Daedalus: Do you really want to delegate to a 99.61% saturated pool?

Staking & Delegation Stake Delegation
#1

So, it seems that Daedalus rankings prioritize Return on Staked Ada which makes sense. However, once that threshold has been reached then Return on Staked Ada will decrease in proportion to the amount of Ada staked.

I just looked at the rankings and noticed that the #1 listed pool has 99.61% saturation! Won’t saturation already be past 100% in the next epoch after staking rewards have been added to the total?

Why would a rational person want to delegate to a pool so close to being oversaturated? :joy:

Capture1

#2

Pools offer maximum rewards at 100% saturation, then diminished rewards after it. Daedalus ‘ranking’ isn’t very good and actually works against the chief scientists recommendations on leverage.
There are really only 3 factors that matter and Daedalus ranking ignores some of them.

  1. The pool is online and makes all its blocks, excluding orphans. This is, obviously, the most important.
  2. Current saturation - pools offer max rewards at 100% saturation. Higher the better up to 100%
  3. Pool pledge - higher pledge pools pay more rewards. Not a lot at this point, but they still do. It also shows the operator has skin in the game. The higher the pledge the better. A pool that saturates itself with pledge is the best.

Daedalus ranking is responsible for making the highest leveraged pool conglomerate, by ranking all of one person’s pools near the top, despite them being against network strength.
IOHK wrote a blog and made a couple videos warning against this exact conglomerate that Daedalus made. Don’t get me wrong, many conglomerates carry lower leverage than other single owned pools. So they’re not all bad.
You should look in a different place to determine a rank of your own. PoolTool.io, CardanoScan.io, and AdaPools.io give you the tools to make your own decision.

#3

Won’t saturation already be past 100% in the next epoch after staking rewards have been added to the total?

No it won’t, because all pools get rewards relative to their stake. So the relative stake of each pool stays the same.

#4

Daedalus ranking in the latest version 3.0.0 seems to be working exacltly as intended by the shelley design specifications. That’s why Aggelos’ blog post did suprise me to be honest.
In my view there’s currently nothing wrong with just picking the highest ranked pool to delegate your ADA to and maximizing your reards in the long term.
The other (arguably better) alternative is to delegate to pools you sympathize with, e.g. because of their contributions to the Cardano community.