“Help Save Hotel GInebra Barcelona- 1st business to accept ADA”
Well…that title probaby caught your attention.
Not quite your average daily Cardano Forum title of a post.
So here is the story.
As some of you, or perhaps many of you know, our hotel in Barcelona, Hotel Ginebra, in
2017 became the first business in the world to accept ADA for payment.
To verify the fact, IOHK sent the lovely and investigative Olga Gonzalez on a scouting
mission to come and visit us and we had the pleasure of spending a few hours together.
This tete-a-tete produced an in depth interview, which resulted in a blogpost on the IOHK blog.
The article will come up if you google “Hotel Ginebra IOHK” or search for “Hotel Ginebra” on the IOHK blog at IOHK Blog - Page 1
Fast forward to July 2nd 2019: the date of the IOHK Virtual Summit.
Yours truly was undeservedly and unexpectedly invited to fill a few minutes amongst a
collection of illustrious speakers.
i am happy to report that to my surprise the presentation was better received than expected and Hotel Ginebra, in this case represented by only myself, once again did its best to promote Cardano and its noble cause.
You can see for yourself that i am not making it up, the link is down below.
If you would like to skip the part where i talk about the similarities between the city of Barcelona and the Cardano project, you can go directly to minute 7.34 where you can see a short animated video about Charles Hoskinson and my view of him:
** So what is the point of this article?
**Fast forward to November 8th 2020.
As we all know, the pandemic has been savageously barreling through the world like a
months long hurricane of despair, leaving many victims in its path, both in terms of lives lost
and shattered and businesses ravaged, many of which forever.
BUT…just hours ago, the news broke that the vaccin that Pfizer is producing has a 90
percent reliability and that we can expect the green light for mass production by the 3rd
week of November, which is only some ten days away.
You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief the world let out and it means that we
now have more than a fighting chance again to save lives and businesses alike.
Hotel Ginebra is one of those small businesses.
It obviously does not give me any pleasure to share the story, but these are the Terrible
Tales of the Pandemic and ours is just one short line in the thick book that will be written
once Covid is nothing more than just a pale memory:
We have had to shut the doors of Hotel Ginebra on March 23rd 2019 because of Covid and they have been closed ever since.
The pressure of ongoing bills and expenses made that we have looked bankrupcy in the face
a few times already.
General Maximus famously said in the movie "Gladiator: “when Death smiles at you , smile
back”. We have tried to bravely look back in the face of the death of our business and what-
do-you-know…we are stil here.
But even though the good news of the soon to be produced vaccin broke today, it will not be easy to keep a business afloat much longer. A business which currently has zero income and tons of bills to pay every month.
WE OPERATE A STAKEPOOL!!
So what to do?
We thought about setting up a crowdfunding project but that feels a bit too
much like charity and why would we benefit from such an initiative if there are tens of
thousands other businesses that merit help perhaps more than we do?
But we DO operate a Cardano Stakepool (ticker CASH), perhaps even once again as the first business in the world to do so.
And as often is the case in Life and perhaps in the Universe, sometimes things seem to
happen for a reason and different paths converge to one exact moment in time.
One of these paths has lead IOHK to change the parameters for Cardano stakepools by
December 6th 2020 which was just announced days ago.
(In case you did not yet hear or read about it, the “saturation point|” is being lowered from
approximately 220 million to 64 million ADA. In short this means that if you are a delegator
and a pool has more than 64 million ADA delegated to it, you are better of delegating
elsewhere, as your rewards will drop.)
The lowering of the saturation parameter will have as consequence that delegating to small
pools will become more attractive and that those small pools (the first 500 of them in the
ranking) will be “defended” by the protocol.
So it is inherently to the advantage of delegators to now start spreading their delegatated
ADA among those for now 500 stakepools.
You can already guess where this is going.
Hotel Ginebra operates a stakepool called “CASH”
(the name could have been a lot better and one day we might change it)
By delegating to our stakepool “CASH” you will directly contribute to giving us a fighting
chance to keep the hotel alive untill tourism comes back to Barcelona, which we hope will
happen by February or March of 2021, so not too long from now.
We are not asking for a hand-out because our stakepool already TODAY pays rewards to
delegators just as other stakepools do. In fact this epoch we are on track to mint 13 blocks,
a new record, notwithstanding our (too) low stake. And it so happens that in a few weeks
small pools will become inherenty more competitive anyway because of the changing
parameters and more rewarding so timing is perfect.
What we do ask is, by delegating to stakepool CASH, to give us a fighting chance to keep Hotel Ginebra alive untill we can go back to the business of what we do best, which is to offer amazing and affordable accommodation on the central square of Barcelona.
Every now and then you see delegators asking stakepool operators on Twitter what the
good cause is that a pool wil commit to if they decide to delegate to it.
Well…its a bit embarrassing but at the same time funny because of the role reversal (if you
share my dark sense of humour at least) to say that we ARE the good cause.
By delegating to “CASH” you participate in no small way in helping Hotel Ginebra staying
afloat just that little bit longer that may allow us to get back on our feet again.
For us, if Covid is anything, it is a battle against time. And time, as we all know, is money.
WHAT DO WE GIVE BACK?
Hotel Ginebra is already the 1st business in the world to have accepted ADA and will be
forever. Nobody will be able to ever take that and the incredible memories that it
consequenly produced, such as being invited to Lisbon to be present at the IOHK workshop
of January 2018, away from us.
In Harry Potter style and Highlander style, “There can only be One”, and Hotel Ginebra is
that Special One.
But we would hope that also in Harry Potter style, at the end of the story the hero that is
Hotel Ginebra, will be able to defeat the pure evil that is Covid, with the help of delegator
wizzards of any size, colour, creed or conviction.
IOHK has already reached out to us several times with the idea of having meetups at the
hotel and workshops post-Covid.
If we survive, we can do one better.
It would be our great pleasure and distinct honour to re-theme the Hotel on Cardano and turn it into a proper Cardano Hub in Barcelona. We do not lack ideas, but we do lack finance at the moment. We are…ironically “strapped for CASH” 
Not by our own doing (because Hotel Ginebra rocks) but by something that nobody could
have foreseen and that we all hope to put behind us as soon as possible.
WE LOVE YOU ANYWAY…
So thats our story.
Delegate to our stakepool (CASH) or not, in the end what must happen will happen and you
never know in advance if for better or for worse.
Such is the beautiful unpredictability of life. But if life is a theater, this is at the moment the
role that we have been handed to play, so…lets enjoy the play as much as we can, even it it
means having to play all the nuances of a character of a nearly bankrupted business and posting this on the Cardano forum
And no matter what happens to us or Hotel Ginebra, we will always be in support of “The
Marvellous Idea” that is Cardano. There is more to life than Cardano, but personally i have
not come across many things that are worth fighting for more than this.
Tk care everyone, i hope you at least enjoyed the read and stay safe.
Alfred
