Hey @deblasis, great to see you on the forum!
While I agree that v0 is mostly in maintenance mode while v1 is being produced, geo-mesh was arguably one of the most significant v0 upgrades to protect against node centralization and preserving POKT’s collaborative node community.
There is history here that I think is important to understand. Over the summer, a few node providers figured out geo mesh, and developed their own closed-source clients. Their numbers put them 2x to 3x above everyone else, and some of those companies had the fastest node growth in POKT history. The node community was scrambling to figure out how it was being done. Since a few providers were getting 3x the rewards, the other node runners were now starting to get substantially less (on top of already challenging market conditions). Huge amounts of technical debt and resources was spent by many to try and figure out how to run nodes in a way to get that level of rewards.
This had a major tole on the node community as a whole, especially on the independent node running community. The few companies that figured it out started gaining market share and signaled no intent to explain, or much less open-source, what they were doing. Rewards become a black box in the community. Had POKTscan not dedicated their team to figuring it out, our node landscape would likely look very different. Over the summer many independent node runners gave up because there just wasn’t a way to compete. No doubt these few provider absorbed many of these demoralized node runners who didn’t have any idea how to compete.
Now, it’s perfectly fine that some providers found a market advantage and took full advantage of it. Kudos to them… no hard feelings what-so-ever, as they were making savvy business moves. But POKTscan’s geo-mesh leveled the playing field from a much larger node consolidation trend. Geo-mesh allows there to still be profitable independent node runners until v1 comes around. It was a significant investment to dive into core-code and figure it out themselves. They did so in a way that did not rely on heavy PNI’s involvement, thus not taking resources away from v1. I don’t believe PNI was involved in any way actually.
So while geo-mesh is strictly a v0 feature (from my understanding), it is vitally important that while the network is in v0 maintenance mode, we don’t consolidate into a few companies with closed-sourced clients. v1 will not have the intended impact if POKT’s decentralized, collaborative culture is demoralized into centralization. No other proposal has been more meaningful with preserving POKT’s node runners community.
I humbly disagree that geo-mesh is something we can live without. We need to protect POKT from centralization, especially from closed-sourced clients, regardless of if it is v0 or v1. The DAO should in-fact incentive innovations that bring equality and preserve the decentralized spirit, regardless of v0 or v1.
Regarding their asking amount, I’m withholding my opinion in the short term while I do background research.