Half a Billion Dollar’s Worth of Ada is now Delegated to Mission-driven Stake Pools on Cardano

[Cardano-Foundation]

Half a Billion Dollar’s Worth of Ada is now Delegated to Mission-driven Stake Pools on Cardano

(Written by @elliothill at the Cardano Foundation)

Mission-driven stake pools truly make the world work better for all.

Today, we interrupt our usual article series to share some extra-special news with our community.

As many of you know, Cardano is focused on bringing social and financial inclusion to underserved communities and causes that need it most—and there are few better ways to do this than supporting existing charities that are already having an impact in local communities.

Driven by our community of mission-driven stake pool operators, the Cardano ecosystem is now realizing and exceeding this vision. We are delighted to share that over US$500,000,000 worth of ada is currently being delegated to charity-focused initiatives on Cardano through mission-driven stake pools.

The rewards from these pools, generated by the collective power of you, our Cardano community, are being donated to more than 100 charitable organizations worldwide. But what are mission-driven pools, and how do they differ from normal stake pools on Cardano?

What are mission-driven stake pools?

Mission-driven stake pools commit to donating a portion of their block rewards to charitable causes—either through ada directly where it’s accepted, or fiat currency, in addition to helping validate transactions on the Cardano network in the same way as other stake pools.

Not only do mission-driven stake pools validate network transactions and generate rewards to pass on to charitable organizations, but delegators themselves also receive staking rewards as normal. This represents a new and innovative way to tangibly support charities while also building your ada balance—with no upfront donation costs if you can’t spare your funds. The rewards generated from a mission-driven pool are similar to those generated by purely for-profit stake pools, which means delegators can drive social good while also meeting their personal crypto goals.

Recipient charities, chosen by the mission-driven stake pool operators themselves, span a wide range of campaigns, geographies, and beneficiaries. These include humanitarian charities, environmental initiatives, and animal protection alliances to name a few. Some of the largest mission-driven stake pools make regular contributions to charities such as Save the Children, The Water Project, SolarAid, and many more.

Together, more than 10,000 individual delegators—ada holders like you—have pledged a proportion of their personal ada holdings to more than 60 mission-driven stake pools on Cardano.

This represents one of the largest collective giving communities in the entire blockchain space, a huge achievement that everyone in our ecosystem should be proud of. A full list of mission-driven stake pools and their pledge amounts can be found here.

What’s next for mission-driven pools and giving on Cardano?

So, how do we make giving to charity on Cardano even easier? To start, the planned introduction of third-party payment gateways will greatly enhance the ability of charities to directly accept donations in ada, with a view to eventually facilitate the generation of staking rewards to give charities consistent returns on their ada donations. Payment gateways will also enable ada holders to support charities of their choice through direct ada donations.

Next, through transactional metadata on the Cardano blockchain, work is also underway to empower an immutable audit trail of on-chain ada donations—allowing delegators to independently validate that stake pool rewards are indeed being used for charitable purposes. This could have profound effects on how charities prove the impact of their donations in the future, powered by metadata on Cardano.

But for now, reaching US$500,000,000 of ada staked to mission-driven stake pools is a significant milestone for the Cardano ecosystem, proving that serious use-cases focused on social good and financial inclusion are already emerging from the Cardano community.

As Cardano continues to onboard new users and increases on-chain activity, the ability of mission-driven pools to create change will grow.

We sincerely thank all of our mission-driven stake pool operators, and their 10,000 strong delegators, for joining us on this journey.

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Special thanks to @Smaug / Pool.pm for visualising mission-driven stake pool metrics here.

[CosmosX]

So proud! <3

[Alexd1985]

This is hugeeee!

Well done guys, BRAVO !!!

[ElliotHill]

Yes, massive news! We should reiterate - it is the entire community that has contributed to this and our mission-driven stake pool operators. This is the power of decentralization and pushing power to the edges, very cool and we should give all those involved a clap!

[tsipou]

This is how Cardano and the Pools,
all together can build a better World!!!

Lets Decentralize this World!

[keltxo]

Nice news.
Thanks cardano!

[ACOL_pool]

Wow, Thanks. I’m very happy to see this initiative. a Big Thanks from #Beekeepers and ACOL Pool
Thanks Cardano team ^^

[GrahamsNumberPlus1]

Fantastic visualization - well done

[andreassosilo]

Wow, that’s a big achievement. Thanks @Smaug (Pool.pm) for creating such a wonderful tool for visualisation!

[ADA4Good]

Goosebumps!!

[Donnybaseball]

Super cool! Very proud to be involved.

[edwardtam]

What a meaningful event! May I know how I can be qualified as a mission-driven stake pool?

[ADA-INDO]

I’m in. But, how to start? Should we make a new pool? or we can use this one we owned? Where to sign up?

[Reza1]

ایول nice work

[Venne]

Awesome news! I launched our Mission-driven Stake Pool STORK last Sunday. We are supporting a local nature centre that provides education, takes care of a beautiful nature area but is highly depending on donations to do so. We would welcome all of you that feel like staking for a good cause while still only paying a low fee of 1.5%.

PS. don’t miss the updates on out local storks. Currently only available in German but soon also in English!

[hyferion]

Awesome. I wasn’t able to find StakeForElephants in that list. We are a non-profit stake pool with 100% of the profits going to the Porini Foundation and IUCN to preserve biodiversity. We would appreciate every support we can get.

Ticker: SFE

[Ampere]

An amazing idea! our recent Ampere Pool (ticker: AMP) wants to help people around the world with electricity. We hope that we will be able to benefit from this donation and contribute to making electricity available to all.

[cybershaman]

@ElliotHill brings tears and joy to this here SPO. Thank you SOO much for spotlighting our MDP community and the amazing work we are doing.

GROW pool has been working closely with our charity, Save the Children, to help them accept ADA directly. Currently they accept a few cryptos via TheGivingBlock which provides them a web-based widget for accepting crypto donations via their partner, Gemini exchange. As we know Gemini doesn’t yet list ADA so the work-around for now is to convert ADA to fiat and provide ProofofDonation receipts via metadata TX on-chain for transparency & trust building with stakeholders. If we can come up to $2500USD/mo they will accept ADA directly via a custom route. GROW is currently at half that amount monthly now with 100% of profits going to them. We are currently sponsoring EIGHT children in Ethiopia every month. We are adding TWO new children every month for 13 months. By the end of the year, we will, as long as the community continues their support for GROW, be sponsoring 26 children.

Future plans involve making it possible for stakeholders to vote, proportional to their stake, on which charity they want our profits to go to every month. We will have a menu of charities. This capability is in development now.

We are also researching the ways we can enter the lending protocol space. Projects like KIVA running on a decentralized blockchain like Cardano is, as Charles Hoskinson put it, when he knows Cardano has succeeded. We share that vision.

Congratulations to ALL SPOs and their pools and stakeholders for making Cardano the community that pushes power to the edges, brings the world the best blockchain, and we do it all while we making the world better in every way we can.

[MMA_Stake_Pool]

Glad to be part of the group. The MMA Stake Pool is one of the smaller members but we are confident the idea of MDP pools will grow as people learn about Stake Pool’s impact.

Delegators wishing to support mixed-martial-arts can delegate with ticker [MMA] to join the first MMA Cardano subcommunity.

[StakeADAPool]

Very very proud to be a part of this list. I [KARMA] am currently struggling to find contributors other than myself and my loyal group of 16 delegators, most of which have been with me since November. I would LOVE to see the Foundation make a sizable delegation to those of us putting quite large personal stake on the line for these Missions. Think about greater delegation please, but also THANK YOU for what you’ve done for the community and for us to this point. Best to all of you.