# Ecosystem Sync - 02/17/2021

**Date:** 02/17/2021
**Moderator:** @Patrick727
**Note Taker:** @dermot
**Attendees:** @jaureguia, Adam

## Praise:
*Tag anyone who you want to give a shout-out to and say why*

@michael and the folks who helped for closing off our sales projections. Hit all of funding goals.

## Project Status:
*We’ll take 10 mins at the start to read over these project updates and add surface items to the appropriate section below.*

| Name | Owner | Most Important Info |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| Dashboard| Enrique | UI implementation is under way and on target to be done by Wednesday as per the timeline. Backend work is already being scoped, and going back and forth with Valeria on the UI. We've also started hosting the new dashboard on fleek and it's working well. TLDR: Hitting all our deadlines as of now.|
| Gateway | Enrique | Waiting for Hamza to start for us to handle any issues regarding data collection and any stability—Enrique is hands full with Dashboard/wPOKT work, but there isn't any "urgent" thing to do anyway, other than more mid-term product thinking and misc bug fixes to improve success rates and metrics.|
| Website | @Patrick727 | Contractors being assessed. First round of content needs done. Formatting as strategic overview. Vetting contractors next week for decision.|
| Rebrand | Vale | ---------|
| Comms & PR| @jaureguia & @Patrick727 | Pokt sale PR being finalized now. Multiple podcasts will be live soon with mike. API3/EtherJs went out. Newsjacking on BTC price|
| Marketing | @jaureguia | 1) Another round of interviews earlier this week. Will be sending out challenges today to then trim up the candidates again once received. 2) Marco's contract is done at the end of the week after the monthly/weekly newsletter. Looking to extend it. 3) Worked with BlockBeats (Chinese PR firm) on a lower cost and payment schedule, signing contract today 4) Spending the rest of the week ironing out the wPOKT marketing strategies/playbooks and putting together v2 of the Pocket Network GTM strategy outline|
| Snapshot| @jackalaing | Snapshot RFPs is still being fleshed out using feedback from discussions I've had with Snapshot community members. It looks like we might collaborate on the Snapshot plugin with Web3API. |
| POKT Arcade | @jackalaing | Making progress on the Discord bot spec. Looking like it will be split into two projects: a backend database for tracking on-chain statistics, and a bot for interfacing with that database. |
| Gov Proposals | @jackalaing | Jack: PUP-4 took up a lot of the conversation last week, for good reason. We also have a PEP from Lowell's friend in the pipeline, to build a Python client. Adam: I've asked that we push forward with a vote on PEP-4. It seems as though debate has largly ended. |
| RFPs | @jackalaing | See Snapshot & POKT Arcade above. I"m still the only RFP author. |
| Docs & Wiki | @jackalaing | Discourse has been reformatted to suit the wiki/docs use case and the content is being filled out at a rapid pace now. I'm confident we can have v1 finalized in the next few weeks. |
| Handbook | @Patrick727 | Formatted in [discourse now.](https://forum.pokt.network/c/wiki/handbook/65) Priorities to get coordination section done. Then tools. then build cohesion.|
| App Onboarding | Shane |Shane is beginning to take over application onboarding. He's quickly getting up to speed and is the main point of contact moving forward for nodes and apps. Pipedrive (our CRM) is fully set up and current orders are now being processed through there. Sales worked with Republic to create a draft sales deck for using with app sales. |
| App Onboading | Unstoppable| Made introductions to Defi degen, Freddie Farmer, and Batu from CMC/coinbase (hoping to leverage them for app intros). Completed the wPOKT Hitlist with over 50 apps which are ideal partners for the wPOKT launch. |
| Node Onboarding | -------- | ---------|
| WPOKT | Michael | Adam: I need to continue pushing to get final weights for the LBP pool. |

## OKRS:

1. 100M daily API requests

| Metrics | This Week | Last Week | Difference |
| -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- |
| Weekly Gateway Relays | [38.2M](https://grafana-mon.mainnet.pokt.network/dashboard/snapshot/C8LvS1ULx0nG1wj5I5mdCBpKrO7qoUPh) | [37.2M](https://grafana-mon.mainnet.pokt.network/dashboard/snapshot/08ny4wtZnAU5Dw2sX8DXYsGkbzVPcKi8) | +1M |
| Daily AVG Gateway Relays | 6.39M | 7.29M | -0.9M |
| Network-Wide Relays | TBD | N/A | N/A |
| Network-Wide Success Rate | 74.64% | 73.06% | +1.58% |

**Highlights**:

- Small spikes in usage via EthersJS every few hours, most likely due to the rotation of network providers. Might indicated developers upgrading their dependencies, too.
- Zapper contiues to drive a consistent amount of relays per hour

**Lowlight**:
Takeaways: need to get better at surfacing data. Enrique is working on something in this regard

**Notes**: Pat: are we in their backup? Mike: yes, in their production setup but only as a backup.

Mike: 100m relays was aggressive as a target. Gateway is still inconsistent in terms of service; timeout issues, latnecy issues, simple fixes that can be done, eg on cherry picker algo; retrying requests etc. Leke's migration will help with this. Aim is in 30/45 days to have really solid consistent service. Service has been a big blocker outside of all our UX issues.

Enrique: still waiting on Hamza to start and hit these low hanging fruits on gateway. Mid-term thinking there is a lot of work to do as well.

Pat: Mike, let's reassess where we went wrong in our forecasts (eg 100m relays) and think ahead for the future. either way, it's good to have aggressive goals.

Mike: 100m is the right target, just we won't hit it in the desired timeframe.

Shane: big difference from aggressive internal goals versus external public-facing goals that we miss and not hit them.

Pat: we need to be tight in our feedback loops in terms of refining goals and figuring out where we want to go and how we can get there. New community members should be helping us like team mates and shouldn't be kept out of loop on our thinking.

Jack: you said you don't want to change OKRs in middle as it's a bad habit to do so. If we are bringing in community, then we should think about having more realistic goals for the community.

Pat: think about monthly and quartlery goals for community versus annual and quarterly internally.

Shane: once there is a lot of information out there and the community expects tons of information, and demands of community will grow over time. If we try to put everything out there, but start to get FUD and creates a negative feedback loop that we can't handle, resuling in a decrease in public sharng of information.

Pat: HackMd will be how we share info. This is about iteration.

Dermot: think about BHAG as well as month to month goals and metrics. Need to filter information to ensure we manage the message for the best possible reasons

2. Ample Decentralization

| Metrics | This Week | Last Week | Difference |
| -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- |
| Total Staked Nodes | 1811 | 1718 | +93 |

Highlights:
- Node count is ahead of projections. Strong growth over the last 60 days.
- Node running remains profitable despite growth in nodes.

Lowlights:
- Growing node count is causing concern for Pocket Core Development. They believe approaching or exceeding 5,000 nodes could destabilize the network. [PUP-4](https://forum.pokt.network/t/pup-4-change-relaystotokensmultiplier-to-9000/683) is designed to address the node growth. We are seeking feedback from the community on this proposal.
- Peak node count = 1950

Takeaways:
- The node growth we experienced from the end of January to now is likely unsustainable from a technical perspective if it keeps up at the current rate. We'll need to find a technical or economic solution to keep the node count under 5,000.

**notes:**

- Jack: if someone wanted to attack the network, they could just buy a big chunk of Pocket and spin up lots of nodes.
- Adam: Would a private Discord channel help?
- Jack: A Discord channel could be helpful, and we have POKT-swat for that for our best node runners, but doesn’t resolve when a patch needs a proposal to be pushed. When that’s the case, we’d need to try to build the patch and have it ready to ship before surfacing it as a proposal.

## Surface Items:
*Add any surface item you want to discuss here, it could be clarifying questions or asks. Anyone can surface an item and the moderator will make a best effort to coordinate these. Add your name before the ask so people can reference or follow up later.*

- **Michael**: Is there a template for community calls?
- **Pat**: it's all on HackMD.
- **Michael**: how to keep track of milestones?
- Pat: keep in notion for internal use (project management) and use Hack MD for knowledge base

- **Adam**: On a call yesterday, Michael, Alberto, Shane, and I discussed making key chains monetized early (meainging activating rewards on new chains). I know there are concerns about self-dealing early on chains, but does anyone see any additional downsides to this? We think this will encourage a bottoms up approach to sourcing new infrastructure for new chains. The upside is that we'd likely see more participation on newly monetized chains, probably at the expense of some self-dealing (which would probably lead to more infra being joining that chain).
- Dermot: if we are only whitelisting legit chains then the risks are minimised somewhat. The real risk, for me, is having the same reward for every relay given how much cheaper it is to make a transaction on some of the other chains, making the risks related to self-dealing higher, particularly if we're giving away free infra on the app side. We could monitor this though?
- Adam: enable to monetise earlier from new chains
- Shane: right now we're the only ones who will spin up infrastructure for new chains, so the monetisation should incentivise the community to provide support too
- Mike: will need a process for connecting new chains to the dashboard and making sure everything works. for example, adding chain ID to the gateway and having a minimum number of 5 nodes. Need to be able to test new chains to give security and safety
- Mike: will choose the chains with the most potential

- **Adam**: @Patrick727 let me know when you'd like me to take another pass at the website content.
- Pat: Thanks. Working with Vale next to condense content to give strategic direction to website contractors.

- **Adam**: Luis, can we get another sovereign node count?
- (not on call)

- Patrick: This is the first of 3 weeks until we move this call to a community call. [See plan of action here.](https://www.notion.so/pocketnetwork/Community-Calls-a3475aa6e52145639db3c9a04babb216) Can someone get 1 or 2 trusted community members who can sit in on the next meeting?
- would like feedback from this group on how this call went

- Patrick: Please see and engage on the new Ad-hoc internal [budget proposals.](https://forum.pokt.network/c/pnf/projects/64) Im keen to see/improve this process.

- Jack: On our latest alignment call with Dabble, we agreed on starting with AWS marketplace images that speed up the deployment process for competent community members, to tap into the large technical community in crypto. Relating to this, we wondered if it might be worth repairing and maintaining the DAppNode package. How large/influential is the community of DAppNode users? Did we just not get users before due to lack of marketing?
- Jack: focused on crypto native reasonably technically competent people. Waiting on Lowell to confirm re Monk.
- Nelson: using Monk is a lot more developer friendly so might be a better option than using just Docker compose
- Lowell: we just defined the goal but not define the how. You can use AWS with any deployment platform, so need to confirm with Monk on how they integrate with Monk.
- Alberto: the community of dappnode users has grown in the last year. There is an overlapping venn diagram of Defi users and dapp node users, particularly for ETH2 staking. not the biggest priority at the moment. One of our OKRs is improving our community experience

Michael: What do you all think about setting the top 10 - 15 most promising chainIDs as paid? I'm thinking we add an additional incentive in POKT especially for newcomers to begin running nodes and integrating with our gateway so we can start supporting ASAP.
- dealt with above

Michael: I'm considering the strategic value of waiting to do the PR for the sale announcement until after we've launched the dashboard to maximize attention and potential traction. What do you all think about this?
- Jack: This sounds smart. How does the Dashboard launch fit timeline wise with wPOKT launch?
- Pat: Yes, this is more in line with peoples orginal POV regarding PR. and +1 to wPOKT synergy. And we can add dashboard into the PR.
- Dermot: PR for Biconomy led to a growth across the channels, like social media and discord. Be clear where we want to channel this growth. Things we need to do in advance. For example, they funneled attention to their free to use dashboard.
- Enrique: Coordinate around a strategy for dashboard launch, and tie in somethings we've thrown up in the air like features a few weeks after the launch.
- Vale: Worried about forcing it to fit with PR deadline. How do we manage spike in traffic?
- Enrique: Hype around dashboard. People will ape into wPOKT too. Honest, prefer delaying dashboard to ensure proper QA.
- Nelson: Agrees with delyaing to ensure everything runs smoothely and ducks are in line. Also, if we don't have the right partners it isn't worth launching.

Michael: Per the conversation in #budgeting, we have about an $800k we could pull the trigger on very easily, a potential extra $500k as well from greenfield
- dermot: Felix reached out to me for a chat. Planning to speak to him tomorrow.

Michael: Have had several conversations with marketing focused investors from Asia. Redline capital (recent investor) from there offers services to help with boots on the ground and would require a retainer for consistent outreach and so forth. I think this would be worth doing, but I think we would need to increase our marketing budget to pull it off. Regarding all the conversations on extra funding, I think this may be worth doing but we need more people to manage the increased efforts.
- Action item: Get Alberto in those conversations.

## Action Items:
- [ ] @Patrick727 example action item
- [ ] @enrique surface ideas for internal call
- [ ] @michael submit a proposal to add 10-15 chain IDs to be monetised (xDai, Matic/Polygon, etc)
- [x] @Patrick727 scheduling follow up budget call
- [ ] @enrique(or @jaureguia) schedule launch plan for dashboard +wPOKT.
- Enrique: I'd definitely do this with some more key people involved—I felt that in the call we expected the dashboard to be ready sooner than some other stuff and we should really see what depends on the dashboard being ready.
- [ ] @nelson - surface proposal to delay wPOKT until we have launch partners.
- [x] @Patrick727 Create seperate sync for PR strategy. Friday.
- [x] Include Asian Market, marketing.
- [ ] @Patrick727 schedule sync on todays uppercut experience and what next iteration might be.