Cardano Foundation Updates Delegation Strategy

English News and Announcements
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Hi @ADAfrog and @Terminada,

I apologize for budding into your exchange uninvited, but I feel like this is no place for “my pool is bigger than yours” jabs.

@ADAfrog Kyle, you may not recall, but you and I go back at least 3 years. No one is doubting your personal contributions to Cardano: I, for one, received heaps of help from you when I was starting as SPO, and for that you will always have my thanks.

@Terminada and many others in this post, including myself, have been quite vocal about the changes in CF strategy. Although the removal of the Single Pool requirement might make it easier to handpick pools for delegation, there are much better alternatives to support developers and builders.

@ADAfrog, you surely have been in the ecosystem long enough to agree that 170-200 ADA per epoch, while a nice gesture and acknowledgment of you efforts, is not nearly enough to pay for professional development of complex projects, not even close. If CF wants to support your building efforts, they should set up a fund, similar to Catalyst: surely the amount of ADA they control should be enough to justify that.

Further, if we continue to jab at each other over this MPO vs SPO topic (which in my opinion has merit, but represents only a part of the issue), we all run the risk of missing the main message here. Whether you run 3 unsaturated pools, or run one that could be split but is not, we all (for our own reasons) look at CF as a guide. After all, CF are the ones who talk to politicians, are supposed to drive adoption, have their own education branch. Not to mention that they are 1 of 3 genesis key holders.

Aside from WHO got this round of delegation, the oversaturation of pools is unacceptable. Particularly when AOS didn’t even apply (as stated on Twitter by @adatainment). Not to mention the fact that the application form was closed, then opened for less then 3 weeks: surely it takes a lot longer than 3 weeks to receive, filter and assess nearly 250 applications. Unless the selected pools had already been shortlisted and the form was just for show (or future rounds of delegation). If this is the case, it’s fine, but CF should have just said so from the start.

These “oversights” should not exist. They plainly and simply erode the faith in CF’s operations as a whole. And this is bad, whether you’re an MPO or an SPO: we all work in the same Ecosystem, and should demand integrity and competence from the representatives of said ecosystem to the outside world.

Just my 2 lovelaces

PS edits were for grammar and the number of weeks of the form

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I remember helping you.

This isn’t a “my pool is bigger than your pool” spat. This is a “don’t you dare to speak for my customers by painting a false narrative at my expense to make you look better” spat.

I’ll do a spaceplace episode (tomorrow) so I don’t have to pull any punches on why the anti-MPO narrative is both significantly tainted RE decentralization and more so extremely harmful to the ecosystem.

In regards to revenue - the Ada helps drastically. I have to make very serious personal sacrifices to keep leading the teams I lead and payroll flowing.

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You appear to be using the anti-MPO narrative as a (failing) marketing tactic.

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All pools were chosen based on the contributions we saw from pools we know over the last year. The typeform hast nothing to do with it, we stated this in the announcement, is especially for completely new pools or pools that suddenly do something completely new that we don’t know about.

Having looked at a lot of applications and otherwise following what the pools are doing, it’s fair to say we have a good idea of what is going on.

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I don’t know if you realise @ADAfrog but you can amalgamate your two pools into one and remain well under the cap caused by K. Your delegators would be better off.

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I sincerely hope your are not struggling too much. I would like to see community Ada used to support tool development that benefits the community. I think CF should pay for your work directly rather than using the staking mechanism as an investment vehicle when it wasn’t designed for that purpose.

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Ok, sorry, I must have misinterpreted then. My apologies.

Glad to hear that, if the extra ADA helps your struggle than it must be well placed. Still, CF could just simply pay you.

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Alright Tommy, my apologies for not understanding. My interpretation was wrong all along: this delegation round is nothing but fantastically thought out and executed.

Meanwhile at AOS, the pool is bleeding delegation thanks to oversaturation:

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I don’t know if you realize, but delegators pursue value propositions extending far beyond mediocre Ada staking rewards.

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While I appreciate your personal opinion, I am very glad so many others disagree.

I sincerely hope you now understand there are consequences to making broad false and disparaging remarks about your competitors on behalf of “the entire Cardano community”.

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@ADAfrog I see you have 3 pools: https://cexplorer.io/groups/adosia

You seem angry and I am not sure why. If all the delegators from your 2 smaller pools moved to the one that received CFs delegation then it would still only be about 60% saturated. In other words, you can easily become a single pool operator, which would be better for your delegators and cheaper/easier for you to manage. That’s a win - win. You can set your fees to whatever you want, so I don’t see the issue.

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There’s a value tradeoff my customers understand very well. The revenue supports teams that solve real problems here - Cardano holders are extremely smart. I don’t know how I can be more clear.

We operate in a permissionless space, and it’s silly to assume what’s “better” for my customers without understanding (or failing to even recognize) the value proposition.

I recommend focusing on bettering your own business for your customers.

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Don’t worry I am. Also focused on education, which you have helped me with, so thank you.

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@adatainment and CF team, I am starting to think that the CF delegation strategy might be more wisely strategic than first appeared.

Consider the following steps:

  1. Select a pool operator doing good work who happens to run multiple pools, but their pools are small such that they could all be amalgamated into one.
  2. Select one pool in the group to stake the 20M Ada to.
  3. This produces a clear signal to delegators of the other small pools in the group that they would be better off to move their delegation to this largest pool.
  4. Any delegators that move their stake this way will still be supporting the same operator. But, CFs delegation is like a push towards consolidation of the group.
  5. There is no disincentive for the pool operator since she can set whatever individual pool fees she likes including minFee and percent fee.

This is how the staking mechanism is supposed to work but on a micro scale, focused within a group of pools owned by a single operator.

I wouldn’t expect CF to admit this strategy, they might even deny it, but maybe they are playing 3D chess here?

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I think it better to just keep those and stop the whole application process.

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Yeah, so what you described is that their strategy is to pick and choose where they centralise the rewards to.

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I have no issue with CF paying rewards to whomever they deem fit for helping to build wanted tools.

But, unfortunately their strategy doesn’t just result in paying monetary rewards, rather importantly, it hands more control over the block production to selected players. Which in turn has an impact on Cardano’s decentralisation and resilience.

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When is the cut off for the application process if it is now an annual cycle? Did I miss that someplace?

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