Category: decentralized open-data delivery network / permissionless RPC marketplace / gateway-and-supplier infrastructure / non-profit public API network
Summary: Pocket Network is a decentralized data-delivery marketplace that publicly positions itself as open infrastructure rather than as a conventional RPC vendor. The current first-party materials describe a permissionless network where Applications pay for data access, Suppliers run the underlying infrastructure, Gateways route traffic across available suppliers, and Validators finalize protocol state. The official site and docs emphasize no-key public RPC access, non-profit economics, and a broader Shannon-era design that is no longer limited to blockchain RPC and instead treats the network as data-agnostic infrastructure for blockchain APIs, AI inference, and other service types.
What it does:
Provides public and dedicated access to 60+ blockchain RPC endpoints through Pocket-operated or Pocket-routed gateway infrastructure
Matches Applications, Suppliers, Gateways, and Validators through deterministic onchain session assignment rather than a centralized scheduler
Verifies service delivery through claims-and-proofs settlement, with POKT burned by data consumers and minted/distributed to network participants after verification
Exposes a Shannon protocol stack that the docs describe as data-agnostic, extending beyond blockchain RPC toward AI inference and other relayable service types
Maintains public protocol and implementation repos, including a Shannon implementation (poktroll) and an older V1 protocol-specification repository that points to official relay-mining and decentralized-AI papers
Key claims:
The homepage frames Pocket as a “truly unstoppable” and “fully permissionless, fully decentralized” open-data network with no-key public APIs, 60+ supported blockchains, and wholesale non-profit pricing for sponsored or dedicated throughput
The What is Pocket Network? docs page calls Pocket “the world’s first and only fully permissionless, fully decentralized, open data delivery network” and says the Shannon protocol is data-agnostic rather than just an RPC network
The same docs explain the core actor model: Applications stake/burn POKT for data access, Suppliers serve data, Gateways route requests, and Validators finalize chain state
The How Pocket Network Works page documents a deterministic session-assignment model, relay serving through gateways, post-session claims, probabilistic proofs, and reward distribution tied to real usage rather than fixed emissions
The official poktroll README says it is the Shannon upgrade implementation, while the older protocol-specification repo explicitly points readers to Shannon-era code and to official relay-mining / decentralized-AI papers
Whitepaper: No single current canonical Pocket Network whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest current primary sources are the homepage, Shannon docs, How Pocket Works documentation, the poktroll implementation repo, and the historical official protocol-specification repo that links to Pocket-authored research papers; see ../whitepapers/pocket-network-primary-sources-2026-04-28.md.