Original Placement:
Today’s guest on the Cardano SPO column is a stake pool operated by Pi Lanningham, the CTO of Sundae Labs: 314 Pool [314].
The previous guest was an OG baremetal stake pool operated by Matticus and his family, who live in New Zealand.
This column is where I invite Stake Pool Operators (SPO) to share their stories and vision as a way to connect with and learn about the Cardano Community.
Hi, thanks for your time. Tell us something about yourself, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?
My name is Pi Lanningham, and I’m the CTO of Sundae Labs. We built the first AMM based DEX on Cardano, and are constantly trying to do everything we can to uplift the entire ecosystem.
I’m a mathematician by passion and a programmer by trade, and in particular I really like educating and explaining difficult concepts to people without a technical background.
Tell us how you discovered Cardano and why have you decided to become a Stake Pool Operator (SPO)?
I discovered Cardano when a coworker suggested I look into it to get back into crypto in 2017. I bought and held onto a small amount of ADA for several years, until I got a random email about joining “SundaeSwap”, a decentralized exchange on Cardano.
I joined as a side project after work and it quickly took over my life. After a certain point, it only felt natural for me to run my own stakepool and contribute to the network.
You are mostly known for SundaeSwap, which we had the pleasure to interview for our DeFi column. How are things going on that front?
We just launched SundaeSwap v3, which is a ground up rewrite of the protocol smart contracts.
One of the big focuses with these was on making things extensible and upgradable, and I’m really excited about a lot of the ideas we have in the pipeline to start building on top of the Sundae protocol.
As an experienced Cardano developer, is there anything that can be improved in the ecosystem? What do you think needs to happen to attract more developers and investments?
We still don’t have a great “zero to one” developer story for many different developer tasks. Running a local cardano developer test-net, for example, has gotten a lot better since 2021, but it still isn’t to a level that developers have come to expect.
Look at Aiken, for example, where you can write and test your first validator in minutes. I believe there’s great work being done on this by a number of different people.
Most recently I saw a really great tease of something Anastasia Labs is working on as part of their Catalyst funded “lucid-evolution” library. I also think that introspection and debuggability right now is terrible.
When developing smart contracts and a transaction fails, the error messages are usually next-to-worthless; This is one of the reasons we’re building Gastronomy, a UPLC / Aiken time-travelling debugger.
Great contribution. Any final thoughts? Where can people get in touch?
I’ve only been successful in the Cardano ecosystem because of its supportive and collaborative nature; From community members who resonated with the vision we had, to colleagues who helped us navigate the rough spots.
So my message to your audience, I suppose, would be to try to hold onto and pay that atmosphere forward as our developer ecosystem grows.
Anyone is welcome to reach out to me at pi@sundae.fi!
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the people interviewed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG. Moreover, this content is for educational purposes, it doesn’t constitute financial advice.