Post-Mortem Victory Lap for Pocket Network’s Shannon Upgrade
Pocket Network, the permissionless protocol for open data, underwent a successful migration from Morse to the Shannon version on June 3, 2025, thereby becoming a Cosmos native chain. With the open data economy expected to reach $390 billion in 2025, Pocket’s migration will play a critical role in market dynamics. The move from Morse to Shannon bolsters Pocket’s decentralized infrastructure, demonstrating how crypto startups are coming of age to become business powerhouses.
The protocol underwent massive preparations in the run-up to the Shannon upgrade, with round-the-clock assistance from the Pocket team for post-migration support.
The Preparation
Pocket Network’s migration date was finalized through community feedback. Once the date was set, Pocket ecosystem participants had 14 days to prepare for the non-backwards-compatible event. The time frame was deliberately shorter than the 21-day on-chain unstaking period to prevent network gamification.
To ensure a smooth migration experience, Pocket Network planned a seamless 1:1 migration for staked and liquid $POKT token balances.
Pocket is one of the first protocols to shift to Cosmos cryptographic keys while maintaining the network’s historical state. Thus, every account required a new address, and Pocket published extensive guidelines to help users.
Since new cryptographic schemes are used for wallet addresses and keys, users need to create Shannon accounts, claim Morse accounts, and operate a full node.
The stakes and balances of suppliers, who were earlier node runners, would migrate onchain. But operators needed to update their tools, infrastructure, and configuration to provide services and earn rewards. Pocket thus published the docs to operate and claim a supplier.
Similarly, stakes and balances in apps will migrate onchain, but Gateway operators need to migrate to running PATH to settle onchain Shannon traffic. For doing so, the protocol issued details about operating a gateway, claiming an application, and PATH documentation.
Finally, validators would decouple from Suppliers and follow Cosmos patterns after migration. Thus, the user needed to review the validator walkthrough, learn about the Cosmos validator overview, and reach out if they wished to join.
The Announcement
Pocket Network fixed the migration date on June 3 at 10 am PT, two weeks after releasing a set of Shannon migration resources. The event was called State Shift Day to honour Claude Shannon’s work on bit manipulation in Information theory and Signal processing.
The protocol announced it’d capture (snapshot) the Morse MainNet state, convert that into a Shannon genesis-like state, publish the state transformation to Shannon to open token claims, turn off Morse rewards to remove incentives from the old network, and begin rerouting Gateway traffic from Morse to Shannon.
Since a live, permissionless network was never migrated while simultaneously changing its cryptographic keys, the Pocket team’s priority was to minimize downtime for users.
The team anticipated centralized exchanges to briefly pause POKT deposits and withdrawals, suppliers and validators to shift to Shannon, and validators to stop signing Morse blocks while sovereign POKT holders could make immediate claims. With the anticipation of brief interruptions, Pocket went ahead with the migration.
The Aftermath
Although the network was not fully available, nodes were offline, and earnings were paused, Pocket transparently communicated the problems and actively managed the situation.
The team immediately focused on restoring full network access to resume node earnings, fixed problems with token claims, staking, and reliability, made the Grove Portal fully operational, and improved overall network performance.
Since Suppliers faced lower rewards, Pocket temporarily increased node operator rewards by 10x on Grove-owned services from July 10 to 14, subject to periodic adjustments. While keeping inflation in check with an equivalent mint-burn technique, the rewards were meant to support suppliers and bring rewards closer to Morse levels.
A month since the Shannon upgrade, the DAO and Pocket Network Foundation treasuries, the wPOKT vault, and exchange accounts were successfully migrated. The Foundation has secured new exchange listings for its $POKT tokens and brought on Wintermute, one of the biggest market makers, to improve liquidity.
Grove also supports XRPL EVM Sidechain, which went live on mainnet on June 30, 2025. This means developers can deploy Ethereum-compatible smart contracts using XRP as transaction fees on Grove Portal and public RPC endpoints.
Pocket Network’s Shannon upgrade is a ‘birthplace, not a destination’, as it paves the way for unstoppable open data for the crypto and AI industry.