David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s weekly take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

Apollo Capital has been helping decentralise some key crypto infrastructure, while getting paid for it.

The Melbourne investment firm has been running 41 nodes on the Pocket Network, a decentralised network of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) providers that allows software such as Metamask to plug into blockchains such as Ethereum.

Right now many Web3 projects use a centralised provider called Infura, which runs counter to the crypto ethos of decentralisation. Infura suffered an outage in November 2020 that briefly caused havoc across the crypto ecosystem, with some exchanges including Binance having to halt Ethererum withdrawals.

Apollo’s contribution adds to a network of more than 20,000 nodes that have served 2.4 billion relays to Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Harmony and a few other blockchains.

Each Pocket node requires at least 16,500 staked POKT tokens. Apollo has been staking a total of 691,000 POKT tokens across its 41 nodes, which has generated an additional 41,000 POKT tokens over the past two months, David Angliss tells Stockhead.

“So we’re we’re experiencing really good returns on those nodes,” he says.

A new crypto, POKT tokens surged as high as US$3.11 in mid-January, only to crash down to an all-time low of 96c a few days later. POKT tokens were trading at US$1.23 on Friday, with Coingecko ranking it as the No. 103 crypto.

“So at these prices, Pocket’s quite attractive, and that narrative that we spoke about in October’s still there,” Angliss said. “A lot of projects are looking to use Pocket to mitigate Infura going down.”

Angliss said he sees Pocket as being an essential “middleware” solution in the crypto space, similar to how Chainlink serves as an essential role as a provider of data feeds, or “oracles”.

“We’re super bullish on Pocket for 2022,” he said.
 

Node operator basics

Being a Pocket node operator is rather more complicated than just staking about US$20,000 worth of tokens, however.

Apollo had to add cloud computing servers operated by OVH and IBM, as well as hire an in-house developer who is also helping the team with automation and arbitrage opportunities.

“Just having a technical mind onboard has been really beneficial,” Angliss said.

Apollo invested in both of Pocket’s fundraising rounds and is looking to add even more nodes so that its entire stash of POKT tokens is fully utilised, Angliss said.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.

Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.

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