Positive Externalities and Choosing a Stake Pool

English General Discussions
#1

I just had an idea, but please let me know if this already exists somewhere. If not, can someone please build it?

Ranked/random/grouped lists of stake pools based on contributions or charitable causes made off chain.

I know Charles has talked about making your stake pool competitive based on your pools contributions to the Cardano ecosystem or other philanthropic/charitable endeavours. I also realize many stake pool operators are focused simply on making a profit/return, and that’s ok, while many others are publishing their various contributions, either through direct funding with Ada, or simply their time and efforts. There are some great Websites like pooltool.io, adapools.org etc which are great for ranking pools based on the on-chain metrics and ROA/ROI etc, but were does a delegator go when they wish to delegate with an intent to contribute to a worthy cause.

I know most pools have a website that explains their mission, but I’m imaging a list of charitable/mission oriented pools where one can scan through the various different pools, and quickly find a pool to delegate to based on the more altruistic purpose of that pool. (for example, https://kindstakepool.com/cardano-pool-giving-back-to-charity/ )

It may be too early to ask for on chain verification of donations at this point, and perhaps some trust is required that the pool operators are actually making the donations claimed… but that will eventually evolve.

With thousands of pools and growing, we need more development around how to delegate with purpose. As the total return on your stake will often not be significantly different from one pool to the next over a longer period of time, it seems to me that there is opportunity to shift focus from return on your stake, to the outcome or greater purpose of your stake. Investing with purpose.

3 Likes
[BAM] Bamboo pool - donating to ecologi.com to plant trees and become carbon positive
#2

Great idea! I eventually would like to get my own pool going but I would be happy if someone started something where I could list my NP:

(Australian donations tax deductible).

1 Like
#3

Interesting project (a little strange, but cool) I noticed your project accepts crypto donations, but not ada? Why don’t you accept Ada donations?

1 Like
#4

Great idea! - I haven’t changed that list for ages . .

1 Like
#5

I don’t understand the purpose of the post here. You want someone else to build a large resource cataloging pools by mentions of charitable donations. This would involve manually going through thousands of unverified statements on websites and YouTube videos from pool operators on top of creating a meaningful tracking of the pool performance along multiple metrics.

Why build a third tool? It seems like a very straight forward way would be to contact the people who are already creating the lists over at pooltools and adapools. The odds of a random person here going away to do hundreds of hours of work setting up a third list or self organising a collab with existing list providers seems very low.

My aim isn’t to be insulting or reject your idea, but I did want to suggest a more practical route of communication and why this has not already been done. Even volunteering your own time to an existing project, if they were willing to host this type of information on their site, could be an incentive for them to include this type of information. Maintaining this information would also be a significant ongoing task.

Perhaps adapools or whomever could be encouraged to create a self editing section where SPOs could add data about themselves in a few fields including a summary and charity textbox could work, but setting up some kind of login and having some means of verifying the person to their pool would be very tough, not every spo has a website or email address publicly listed anywhere. Not to mention even setting up a place for logins and limited editing access would be a lot of work for them, but is a possible suggestion and very likely something they have already thought about trying with similar issues to the one I just raised about not knowing who controls which pool.

1 Like
#6

Agreed, I didn’t put much thought into the implementation, I was just throwing out the idea. An additional column on the spreadsheets supplied by pooltools or adapools with a brief description of their mission/purpose would be perfect. Many pools try to name their ticker in such a way to represent their ethos, but having a few more words in a column on the spreadsheet would allow one to quickly scan through a thousand different mission statements to find a cause they want to support.

1 Like
#7

Found this! https://missiondrivenpools.org/

3 Likes
#8

Mission Driven Pools (MDP) is a collective of mission based Cardano stake pool operators with a lot charitable projects ongoing

check our site:

https://missiondrivenpools.org/

Cheers

4 Likes