I’m interested in learning about staking as I’m very excited to support the Cardano ecosystem. I’d like to test out creating my own staking pool. Is there a way to create a pool for testing only (using not real Cardano tokens perhaps) so I can install what’s necessary on my server and test out how to run a Cardano Pool? Do I install a regular Cardano Pool and point it to Testing instead of Mainnet?
Also, would someone be willing to let me know what it takes regarding their approximate costs? I know that owning a Linux Server, electricity costs, monitoring (uptime) are all involved in running a reliable pool. I’m not into this to make a ton of Cardano but I would like to at least cover what I’ve put in and see what kind of rewards other receive when running a pool. I’ve watched this video and it appeared on a 100,000 tokens staked there could be a 30-40 thousand tokens earned for the stake pool owner. Is this video accurate?
Any advice you can provide me would be greatly appreciated.
Really appreciate you talking the time to respond to my post! I maybe able to leverage existing infrastructure to minimize costs on running a staling pool. But first I’ll connect to the Testnet for testing purposes before I dive deeper.
I’m curious about your comment about not earning 30K on a 100,000 stake? I didn’t think that the amount a stake pool owner put in mattered for how much they earn? Is there a relationship between how much a stake pool owner puts in compared to how much they can earn for running a pool? Or is it more related to delegates seeing a small stake by the owner and not trusting the pool to be a profitable pool?
To be able to create 1 block per epoch your pool should have a minimum 1,5M Ada delagated (perhaps a little bit more to be 100% sure that the pool will create the block; or maybe leas if you are lucky)
so… do the mate
1 block means ~ 1000 Ada or maybe less to be distributed to delegators
6x epoch per month x 12 months = 72 epochs per year
72x 1000 Ada = 72k Ada to be redistributed to delegators
Ofcourse you can create more blocks per one epoch but it will not happen again and again…
So let’s say 80k Ada if you are lucky… now do the math and find how much you will learn if you have 100k from 1,5M
Ofcourse your pool will take the cost per epoch (min 340 Ada)
That should be 72 x 340 = 24,489 but you need 1,5M delegated to your pool
Yikes! I don’t have much ADA to put into my own pool so I’ll have to rely on delegates giving my pool a chance to get to the minimum threshold to create a block and win some ADA for my pool delegates!
How do others running stake pools get their pools noticed so delegates join?
Is there a limit to how many pools Cardano can have or want to have?
Nope, there ia not a limit of pools, as many possible… if you are doing a great job with your pool, delegators will came to your pool ( your pool must be active on media space eg yt, twitter,etc)
Really appreciate your input @Alexd1985. You seem very knowledgeable about pools. Do you run a pool? Do you mind if I ask how much you have staked in your pool and if it’s profitable for you to run to cover your costs yet?
Yes, I’m running CHRTY pool, Charity pool;
For the momment it’s not profitable, the hard part it’s to find delegators to supoort us… but maybe with time… they will came… they should understand that small pools are making part of decentralization…
I apologize for the delay in responding. Thank you for your continued sharing of information with me. Congratulations on running your own pool and I wish you well and success as your pool grows! I’m still very new to Cardano and staking so I do hope that in the future Cardano will assist little pools like yours and mine in being successful. I don’t have much ADA and will be staking roughly what you’ve started with. Hopefully with time, marketing and uptime success delegates will take a chance on our pools and help us support the Cardano network.
