How to participate in Cardano Project, including Staking Pool (from a Korean community member)

Hi, a community member from the Korean category of the Forum raised the following question (Please note that following is a word-to-word translation)

Hello, I am a longer-term investor of ADA.
I have two questions to ask you:
I would like to know how can I engage more deeply with the Cardano Project.
I would like to participate as a node in the POS stake pool. Let’s say I host or co-locate a server to participate, not using the delegation system which is under development. I this case, will I get any extra rewards?

How long should I wait for ADA to be developed enough so I can use it to develop an application? For example a retail business such as online shopping application that delivers products when a user transfers ADA to the retailer.

I expect the APIs and the application functions to be developed soon for the developers :blush:
As I only know little about the technology, I hope to find some answers from this Forum.

Hello, @jocellin.lee! Thank you for helping to connect the community! :slight_smile:

If you just run your own node, without registering as a pool - then you just spend money on the server support, without making any more profit, than you would make, delegating to some existing pool. The math goes something like this:

If you delegate your stake to the pool - your profit is Total Block Reward minus Total Pool Fee. But when you run your own node, without beeing a pool - your profit is Total Block Reward minus Total Server Cost. In this case if Total Server Cost is less then Total Pool Fee - then it is more profitable to run your own node, but the probability is very high that Total Pool Fee will be much lower than a Total Server Cost would be, at least for many pools.

But, if you not only run a node, but also register as a staking pool - then you could also set up your own pool fee, that would help you to lower the Total Server Cost for your node. In fact, I would argue that - the whole point of staking pools is so that delegates could “help” node-owners to lower the cost of maintaining a node in return for profits :slight_smile:

The whole system is optimised toward many small pools.

You can use ADA as a payment service right now. When you launch the Daedalus - there’s a full-node automatically starting in the background. And this full node has it’s own API -
https://cardanodocs.com/technical/wallet/api/v1/, So you can just use it to create your own application that will check transactions from your clients. This is how exchanges work.

Smart-contract development (like Ethereum) will be possible toward the end of the year, maybe at the beginning of the next one.