A farewell from Grove, the original team behind Pocket Network

Grove is winding down. After nine years, this is goodbye, and a thank you for everything we built together.

We began as Pocket Network Inc., founded in 2017 by Michael O’Rourke, Valeria Benitez Florez, Pabel Nunez, and Luis de Leon. Over a hundred amazing people passed through the company along the way, and their work fills more than 250 open-source repositories across the Pocket Network and Grove GitHub organizations.

Together we built two versions of the Pocket Network protocol and its first gateway, the Grove Portal, which settled more than a trillion requests across 60+ blockchains. Pocket Network continues on, permissionless by design and stewarded by the Pocket Network Foundation.

In 2026 we moved up the stack, and bet that money, not hyperlinks, was the internet’s best quality signal. We built a platform for humans and agents to pay creators directly, and became one of the first adopters of x402, the open payment protocol for the internet. In five months, nearly a thousand fans paid over 400 creators more than 6,000 times for their content. You proved quality is worth paying for.

To our partners, our investors, our teammates past and present, and the Pocket Network community we grew up in: thank you for betting on us, twice.

The ideas don’t retire with the company. Our code stays open source, and both of our theses stand:

• neutral, permissionless access to public-goods infrastructure is foundational to the internet’s future.
• the agentic internet will need a way to pay humans for genuine, tasteful content.