As Dermot recently shared in PNF’s ambitions update, our Gateway-verse objectives for Q2 2024 are as follows:
- Onboard two new high-potential gateway operators, each capable of delivering 1B+ daily relays to the network
- Build a pipeline of 5+ additional high-potential gateway operators, each capable of sending 500m+ daily relays to the network - to be onboarded at the launch of Shannon
- All new gateway operators (excluding Grove) sending an aggregate of 5B+ daily relays to the network
With these ambitions laid out, and some Gateway-verse milestones recently hit, it’s time for an overdue update on where we’re at with Gateway-verse. Moving forward we’ll be working to uphold a higher standard of update frequency from both PNF and Nodies.
This update outlines 1) what has been worked on so far in the Gateway-verse and, 2) how we’ll work towards achieving our Q2 2024 objectives.
What has been worked on so far:
- Onboarding Nodies: PNF defined a standard gateway operator agreement, which will enable wider onboarding of other gateways, as well as a grant agreement with Nodies. The grant began September 1st.
- App Stake Management: PNF has been working with Grove to free up app stakes for other gateways. Nodies now has enough app stakes to do more than 400M requests/hr, matched with 624 nodes every hour.
- Nodies Integration: Nodies completed their integration with POKT on October 31st, which included
- Optimized Golang Client: Nodies has been focused on extracting as much performance as possible for their gateway, building their own custom minimal Golang client to their relay specification. They’re experimenting with FastJSON) and FastHTTP) to optimize on latency rather than use the standard Golang packages. This has led to 2-4X performance boosts in the relay process, which should translate to more efficient gateways in the long-run as these optimizations will be embedded in the OSS Gateway Stack and will carry forward into Shannon. We’re expecting Blade to share more detail in this thread later this week.
- Dispatcher Management: they’ve set up their own dedicated Pocket dispatchers to enable better scaling of traffic through to POKT
- Load Balancer between Nodies and POKT: Nodies has the ability to serve endpoints from their own nodes as a backup, so they have built an internal load balancer to enable dynamically shifting between their own nodes and POKT
- QoS Checks: they’ve implemented basic QoS checks within their own systems, including a height checker, a latency checker, and a simple node registry
- Observability: they’ve implemented observability on all their backend and frontend systems to allow them to determine how a request is performing in terms of success rates, requests per second, per chain, etc. This allows them to be alerted whenever there is an issue and to ensure a high standard of QoS. They’ve migrated their observability away from postgres and into a more purpose-built time-series database using Prometheus, Influx DB, Posthog, and Grafana. These are all open source technologies that anyone can integrate and will lay the foundation for the Observability Service within the OSS Gateway Stack, as well as upgrades to the data provided to customers in their frontend.
- Public Endpoints: Nodies completed their integration with POKT in time to take over the role of maintaining public endpoints from Grove. These are now serving just shy of 100M daily relays. Thanks to their work on building an efficient baremetal gateway, we’ve observed a 60% reduction in costs to maintain the public endpoints.
- Gateway Dashboard: POKTscan updated their dashboard to display per-gateway relay performance. Here you can view gateway relays per-chain, in time series, and as a % distribution.
How we’ll work towards achieving our Q2 2024 objectives:
- More Frequent Updates: Both PNF and Nodies will be providing more frequent updates here in the forum and on community calls. For the latter, the Node Runner Office Hours have evolved into Ecosystem Office Hours in part to make space for gateways to be discussed on those calls.
- Optimizing the Integration: Nodies has been paying close attention to their POKT integration, tuning their performance with POKT using real traffic, adjusting their QoS checks, and ramping up the traffic that is coming through the network.
- Building the OSS Gateway Stack: The vision for the gateway stack has evolved from a barebones integration and QoS framework, into a modular architecture powered by GRPC, with simple Docker deployments and the flexibility for developers to choose only the services they need and/or plug-in other services. Now that Nodies has completed their vertical integration and are sending traffic through POKT, they are focusing on modularizing it. The repo in which this will be developed should be shared by Blade this week, starting with the optimized Golang client that we described above. Everyone will be able to follow the progress in GitHub and we expect the stack to be ready for onboarding by early adopters by late December, then completed (RC ready) in January. You can read more about Nodies’ vision for the stack here.
- Headhunting Gateways: PNF has begun deploying a headhunting GTM strategy targeted at ideal gateway personas, meeting with high-value gateways, understanding their needs, and establishing an onboarding pipeline with a view to onboarding them starting in January. Please get in touch directly with either myself or Dermot if you can introduce any established RPC businesses capable of sending 1B+ daily relays through to the network that might be interested in building a gateway on POKT Network.
- Public Applications: PNF will launch a public application process for becoming a gateway operator, so that anyone interested in building a gateway can be considered for the opportunity. If you don’t want to wait for the application process, feel free to get in touch directly with either myself or Dermot.
- Preparing to Onboard Gateways: PNF is preparing an onboarding/support package for gateway operators, including one-pagers, ecosystem support offerings, public docs, and economic models (cost, breakeven).
- Consistent Gateway Marketing: PNF will establish gateway marketing guidelines for use by all existing and new gateways, including “Powered by POKT” assets and requirements to mention POKT in materials/promotions.
- Sockets/POPs: PNF also plans to use the ERA Allocation to create more grant opportunities for parallel community projects that complement Nodies’ OSS Gateway Stack work (rather than duplicating it), such as QoS monitoring solutions.