As a small pool operator, the struggle is real to keep your servers running every months because you spend $$ and you don’t get rewarded. As a believer in Cardano mission, I think sometimes that’s not enough we all need support to get started if and only if those big pools were not greedy they would delegate small of their ADA into smaller pools jut to get them started…
As an operator of FasoPool
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Indeed, here my thoughts on the current dilemma. ASTOR runs non-profit and is still economically viable, perhaps because of it.
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We are waiting for multi delegation and k increase to 1000; these updates should help us
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Hope you are right Buddy
The only way to get a pool to the point of financial self-sustainability is to either invest lots of your own money or attract stake = actively promote the pool. If I wanted to delegate to your pool, I wouldn’t even know the name or ticker.
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Thanks
I will add my pool name
Yeah, it’s rough out there. There’s a ton of pools and as a former newbie, it’s hard to know which ones to choose.
The BRO pool is newish and struggling to get off the ground. I’m really just embarking on my marketing materials, but reaching the people that are just learning how to stake is difficult. And who wants to join a pool that has yet to mint a block… no matter how good the nodes are.
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You are right and I hope when they change the K parameters it will help all of us
Do we have any idea what the timing for these are ? Desperately needed.
Nope, no dates for the moment.
Wish I’d submitted this as a question to Lex Friedman then!
That wouldn’t make any difference imo. If I delegate my X Ada to you and you delegate the same amount of your Ada to me, we have achieved nothing.
Me again.
I’m getting increasingly concerned now that Cardano staking is turning into a playground for exchanges and well known youtubers. I tried to ask CH about this on his recent AMA but my repeated questions must have gotten ignored in the deluge of other questions.
Here is what I’m seeing:
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Exchanges like Binance able to offer 8%+ ROA of you lock it up with them. Had to compete with that.
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Famous youtubers opening up multiple pools
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Other famous youtubers realizing this is a sweet gig and opening up their own pools
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The research someone posted that shows pools with less than 10m ADA do give delegators lower ROA
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The fact that no one knows what the plans are for the parameters change and when it will happen. I don’t see how a higher pledge for example would solve this. Not sure if a lower saturation would solve this either
Based on all of the above, if I play it out in my head, I’d expect small SPOs to get squeezed out in the long run and the only new SPOs to be the ones created by existing Multi pool conglomerates.
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Let’s be honest even if they change the K parameters, it will always help those multiple pools operators. If you can 3 pools I don’t see you can’t open 4 or 6. This is gig for most people that they should at least support small pools…just saying.
This is gig for most people that they should at least support small pools
Cost per block matters. A small pool that on average makes (just) one block per epoch will have a cost of 340 / 740 => 46%. This is a significant cost to the delegator that needs to be compensated by such a pool in one way or the other. To the delegator, it is “effective cost per block” that matters i.e. after potential extra payouts.
If you can 3 pools I don’t see you can’t open 4 or 6
Binance has 63 pools, eToro 10. They can offer a much higher ROA than any other community pool. This is because they stake ADA that they control but not own.
A change of k seems like a minor tweak, with this being a real issue because it undermines any honest and hard working community effort. I look forward to the upcoming update to the incentive model, especially how it addresses the multiple pool owner identity issue.
What is multi staking? How would that work?
This post is three years old.
Back in the days, it was one idea to allow delegating to multiple pools at once on the protocol level.
For example, CIP-17 CIP-0017 | Cardano Delegation Portfolio goes in that direction.
I’m not aware of any recent initiatives to do it on the protocol level.
You can, however and of course, do it since forever by just splitting your ADA over many wallets and/or accounts and delegate them to different stake pools.
Lace also has a mechanism for multi-delegation which works similarly, but hides it a bit from the user and allows the user to semi-automatically rebalance between the pools (user still has to push a button and sign and pay a transaction for the rebalancing). And this is incompatible to all other wallet apps and some dApps (because it uses additional stake keys for the same account which are usually not derived and observed by other wallet apps).
Âtrium https://www.atriumlab.io/ works on “staking baskets” where you can delegate to a portfolio of stake pools instead of a single one by locking your ADA in a contract.
All of these solutions claim to better support decentralisation, but in all of these cases that point is kind of moot in my opinion because the ADA are, of course, not magically multiplied and you support more stake pools with your delegation, but in turn each of them only with a fraction of your ADA. I’d still prefer to just choose one SPO that you really want to support and delegate your full ADA to them. Period.
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