This post serves as a final post to this thread. Moderators should lock and start a new thread discussion to avoid spam.
Nodies involvement in the gateway verse has come to an end. The engagement was mutually concluded back in April 2024 with @Dermot / prev Foundation after all of the agreed deliverables were met. Since then, Nodies has been offering pro-bono software development services on onboarding gateways and contributing to the gateway stack.
It’s been a pleasure to work with the ecosystem to help develop a multi-gateway implementation and provide a fully open source solution for gateway operators to tap into 50+ EVM, and Solana chains. Anyone who wants to be a gateway operator can do so within an hour of using our stack.
Let’s dig into a recap of the impact we’ve made with the Gateway server:
Increased Traffic Diversity
POKT single point of traffic has been distributed across multiple gateway operators (100% → 52%) The following are running the gateway server:
- Nodies
- Liquify
- Chainstack
- Poktscan
- Porters
- DeveloperDAO
Increased visibility in QoS
Further more, the gateway server exposes QoS metrics that any gateway operator can expose and any blockchain explorer can scrape. This has enabled blockchain explorers to expose QoS metrics back to the node operators to help improve the service.
Reduced infrastructure costs of gateways
It was a perceived conception that gateways should cost a significant amount of funds to run.
Nodies initially optimized the supply side with LeanPOKT - reducing the cost of node operations by 99% and now the demand supply with Gateway server. The cost of pure gateway costs was reduced from $600k/month to $1k/month with the gateway server.
Next steps:
Grove is now creating another open source solution called Path. Currently, it is not production ready and lacks QoS abilities to run in production. Not a single gateway can use it currently.
To be frank, we invested a lot of time into documenting our processes and encouraging the ecosystem to contribute too. Multiple entities already have contributed to the repository, including Chainstack and Poktscan.
With the current state of Pocket, my belief is that more time being spent on alternative gateway implementations is only going to introduce segmentation rather than unification right now, which the network desperately needs. I would much prefer to see Grove contribute to the gateway server and focus on protocol, but atlas it is their decision.
The gateway server isn’t perfect, as with any software. Nodies has sent an informal proposal to the Foundation for continued development of the gateway server. Until then the responsibilities of gateway development has since April and still now does lies with the existing Foundation.
Thank you @Dermot, @JackALaing and the prev Foundation for advocating and supporting the development of the gateway server Ultimately, the initiative was well needed due to the lack of open source solutions.
Best of luck everyone and glad we got the network this far,
Erick (Blade)