Purpose

The biggest gains to Pocket’s reliability, performance, and cost will come with v1 and the whole host of innovations and mechanisms that come with it. And this project is a key component of our ambition for v1 to be the most successful new protocol launch ever.

While the protocol team is developing v1’s core technical stack, it is the responsibility of PNF to coordinate the research, design and development of the economic, social and technical mechanisms that will incentivise all stakeholders within this new system and how it is governed.

Project objectives

Our primary objective for this project is to define a minimum viable set of parameters against the V1 utility spec that ensure Pocket economy's adaptability, dynamism and sustainability.

Ancillary objectives for this research project include:

Value Capture: Ensure that the POKT token is designed to best capture the growth and success of the network in synergy with its crucial utility functions within Pocket Network
Economic Health: Create a framework for measuring and analysing the economic health of the network, including metrics such as staking participation across all relevant stakeholder groups, economic security, network profitability, as well as network capacity and utilisation
Community Education: Educate the broader community on the economic design of Pocket Network Protocol V1, its benefits, and how to participate in the network's growth and success.
Benchmarking: Quantify the value of using Pocket Network over alternatives per each point of the RPC Trilemma

Operating principles

All work related to this project must keep in mind the following three operating principles:

Simplicity: how can we reduce complexity for all stakeholders and make Pocket’s system easier to understand and participate in?
Efficiency: how can we reduce unnecessary overhead by hard-coding parameters and/or using market-based mechanisms or similar to automate how various parameters are administered and governed?
Impact: How important is it to add/amend a certain parameter for mainnet instead of at a later date. Shipping v1 in the safest and most efficient matter should be front of mind when considering what to focus on now rather than later or at all.

Technical specifications

See here for the document that gives an overview of the mechanisms that all contributors, including protocol, PNF, the community and BlockScience are working on
- Note that Blockscience will be responsible for building a model that can be used for simulating the outputs of different scenarios involving these mechanisms across a full spectrum of viable parameter ranges, so that we understand the optimal parameters to choose for each, and also the risks to be wary of.
See here for the live document detailing the list of features for testnet/mainnet and their necessity for each stage.
And here for the document listing the existing v0 parameters, the parameters currently proposed for v1, as well as any open questions related to this workstream.