Original Placement:
Today’s guest on the Cardano SPO column is a bare-metal stake pool operated by Brock, a Canadian decentralization maxi focused on improving many areas of the Cardano ecosystem: BROCK Pool [BROCK].
The previous guest was a bare-metal stake pool operated by a team of six operators based in Quebec, Canada.
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?
Thank you for thinking of me and inviting me to share!
I’m Brock, a Canadian single bare-metal SPO and decentralization maxi focused on improving many areas of the Cardano ecosystem. I’ve always been a computer nerd as well as a photographer.
After holding ADA for a while, I started exploring the digital collectible market by minting my photography on Cardano. I quickly learned how many basic features Cardano’s marketplaces lacked compared to marketplaces on other popular blockchains — especially when it came to minting, collecting and trading art specifically.
This lit a fire under me to create change. After establishing myself as a reputable figure within Cardano’s ecosystem and making a lot of connections, Cardano now has Kreate marketplace for minting, trading, and properly displaying tokenized art; and a previously non-existent standard for “editions” (limited or unlimited minting of multiple copies of a single art piece) as a native-asset-equivalent to how editions exist on other blockchains.
What’s the path that led you to Cardano and to become a Stake Pool Operator (SPO)?
In 2020 I became fascinated by and interested in proof-of-stake blockchains. I researched and experimented to find which PoS blockchain I liked most, and I naturally landed on Cardano as the undeniably best option. However, it wasn’t until 2021 when I joined the Cardano community — the art community specifically.
I initially became an SPO with one major goal in mind: generate more sales volume for art on Cardano. I couldn’t afford to buy everyone’s art with my own funds, so I created my stake pool — originally called RTIST Pool — as a way for the community to help me generate ADA that would be used to purchase art from the many talented artists minting on Cardano. The purchased art was then airdropped to a randomly-drawn delegator of the pool, so delegators were rewarded with fantastic art as a thank you for their staking contribution.
I’ve since started contributing to CIPs related to token minting standards and token policy management to broaden the capabilities of Cardano native assets and asset policies; as well as providing UX/UI advisory to marketplaces and minting platforms to ensure an easy-to-approach UX/UI and better display of collectible assets. I’ve also branched out to many other areas of Cardano’s ecosystem, including DeFi and DePIN, to help contribute to products that will bring the rest of the world to blockchain. I create open-source scripts and bots that help node operators of various sorts (Cardano, Mithril, Iagon, etc) to increase uptime and reliability.
I also created $sendscams, a wallet where Cardano users can send scam tokens that they received in a malicious airdrop. A bot automatically adds those scam tokens to a public scam token registry on GitHub after they‘re checked by community maintainers. This registry can be used by anyone for free to create scam-prevention tools, token blacklists, wallet warnings, or whatever they need. The ADA that travels with the scam tokens, which originally came from the scammer, is kept in the wallet and is delegated to my stake pool to support a bare-metal single stake pool in securing the Cardano blockchain, rather than harming its users.
Anywhere I can help improve the user/developer/operator experience of Cardano — I’m there.
Let’s talk about art. What synergies do you see between the art and blockchain worlds? What benefits does art tokenization bring?
Securing art on a blockchain just makes sense. Especially digital art, which makes up most of today’s art market. Blockchain is fire/flood resistance; it’s counterfeit resistance; it’s verifiable proof-of-ownership; it’s expedition of global trade.
Blockchain solves many of the significant issues and struggles that the art industry has faced in the past. Art that is tokenized on Cardano has a verifiable policy id to track all of the artworks in the artist’s collection. All ownership changes are trackable. The history of tokenized artworks can’t be altered.
By minting and selling their art on Cardano, artists are able to reach a global market of collectors, far beyond their typical reach, and are able to continue reaching and interacting with their collectors forever. Now that’s synergy!
What is Iagon, and what does your role as a Storage Provider involve?
Iagon is a very unique cloud solutions company, currently focused on cloud storage and cloud compute applications.
After becoming one of Iagon’s first storage node operators and providing initial feedback from an operator’s standpoint, I joined the team in early 2024 to help with UI and UX review, community connection, and quality assurance on the various products that Iagon offers and will offer.
As both an operator/provider and an end-user of many products within Cardano’s greater ecosystem, the Iagon team felt I would be a valuable addition to their team and invited me onboard.
It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with the dedicated and talented Iagon team, and I’m inspired by the well-calculated ambition for the future of Iagon.
Great contribution. Any closing thoughts? Where can people get in touch?
Thank you so much! I simply aim to be as universally valuable as I can be with the skills that I continue to develop and refine every day within this incredible ecosystem. At this point I work full-time in Cardano’s ecosystem and I couldn’t be more proud of that. I never imagined I’d be in this position when I first started this journey.
Anyone can reach me on Twitter or Discord @BrockCardano. I’m always offering my opinions and input on Twitter. I’m also always open to more opportunities to help out with products and services that add value to the ecosystem, so feel free to reach out if I can be of any assistance.
At this point my stake pool’s rewards stay entirely within the ecosystem and increase my pool’s pledge, so any delegation to BROCK Pool is greatly appreciated. Don’t be scared of smaller pools, we just earn bigger rewards less frequently, and we can’t grow without your help!
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.