Have your say on the Cardano Foundation’s delegation strategy

A pool with 2-10% (with the current cap already at 2%) would produce blocks nearly every epoch already. Charging a 0% margin means they don’t pay themselves for the work they do, and won’t make anything from the delegation, besides blocks.

Supporting pools already minting basically every epoch and also not paying themselves by running a 0% margin sounds like a drastic change from the selection criteria. This definitely does not sound like helping the majority of small pool operators.

Honestly the only way out of exchanges/big entities owning any DPOS network is to make the saturation ridiculously low, and the technical know-how to run one, basically nothing… Make it so low that it’s not financially worth it for big companies to even bother.

Daedalus should be able to self-stake with a single click of a button. Saturation should be 100k and adjusted even lower as ADA value increases.

THE MASSES NEED TO RUN THE NETWORK… Or Cardano will be nothing more than another Chase Bank/Goldman Sachs. Devs need to find a way to put the power of the network in the hands of the people, not Binance pools or 1PCT pools. Delegating is not providing the right incentives for decentralization. I’m sorry, but it’s not.

You conveniently forget to mention the fixed fee per epoch which is supposed to pay for the cost the pool has. Most of that is already covered by the delegators unless the pool owner contributes most of the stake themselves.

No part of the pool operating cost depends on the amount staked, so why take a margin?

Besides, the purpose of a stake pool is to, well, pool stake. Just running a node with no or miniscule stake in the hope that enough people would come and pay a cut of their rewards does not make a stake pool.

10 million is enough to sign blocks an less time 1 month. And distribute in more pools

I don’t think it should be a fixed amount but variable and the necessary to make a pool produce +1 block per epoch and rotate once a month.

Making the delegation amount variable would enable a better distribution, and while not being the same for every pool, impact on the other hand should be the same.

Hope I made myself understand.

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We recently asked our community to vote on core aspects of the Cardano Foundation’s delegation methodology. In the discussion that has followed here, some participants have expressed an interest in a longer Cardano Foundation redelegation period, spanning months rather than a few epochs or weeks.

To reflect the interests of those who expressed a desire for longer redelegation periods, we would like to call for one final round of votes to reflect this. Your responses will help us decide our redelegation methodology, and we are grateful for your participation. Thank you to all who have voted so far.

3. In your opinion, what should be the right epoch interval for redelegation?

  • Once a month
  • Every two months
  • Every three months

0 voters

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Need all translate in german

I would prefer one day.

+1. Week maximum

I tend to agree with this. With k=1000 in mind, 10M for 3 months gives enough of a boost to have a chance at attracting delegators. Extra marketing can have an effect that way.

Anything less than a month gives you nothing when it comes to convincing delegators. You as an SPO have no chance of an influence that way, it’s just lottery then, with some short term ada prize.

Also agree with people thinking small pools can benefit from lower amounts than 15M. The goal should be to give a chance to all the viable smaller pools, with enthusiastic yet skilled SPOs behind. Spreading the delegated amounts thinner would help that. How thin we may go? Based on comments above, 10M looks about right.

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I think the new delegation strategy is super! (Is saw the Blog Tim Harrison 24-11). Helping the little pools and the ‘charity’/purpose driven pools is making the world a bit better.
I m not an spo, just an delegator.

First question: i think at 10 million stake, otherwise the pools become too dependend on that stake and the fall after IOG leaves the pool is to big so delegators will also leave.

second question: stay at least 6 weeks/2 months… a shorter period will not pay attention to the pool and it is to fluctuous. A longer period gives confidence to the delegators.

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By IOG’s example quarterly delegation would be more meaningful for small pools to show the Cardano community a history of performance.

The chicken and the egg is the lottery to get into block production range at all and the 340A cost to get into reward range for delegators.

Perhaps:

~7M delegation
3 month rotation

Do you have a list of criteria of how you would be selecting the pools?

If history of making a block (confirming configurations) is a criteria, those below this threshold technically need this boost the most.

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Is why we are here asking dialogue it finally came to fruition in as fast fashion :wink:

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I would prefer 6 weeks period so the SPO have the time to plan and execute a marketing campaign.
Maybe 10M like less ada and a long period of time to work on delegations.
Thanks for all the hard work to re think this delegation strategy. Hopefully we will find consensus.
Maria

I really like your ideas it really helps we share the pie.

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I choose 15M but I believe this value can be lower and for a longer period of time.

I believe that our main goal is to help as many of possible at once (that’s why a lower value then 15M) and still pool can produce blocks consistently.

For a longer period of time so when new delegators come ( in the next few months there will be a big movements) they can decide a pool based on pool mission or purpose so small SPO can grow organically after CF delegation leaves.

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No, I did not forget it, conveniently or otherwise, I left it out intentionally. I was referencing a 0% margin and the operator paying themselves. The fixed fee, as you state, is meant to go to pay for operations like web hosting, DNS, cloud servers, colocation and to repay expenditures in bare metal, colocation setup fee’s, etc…

Paying for costs is NOT paying yourself for operating a pool the same way that paying my gas costs and car payment to drive to work is not the same as receiving a paycheck to do the work when I arrive. As fixed fee’s are meant to cover infrastructure costs, not pay the operator for running the pool, I intentionally left them out of my comment because I was addressing your statement on supporting pools with 0% margins, which is regardless of the fixed fee everyone must charge per epoch. Until we make a change and remove fixed fee’s then:

  • Fee’s are for infrastructure and repayment of expenses
  • Margin is to pay the operators for their time and energy

Also the fixed fee in many cases either does not cover the monthly infrastructure costs, or with initial expenditures does not repay the operator for 6-12 months, or even longer, for their investment.

If an operator put so little infrastructure into the pool, for instance hosting it from 1 RaspberryPi on home internet without using relays, the operator is leaving single points of failure and not providing adequate resources for internet outage, hardware failure or other events. While this might allow them to turn a profit from the fixed fee alone the delegators will be the ones to pay the price for an under provision pool when issues occur.

Another issue is that multi pool operators can also afford to set 0% if they make enough off fixed fee’s and spread their costs over multiple pools.

So I stand by my statement that I do not support delegating to a 0% pool as it tends to point to 2 cases:

  • SPO under provisions resources and 340 actually makes a profit
  • SPO has multiple pools to spread out costs and earns multiple 340 fixed fees per epoch

Please read up on how delegation works, what an epoch is and how rewards are calculated.

There is no 1 day delegation lengths. CF moving their delegation around once each day will help 1 pool only, the one where the epoch snapshot was taken, the other 4 pools would receive nothing. Therefore pushing for a 1 day delegation is the same as saying 1 epoch (5 days).

Thank you for your note.

And please be a bit more careful with jumping to conclusion. Having a certain opinion does not correlates with having a lack of knowledge.

I am familiar with the delegation mechanics and I know at this moment there’s no option to redelegate within that period of time. However, the longer the redelegation period the higher the risk the staker undertakes. Rewards should be distributed more frequently, like in case of Algorand.

Currently, if someone delegates into a wrong pool then first, they won’t realize the pool does not generate rewards, unless doing detailed analysis, like checking on adapools.org or the like. So, if someone uses Daeadalus for example 2 epoch is gone plus one due to redelegation.

Maybe later there will be an improved section within the wallets where someone can check at any moment how the stake pool performs where they delegated.

I stake since the beginning of the testnet and I hope this will not evolve into a walled garden for the stake pool operators. Shorter redelegation periods means tighter competition. If the stake pool operator has a guarantee that the stake is there for 3 months, why would they make efforts to perform better then the others?

Your statement would then be specific to changing the cardano staking protocol. Not the length of time “Cardano Foundation” should delegate their stake to a small pool to help the ecosystem. These are two different things, and the first is not the focus of this thread.

This discussion is not talking about delegators being restricted to delegating stake for 3 months (or 2 or 1 month). This is specific to ONLY how long the Cardano Foundations stake would be left with an SPO to help bootstrap them into producing blocks. This would have ZERO effect on the length of time you as a delegator would be required to leave your stake with a single pool.

Why should they perform better than others? Because, in your example, after 3 months Cardano Foundation moves their stake, and the SPO no longer has that delegation. They should perform well:

  • To show other delegators they are a good place to delegate to
  • Attract more stake over the 3 months CF is delegating so after they still produce blocks by having enough stake.
  • Convince delegators not to move their stake after CF delegates to a new pool.