket Network’s goal of multiple gateways. I believe the spec is sufficient enough in what we will actually deliver. The mechanism for how secret checks are shared and distributed is up to gateway operators to decide. It can be further iterated by future gateway operators as Pocket continues to evolve. We’re not opposed to releasing our mechanisms, but at the same time, we have to balance that with what our clients require for security since the network has no effective slashing mechanism at the time.
Absolutely!
I’m personally not a fan of the per-node system we have in the Pocket ecosystem right now. It is often a sign of confusion about what the number of node counts actually means when in actuality, there is only a certain amount of blockchain nodes operating behind them. Ethereum is also going through a somewhat similar issue where they’re proposing to allow for stacking vertically instead of horizontally for nodes since many nodes map back to a single identity, anyways. That being said, it’s a pretty minor detail for us right now and can always be iterated on.
There have been many ideas we’ve floated around (i.e: an open dataset from us of ranked nodes that node operators can use as a baseline then build and train their own model, but this is likely not to make it into the initial bootstrapping budget, perhaps as a continuation and evolution of the initial gateway-verse). Any collaboration we can have with the best data science team in the POKT ecosystem sounds great 
, and just shows the potential of what the world of multiple gateway operators would look like. I’m really excited to start forth on what we can do for the ecosystem and the opportunities it opens up for others.
An update on our end:
I’m happy to say we reached terms with PNF, and the last action item is a formal execution on contractual agreements in regards to our deliverables. We will finish this today and will have news to share with the community after our roadmap planning (1-2 weeks), and our first payment received for this budget will be started on the 1st of September 