I am currently analyzing this crypto as a potential “three zeros” token. What caught my eye about this one is my participation in a few DApps that are running on the Harmony (ONE) network. ONE has recently experienced (in January 2022) some DApp-impacting latency resulting from massive use of API calls from the DApps. If you don’t know what that means, I don’t blame you. Suffice it to say that one DApp, DFK, decided to make use of an alternative to the Harmony mainnet named “Harmony Mainnet 0 POKT Portal”. During times of high congestion on the ONE network, switching to this alternate network mid-game play (via Metamask) had a dramatic impact on game latency and could be used to clear backlogs of API calls that prevented real time gaming.
Stuff like POKT happened in the mid 1990s when WAN bandwidth was at a premium ,and some of those companies providing similar services (alternate routing between source and destination) got to be worth an awful lot of money - like Cisco. It is about supply and demand, and for the supplier, it is about technical prowess and keeping ahead of competitors in the application of modern technology.
I will do some weekend research on this one (now I am back in paid consultancy during the week), and if I decide to participate I will post about that.
It is very hard to get your head around such numbers. Whilst all ecosystems seem to brag about their use of sharding “designs” to move traffic in parallel routes to speed up their “effective transactions per second”, there is little evidence of success after success in the real world of global networking. Marketing hype has overtaken common sense “Develop, test, production” methodology. “Agile” development is stretched to its limit and stuff just isn’t tested enough (or at all) before new version releases that seem to fail far too often for anyone over 30 years old. One after the other (Polkadot, ADA, Solana, ETH) seem not to be able to get their “multi-protocol internetworking” house in order and I spent the first five years of the new millenium ordering bandwidth upgrade after bandwidth upgrade at an ever reducing “cost per MBps” halving in cost within less than a two year cycle.
This may be one of the Web 3 participants that leads in the high-demand area of cross-ecosystem transaction speed with decentralized load distribution. Ranked at #105 and with a market cap of over $1bn already, it is not likely to do a 1000X, or a 100X. But a 10X is entirely possible, so it may become one of those “1% candidates” in my portfolio plan.
Pocket Network Growth Up 80% MoM to 9.5 Billion Relays Due to Industry Demand - The Daily Hodl