I couldn’t beleive this - they post something and I respond and so they try to belittle me - is that professional? - not only that what confidence does it give you in the CF now?
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Unbelievable, and then the mantra is always inclusivity and keeping the conversation constructive…as if! Every time someone disagrees they are made to feel like they are not being constructive and inclusive. Dear me!
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In the Shelly Era, decentralization was the main goal. I feel CF/IOG naturally made efforts to achieve this goal. Including the way they used their delegation.
Currently, I believe that Cardano has achieved this goal. Comparing Cardano’s decentralization (MAV) with many if not all other top chains will show that we have done a good job. The current goal, I believe, is to grow the ecosystem in terms of projects, TVL and tools going online on Cardano. Naturally, it makes sense for CF/IOG to focus on these goals now. Changing their delegation strategy accordingly therefore also makes sense to me.
I am not saying that we should now stop increasing cardano’s decentralization even further and getting more pools to help in the consensus. On the contrary! But I don’t think CF/IOG delegations matter in this sense. What we need is a totally revamped rewards formula. As I have been reading in this thread and also from the OP, increasing K is already synonymous with more pools splitting. Why? because the rewards formula allows it.
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If CF does in fact take this approach then they will essentially undermined the entire concept of the K parameter.
Maybe CF should read this blog post by Aggelos again: https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2020/11/13/the-general-perspective-on-staking-in-cardano/
In particular this quote:
Do not engage in pool splitting unless you can saturate a pool completely with your stake. If you are a whale (relative stake > 1/k) you can create multiple pools – but you should keep your leverage as close to 1 as possible or less. Pool splitting that increases your leverage hurts the delegators’ rewards, and more importantly, it hurts the decentralization of the Cardano ecosystem, which is detrimental to everyone.
Cardano’s non-slashing, liquid staking, design depends a lot on the social engagement of the community. It is very clear to the Cardano community that the K parameter is supposed to represent the maximum size of any operator’s single pool. It is also very clear that the design architects had this view when they designed the protocol. The community has frowned upon multi-pool operators that have not saturated their pools with their own stake because they have been undermining this aspect of the protocol. The community has been attempting to use social consensus to persuade these multi-pool operators to reform their ways.
If Cardano Foundation (CF) thinks pools should have larger saturation limits then they should come out and explicitly say so. If this is CF’s belief then they must also believe that the K parameter should be reduced. Maybe back to 250 or even lower?
Cardano Foundation: Come out and say what you think the K parameter should be set to.
Don’t destroy the community’s understanding of the meaning of the K parameter by being two-faced.
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I see this post is getting a lot of negative feedback so here’s my two cents:
Firstly, I’ll note that I am in no way affiliated with, or “friends” with, or “friends of friends” with anybody at CF, IOG, or Emurgo.
Over the last year, my pool (formally NOMAD, now rebranded to P2PFI) has received four rounds of Delegation from CF. This support has significantly contributed to the development of P2P-DeFi Protocols. Announcements of early prototypes have been well received by the community (especially on X). Our Catalyst Fund10 proposal for this project amassed over 100M ADA upvotes, though unfortunately it did not receive funding due to an even larger number of downvotes.
Despite this, development continues. We are now in the final stages of setting up a stake-pool based marketing campaign to raise funds. At current prices even a fully saturated pool wouldn’t be much, but it’s enough to keep us going.
Needless to say, a larger delegation for a longer time from CF would greatly support development. There is no way for us to profit directly from the project (no token, and nothing for us to sell). If one day we get so lucky as to saturate the pool, spinning up a second one would be very helpful (especially when we look beyond the core protocols and towards peripheral infra and frontends/integrations). It’s nice to know that running a second pool wouldn’t disqualify us from CF’s support.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that some of the issues mentioned are totally invalid. For example, as @Terminada points out, Ouroboros works best when all k pools are fully saturated, so CF may be weary of delegating to MPOs with low saturation. Full transparency of the decision making around each pools’ delegation would also be a big plus.
Thank you CF for your support, and thank you the community for your feedback and skepticism. I look forward to further deliberation, and I hope it to be as constructive as possible.
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There is absolutely no point in any consideration to increase parameter K if CF is going to green-light multi-pool operators undermining it’s meaning.
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Not all SPOs are necessarily good people. Can you take responsibility if an automated, randomly selected SPO acts in a way that destroys the ecosystem? Rather, it is safer and more decentralized to carefully select SPOs that contribute to the development of the Cardano ecosystem.
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Increasing the delegation time to one year is a good step, which motivate to work on long term topics and not have to worry that the costs are not covered after 3 months. But, i feel we should not reduce the number of pools. Additionally, Increasing the delegation size could saturate some pools.
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I think here we are going backwards. What makes small pools inefficient? Couldn’t we work on that in priority? Removing delegation to the single pools is not going to help but rather encourage them to stop.
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I wrote it already on Twitter: if you say this is not a ChatGPT post, I apologise and comment on all the individual points.
That is true. The rebalancing of the wallets and the delegation did not happen.
I hope you understand how disappointing it is for me, a Stakepool operator who has been an active contributor to this forum for three years and has run a community-oriented Stakepool for the same duration, to receive a response like this and I would like to convey my disappointment and ask for a more respectful approach.
While it may not matter whether this response is edited by a chatbot like ChatGPT, the essence of the message remains mine. I believe that as a representative of the Cardano Foundation, the language and tone used are important, and the previous response appeared flippant, potentially insulting, and belittling. This has, regrettably, impacted my view of the Cardano Foundation.
I want to be clear: I have no issue with people disagreeing with my point of view, and I understand that critical discussions can be a part of the forum’s landscape. However, as a member of the Cardano Organization, I hold the expectation of a higher standard in terms of engagement and dialogue.
I hope you understand
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I made this cheeky statement based on how the text is structured and written. It summarises the announcements, weaves their own opinions in and constantly confuses the Cardano and Cardano Foundation.
But from the comments around this, I have a feeling that I’m wrong and can already write my apology addressing each point.
Great to see the CF’s updated delegation strategy. For a robust Cardano ecosystem, let’s balance delegation support to tool-building projects with projects that focus on education, outreach, and onboarding. Notably, as these community expansion and growth initiatives now lack Project Catalyst support
I think you are missing the point - there are many people on these forums that may not have English as their first language and there are people that care about how there messages are composed. Whether or not the text was edited or improved by chatGPT does not matter as it can only portray what the user has instructed it to. I am sorry but your appology has only been half baked. You make you appology on the basis that it was not written by chatGPT which is not the point. I really wish you could just get this. Anyway that is the last I will be saying about this now and it has left me somewhat dissapointed with the foundation as a whole
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Isn’t it a normal thing that pools increase their margin when delegation increases by a lot? Especially when the minimum fixed fee is high. And what when the minPoolCost parameter will be lowered? SPOs might consider setting a lower fixed fee, but higher margin…
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To me it matters if messages are artificially enhanced by an unreliable and highly questionable service.
But in contrast to @adatainment I wouldn’t have gotten the suspicion from the original message. Which would be all the more scary if he was right.
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I am sorry and would like to formally apologize for assuming that this was written by ChatGPT and can give you my personal opinion on the points mentioned:
It unclear what “small” in this comment means but from my view pools that constantly produce blocks and that are able to take the load of P2P are the backbone of the Cardano network. The current strategy and the one before it does not touch these pools. The Foundation never supported stake pools just because they are stake pools. We have always looked for outstanding contributions. What we do see is that there is an overlap between outstanding contributions and the stake pools in terms of technology, relay configuration and best practices.
We have very rarely observed that pools have grown through the 3 months delegation. Sometimes it was even the opposite. These days, stake is moving around very slowly. If something helps to grow pools then this is a bigger delegation for a longer time.
The Delegation Strategy never had the intention to create an “artificial” decentralization by delegating to small pools. Please look into Cardano Foundation's New Delegation Methodology: Supporting the Architects of the Future for details.
Cardano’s fundamental values have nothing to do with Cardano Foundation’s Delegation Strategy. (but I assume you are mixing here up Cardano and Cardano Foundation?) If the Cardano Foundation would delegate in the sense of Cardano’s fundamental concepts (pure game theoretical incentives) then it would have to do so in a way that maximizes its profit. The Foundation wants to avoid this with its strategy and has always tried to do a very good balancing act, even against the core principles on which Cardano is built.
We removed the single pool requirement to not limit ourselves in the selection of high contributions. The delegation list that we will soon put out will speak for itself.
The old process handpicked a shortlist, and then did a random draw on that shortlist. Because the shortlist needs to be a lot bigger than the actual random draw this has an interesting effect: It is like you need to pick the best 10 dancers in the room but you are not allowed to pick them directly. You need to pick the 20 best dancers in the room and then do a random draw. This diminishes the quality of your list.
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Seriously? Delegate to MPO’s? What an insult to the SPO community. Shame @ CF.
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So, the delegation that CAG already has is from community and not from CF?
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