POKT Network connects the open internet. Today, our critical infra provides access to 70+ blockchains and rollups. Tomorrow, this will expand to include every blockchain/rollup with material demand, along with support for oracles, account abstraction, other DePINs, and LLM inference. All of this is made possible by node operators fluent in every major ecosystem, an army of POKT stakers, a POKT DAO with contributors from across the globe, and a growing ecosystem of gateways that make POKT Network more accessible to every market, region and customer type.
But, until now, our token has lived only on our own chain, connected to Ethereum via wPOKT.
It’s time for that to change.
After listening to the community’s demand for a more ambitious strategy for POKT, we plan to launch native $POKT across all of the leading EVM chains using the new xERC20 standard. This approach allows us to use a single token address across all EVM chains and eliminates the need for wrapped versions. Enabling new possibilities, such as what a Lido model for POKT could do, or how Shannon yields could flow to stakers on Base, Polygon, Optimism, and more.
This is really just the beginning, and it’s thanks to the community for pushing us to be more ambitious with our approach to multichain POKT.
Without further ado, the proposed new chains are:
- Arbitrum
- Avalanche
- Base
- Binance Smart Chain
- Optimism
- Polygon
Wait a second… How have you done this?
Everyone, please give a nice big golf clap to @Vojtech, who led this initiative outside of PNF as an open source contributor. In more exciting news, working with him quickly made it clear that he could seriously cook, and we successfully aligned on how and why POKT Network would be a great vehicle for his ambition and talent. He officially joined PNF as its new Head of Engineering last Thursday! 
Multichain POKT is one of the many exciting new technical initiatives he will be leading. Thanks to his help, POKT is joining the likes of Axelar and Wormhole as one of the early pioneers of this new approach to interoperability, and many more projects (e.g., Lido) are likely to follow suit.
He will share more separately about his background and what he plans to do at PNF in the weeks and months ahead.
Awesome. What are the next steps?
Approximately 3,000 accounts/wallets across POKT Network and Ethereum have non-zero POKT holdings today. Multichain POKT is an exciting new primitive that can help onboard orders of magnitudes more new node runners, gateways, liquidity providers, and stakers. Feel free to share your ideas if anything sparks your interest!
The core code is ready, and Nethermind has approved the audit, as you can see here. And thanks to using the xERC20 standard, we won’t get into any painful migration issues for POKT before the Shannon launch. The Shannon<>IBC adapter that Raid Guild is working on can be connected to this new multichain POKT setup as soon as Shannon goes live.
Next, the main jobs involve coordinating all of the non-technical elements, including liaising with the foundations and communities of all the chains we plan to launch on and finalising the incentives and partners to maximise awareness and success for each token launch. The current plan is to leverage existing funds from the ERA budget and/or to recycle some of the DAO’s assets for wPOKT on Ethereum. No new DAO proposals are expected as part of the first phase of these new token launches.
Oh, and we plan to launch $POKT on Solana as part of this new program too 
Stay tuned! 