Why we invested in Pocket Network; AWS Lamda as it should be.

Michael O’Rourke, CEO and co-founder of Pocket Network

A few months back, we were fortunate to come across Pocket Network.

The founders are young and passionate, and they are solving a problem by scratching their own itch:

Until now, developers had to overpay to access decentralized networks, through centralized infrastructures such as AWS and Infura.

On top of it, they had to build the infrastructure for every single blockchain they needed to connect with since each blockchain network has a different API.

For example, if you are building a payment service and you want to give the option to your users to be able to transact with different currencies like bitcoin, ether, RSK coin, XRP, etc then you will have to connect with every single network through their APIs.

That's a lot of pain.

The Pocket Network team came up with a brilliant two-fold solution: They created a unified API that encapsulates the functionality of every blockchain. This will save developers a lot of time and pain since they won’t need to dig into the technicalities of each blockchain network.

The team also wanted to make sure that there is no single point of failure (like Infura); to achieve this, they created a marketplace in a decentralized economy between developers who run nodes on their computers and those that want to use a node to build their application/service. Most developers can be on both sides of the marketplace.

For example, a developer who builds a service can make money from the excess capacity of their node. 

Here is how:

Pocket Network routes every request to 5 network nodes instead of 1 so if there is a failure in one of these nodes there is always a backup (fault tolerance). For every request that is made, Pocket ensures that the requestor (the developer who needs to use a node) has staked enough POKT (the native token) to access the services. Once the request is completed (and validated), the nodes who served the request get rewarded with freshly minted POKT. And this is how you create a work-economy. Node operators work by serving the dapp developers and they get paid for it. Simple and clean. 

Of course, there are a lot of challenges that are still in an experimental stage.

For example, how the token accrues value as the requests grow, or how do you solve the network (hardware) level inefficiencies (ie, a slow node running in Singapore, will ever serve a high throughput Japanese dapp)? But challenges are for startups and they are a sign that founders push the industry to a new level.

Mike and the team are launching a much-needed service in the space. Keep up the great work 👍