The Shannon upgrade and Pocket's new era

Laying the groundwork for open data at scale.

The Shannon Upgrade

The Shannon upgrade transformed The Pocket Network into the first true sharing economy for any open data-source. It is governed by an empowered community that has both full supply and demand side decentralization. Here are the key components of how the Pocket Network achieves this:

Permissionless Gateways

Gateways handle the interaction between client applications and data suppliers, by facilitating the connection of a client’s data request (relay) with appropriate suppliers. Gateways handle the onchain transactions and service payments, from the client’s stake to the suppliers. Gateways can also design and manage other offchain operations and services that improve or inform the user experience of the Pocket Network, like dashboards and providing quality of service guarantees (Service Level Agreements, SLA).

The creation of Gateways is fully permissionless. This enables rapid volume growth needed to operate the fully open and universal API infra layer that is the Pocket Network.

Improved Scalability

The recent Shannon upgrade removed the remaining limitations on the protocol’s scalability and brought interoperability with key ecosystems in Web3, opening the Pocket Network fully to serve the rest of the world with sovereign data. At the moment serving over 50 blockchains, with upgrades planned to be fully blockchain agnostic through Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) and modular Data Availability (DA) layers.

New Use Cases

Shannon took the Data Source expansion that we started in Morse and introduced tokenomics that enable monetization for the Data Sources themselves. This accelerates our expansion into new use cases and provides a new sustainable incentive model for open Data Sources of all kinds.

We are at the cusp of an explosion in innovative business cases around data provision, organisation and collection. The Pocket Network guarantees that all parts of the value chain get their cut and remain sovereign while un-siloing data from geographic, political or other rent-seeking strongholds.

Here’s a few ideas of what could be built on the Pocket Network:

• Enterprise-grade RPC (Remote Procedure Call) services with guaranteed SLA (Service Level Agreements) uptime

• Open datasets (climate, research, IoT — Internet of Things) that earn directly

• Developer gateways with dashboards and analytics

• Cross-ecosystem bridges via IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) and DA (Data Availability) layers

• Localized gateways serving niche communities

• Next-gen dApps (Decentralized Applications) combining blockchain and real-world data”

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Next let's look at the top-level technical choices that have enabled this new era...