I’ve been operating NSPYR for about 2 months now and have been searching for an answer to this question: How can we maximize stake pool performance? I’ve read that a large stake pool will perform the same as others in the long term. However, that’s not making a lot of sense to me. If a different pool consistently produces over 10 blocks per epoch, how will my pool ever catch up to that rate of return? What things can small stake pool operators do to maximize the chances of minting blocks? Is it all determined by stake? How does the location of my server impact performance? I see a lot of servers in Germany. Is there a reason for that? Does having servers in different countries help increase your chances of minting blocks? Does the number of relay nodes increase your chances of producing blocks?
Sorry for the large number of questions. I can’t find definitive answers anywhere on the subject of performance. Any guidance is greatly appreciated!
I do not agree to this as well. I asked this question to myself before I set up the pool to understand how much stake I will need to be attractive for delegators (through good ROA). I created the following sheet to calculate some scenarios: Cardano Pool Operation Calculation - Google Sheets
The ugly truth is that you will need >5mio. Stake to have really good rates on average. You always can be lucky, but on average you’ll not be a good choice with lower stake, which makes it really hard for SPOs to start. Please note that up to 1mio Stake more than 1/3 of the rewards are eaten up by the Operators Fees…
The only way to get successful is to find Delegation. Unfortunately all technical measures are not rewarded by the network. Nobody measures your availability, security. Being not perfect in those areas makes just a difference if you miss a block because of misconfiguration of unavailability of your nodes or expired KES → which would impact your ROA.
So again. The only way to get successful is to find delegation. But nobody is waiting for your Pool! So you need some strategy to market your pool.
If you’re interested in more details, I’m just about publishing an article which tells more on this topic. Will link it here when I’m done with it.
Simply put, as long as your pool has less than multiple millions of active stake the 340 ada mandatory minimum fees will weight down a lot on the delegator returns. All other factors are not really significantly relevant. This results in about 35% less annual return for delegators who delegate to small pools.
You might want to also check my post about this same subject:
Just finished the article which I mentioned above.
Will need to tune it a little with some charts and images to make it look better. Currently it’s a lot of text
