Attending were Chris ‘Jinx’ Jenkins, Director of PNF, and Cryptocorn, Board Observer.
TLDR: Pocket is now offering a well received product with a major upgrade coming with v1.30. Demand is expected to increase in the coming months, with an aim to produce enough revenue (5trn CU/Day) to have a monetarily stable protocol by end Q2/early Q3 next year, and additional sources of revenue also anticipated in the coming months.
Revenue + Roadmap to Sustainability:
Revenue generation for the protocol is now measured in Compute Units, not relays. 1 Billion Compute Units is $1, to the protocol.
PNF has 1 year’s worth of runway in its treasury and a burn rate of roughly $120k/month. A key focus in the next few months is to move towards generating revenue for PNF such that it can be financed without need for funding from the DAO.
In addition to running Nodes/Validators, PNF will do this by pivoting to a community builder model, similar to MakerDAO or Raid Guild. PNF has previously spent millions of dollars on tooling (like GeoMesh) without considering how to turn this work into helpful tools that can be sold/supplied to other ecosystems. PNF wants to focus on developing future internal tooling to be designed to be sources of revenue generation in addition to their primary role of helping Pocket Network.
Some further avenues for PNF revenue generation will be:
-Partnerships: The largest expected source of revenue for PNF.
-Incubator/Gateway programs: DevDao is an example of a Gateway spinning up on Pocket and more are expected soon.
-App store: PATH as a fully protocol owned SDK. Plan to build out the GitHub repo for custom installs and 1-click installs. This allows for customising for particular purposes, like serving for AI.
The goals for CU usage are:
-Hit 1 trillion CUs/day before the end of 2025.
-Achieve 5 trillion CUs/day by end of Q2/early Q3 2026 (depending on market conditions).
While several factors go into how many CUs are used daily, and several of these (e.g. overall market transactions) are beyond Pocket’s control, PNF’s aim is to try to achieve financial neutrality for the network by summer 2026.
Further into the future after achieving financial stability, creating a deflationary environment may be considered. Pocket has a 1:1 Mint:Burn ratio at present, and is slightly deflationary due to gas fees, but a future roadmap would include research into creating a fully deflationary environment that still adequately rewards suppliers and other ecosystem participants.
However this is still far from implementation and mathematical models will need to be designed and rigorously tested, with proven daily CU volume, before any further advancements would be taken.
Cosmos Vs Base:
Pocket chose to build on Cosmos as it is an SDK, not an L1 for Pocket to act as an L2 on.
Pocket is not simply a smart contract that can be moved from chain to chain: some Pocket products and services are not available on other chains, so moving Pocket to work as an L2 on another chain would be difficult, taking a lot of engineering work and potentially hindering some of the flexibility and speed that separates Pocket from Dapps/Smart Contracts.
There was reiteration that Pocket’s use of Cosmos differs greatly from Akash, who recently left the Cosmos ecosystem. This is because Akash is designed to not need a Validator system and associated costs, meaning Cosmos was inefficient for their needs. As Pocket does employ a Validator system for security, Cosmos’ offering is well suited.
Korea:
Although it feels like some time ago, the trip to Korea by Jinx was considered a success. A lot of great conversations and introductions were had, including with other protocols in the decentralised stack such as SQD, and with university blockchain programs, where Jinx gave a talk about Pocket and decentralisation to a full audience.
The highlight of the trip was the meeting with Upbit exchange’s parent company and their enthusiasm for using Pocket on the Giwa chain. A Pocket/Giwa endpoint will be added to the Giwa chain and to official documentation.
Crypto Liquidation Meltdown:
Binance’s oracle failure led to the largest liquidation of crypto ever in October 2025. This didn’t particularly affect Pocket as a service or faith in the protocol, although POKT’s price followed the general market sentiment.
Thoughts on v1.30, v1.31 for Pocket:
Pocket v1.30 is expected to be released either the last week of October or the second week of November [Update- it was released 28th October]. This is going to be a major improvement for Pocket Network and will bring with it the vast majority of improvements currently outstanding for Pocket. V1.30 will largely wrap up the primary development of Shannon, and this is anticipated to be fully finished by EoY.
The improvements are expected to give Pocket the best latency/price performance ratio in the industry. Although more expensive, centralized providers like Quick Nodes will still have a lower latency, Pocket will offer a better choice for the majority of the market.
Average latency will have a target of less than 500ms post v1.30. There will be 2 dashboards to check latency and other metrics in real time, available by the end of October.
Pocket is already ‘good enough’ that the sales team are again pushing business development and sales. Relays are expected to ramp up in the coming months as a result of this and some larger partnerships moving through the pipeline.
V1.31, which has been planned for Q1 2026, will bring quality of life improvements.
Shannon Post Mortem:
While the state transfer was a success, it is not uncommon to find in software projects that one isn’t as far along as one hopes and has to hit the ground running to avoid forever delaying launch. The teething problems associated with the Shannon migration and business set up have now largely been resolved and Pocket is moving towards a growth phase.
PNF expects the coming months to ramp up active building on, and usage of, the network and revenue generation to increase from this.
The priority now is to return to community led engineering and decentralizing Gateway access to the protocol.