Hi guys,
I understand that staking is coming in Q1 or Q2. I would love to run a pool. How do I go about setting this up?
Can I set it up by myself or do I need a special contact with Cardano / IOHK? Do I need a minimum amount of ADA in order to start my own stake pool?
Anything else I need to know in order to get it started?
CharlesH has mentioned that when the times comes they will have a group meeting in the slack channel or someplace like that for those interested in running stake pools. Part of the objective of the meeting is to see what tech skill those interested have so they know how to build out the software to make it easy enough to deploy. They will then get everybody set up on the test net to test the system. Until then it is mostly just speculation. I donât think there is a minimum to stake or run a stake pool but there are cost associated with operating a pool. From what I have gathered from interviews CharlesH has done, I believe his vision is to have the pool node software designed to be turnkey, a simple one button deploy, and easily set up and maintained on something like Rackspace or AWS if you donât want to run your own servers.
Sounds cool. Thanks.
You mention a slack channel. Is that something you have a link for?
I think the slack channel may have been changed to a Discord group. It is called âCardano Communityâ but I am not sure how to link to the group. https://discordapp.com/
HI Regsanman,
Do you have any idea if this is a ongoing session. I want to create my own stake pool as well. But doing so i want make sure i will be aligned on the Cardano Road Map.
Regards,
Richie
Hi Richie, as far as I know there has not been any effort to organize or register those interested in starting a stake pool. I imagine that will happen in the coming months. If you are on twitter I would watch @IOHK_Charles and @InputOutputHK for news and announcements. If you are not on twitter the discord group I mentioned above is a good resource and this group is as well. It is a discord group for the reddit.com subbreddit r/cardanocoin. They also track the twitter users I mentioned here.
@regsanman thanks much for letting us know about the Discord channel. From some reason Iâve missed it.
Hereâs an invite link to the Discord channel: https://discord.gg/fkrvfwh
Btw weâre developing a staking pool as well - http://cryptogrill.io/ ⊠we are already planning stuff / putting some stuff together, but weâre on the same page as everyone and waiting for more information to come out.
Hi Adam,
@regsanman @AdamSabla great to know someone developing a staking pool, are you running your test environment on a Linux Box? Maybe we can collaborate more im a bit new to this one.
I want to make sure that im doing it on the right track. Hope to hear from you soon.
Regards,
Richie
My team is still open to partnerships as well. we have lot of ADA pre-committed (mid 7 figures). since the details are thin right now not much has happened on the tech side of our project, nor the marketing side (not going to build a site full of empty promises, all funds pre-committed are from friends/family/IRL business associates and not from public solicitation). Personally I have a mathematics degree but am a âhello worldâ level coder but my partner is a professional programmer with years of POW mining experience (self built 50ish gpu project). Message if interested.
We are located in the United States.
Reading between the lines, all you may need to run a pool is a credit card. I think they are going to do all the development and just hand out docker images to anyone who wants to run one. Pop it on EC2 and done. As I understand it, the hardware requirement is very basic, so it will be cheap. Also people are talking about the need for high availability, but how important is that really? If they design it correctly, the wallet will have delegation failover; in the event a pool becomes unavailable, it goes to your second preference pool. Like when you mine Monero.
Hazel,
I agree and hope it is the case. If so, fees should be microscopic since there are no significant costs or barriers, which is ideal for adoption of the tech even if some of these salivating pool-operators-to-be are disappointed.
what I heard from charles was that youâll be able to create a special key on your wallet called a âProxy Keyâ, basically earmarking the ADA to be staked by a third party on your behalf (third party canât spend, just stake),this is how HW Wallet users will be able to stake without high availability or delegation failover.
You need failover, otherwise if a pool goes offline you will no longer be staking.
Check out how mining works with other coins like Monero, you enter 6 pool IPs, so that if the pool dies you carry on mining.
@HazelMazel3 meaning a simple AWS EC2 Spot Intance will work and it will beneficial since there are no strong indication from the team what requirement and when. On top of my head i was thinking a simple linux box with 8 cores or rather 4 cores.
more staking information From Charles H in todayâs interview
@regsanman Hey Reggie! The Discord group is an unofficial channelâŠ
The official chat channel is on Rocketchat here >> http://chat.cardanohub.org
We migrated away from Slack last year due to too many spam issues.
I started an AWS instance last night, downloaded, compiled and ran an SL node on mainnet.
Iâm thinking an AWS t2.medium (2 cores, 4GB memory) with 60GB storage.
IF redundancy is required; you would need 2 of those + an ELB.
Please share with the others here 
Dont do it privately.