Stake pool- profit potential as a business

What is the profit potential of a stake pool as a business venture from an early adopter perspective?
Has anyone constructed a sample business plan and is willing to share it?
Relevent statistics and graphs are welcome
Let’s start a discussion! If there is a good profit potential it might be wise to get in on the ground floor, maybe band together.
I’d also like to lead a thread from this topic to one on voting, specifically on incentives towards delegating
your voting rights to a stake pool

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  • Will join a stake pool
  • Will run a stake pool
  • Need more information
  • Interest in partnership for a stake pool

0 voters

I partnership seems good too …

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I would also be interested in finding out about the idea of a partnership. Not something I have thought about.

I would appreciate any feedback on this possibility. Thank you

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Count me in as one who is interested in a partnership.

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I still haven’t fully educated myself on how to do staking, but the concept of a business venture intrigues me very much. I’m curious what all the details to that would include and what kind of capital would be required for such an effort.

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A partnership interests me as well

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I am also interested in partnership

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@SeanAlimov what kind of fire have you started here? Lol!
I suppose the stake pools could generate some profits as an incentive to operate one, but would the investment outweigh traditional options available? I think in the next few years it is possible that all crypto experiences the volatility that it has in the last year several times over and over again, with this in mind is investment in a stake pool going to be worth someones time and investment? If someone is interested in securing the network then running a stake pool makes complete sense, but if they are in it for the sake of profit it seems like it is risky business, just my opinion ofc.
Hopefully the stake pools will not all be profit driven but started by people that are interested in securing the network they have invested in, I would like to see some stand alone servers of die hard cardano fans running that are independent of the cloud based data farms that are all in some way tied back into the centralized infrastructure that inspired the birth of decentralized solutions, hopefully some of the people interested in the profitable side of pools will decide to take this approach.
Hopefully some of the people posting to this thread dare to operate a standalone server to ensure network security.
Hope you all the best!

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Since I will run a stake pool on https://www.adatainment.com I’m wondering what would a partnership look like?

I wonder how much are staking rewards.If its worth i will stake and be happy of low risk /some reward .Because i want to hold long term.But 10% annually would be nice dont know if i would join for less.

To be honest it is unclear to me what staking would entail. Does it mean having a server on 24/7? Who and for how many hours will the “staker” need to be available for staking? What will it make to be considered an A+ staking pool? Would it be better to have a few servers spread out in different time zones from the partnership so staking is non stop and staking responsibility is spread out. Would there be different type of partners where some can provide money and others provide time to do the staking. This would reduce the risk, instead of going all in. The proposition of a partnership is very interesting but complex. Despite this I am still very interested.

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Oh wow! I do not mean to sound rude in any way but you have much to catch up on it appears, luckily many of the staking threads here can answer questions for you.
Most of the details are not complete so I am reluctant to comment with surety as to what a staking pool should follow to gain an A+ rating, yet I imagine to gain the highest possible reward it would need to operate 24/7 so that if called upon to validate transactions it would be available.

I imagine that there will be something like this, it could come with some risk but it would make sense for large ada holders to secure the network and if they partner with someone that has the expertise to manage an efficient staking node then it could be beneficial to both parties.

I have seen comments that someone could delegate ada to several different known pools to reduce risk, I like this approach also cause it supports the network in a distributed fashion and “not putting all eggs in one basket” or as you say “all in”.

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Sounds like I need to catch up. Thank you

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You have time for it, no worries man!

As I understand it the pool operator (+ partners if any) will need to have and commit a large amount of their own coins. I got the impression they either need to be whales themselves, or be able to somehow get that amount together. Sorry for uncertainty, maybe someone who’s clearer on this will come along.

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I need to collect more information, but surely I’m interested into this matter

NOTE: I wrote this whole thing up thinking that adatracker.com said 1,200,000 Ada, but it seriously says just 1,200 Ada. If that’s true this is a complete waste of time, but who knows what it’s going to be like in the future so enjoy the read based on 1,200,000 Ada.

The question of running a pool as a business really got me thinking so I went and read up on staking and tried to hammer out the numbers. Obviously this is all guess work and since I’m new to this I might have made a few mistakes so feel free to correct me if you see an error. I’m trying to do this to help myself and everyone understand what we can possibly expect from staking on a large scale.

According to adatracker.com we’ve been averaging about 1,200,000 Ada in fees per epoch since epoch 50. I assume that the fees is what is then given out as rewards. I know ideally this number will drastically increase as Ada gains users, but for now I’m going to use these numbers.

I’m going to use the estimated number of staking pools (100 pools) supplied by IOHK for this example. That means that as a staking pool you can only get 1% (1/100 pools) of the total reward in an epoch which is 12,000 Ada in this case. Additionally let’s assume that happens for every epoch for the year which I believe there are 73 of them. This means by the end of the year you have been rewarded 876,000 Ada. At current price the equates to roughly $43,000 on the year. Don’t forget that this has to be given back out to individual members of the pool and you take a small percentage for your “service” of hosting the pool. I think all of us are banking on the value of Ada going up so if it was at $1 then that 876,000 of rewarded Ada would look real nice. The question is how much do you get to keep for your “service” as the host. We need to calculate the initial amount of staked Ada and estimated your charge fee.

Let’s say that you are getting 4% annual returns (I hear this estimated value, but it’s a guess at this moment) from your staking so you would need to stake 21,900,000 Ada in order to be rewarded 876,000 Ada on the year. So let’s say that your fee is 0.5%. I have no idea if this value is realistically competitive, but that means your charging rate would reap you 109,500 Ada for the year. At current price that isn’t worth much (about $5400), but if the price of Ada were say $1 again then you would have gained $109,500 for hosting.

Now let’s take a look at how realistic is it to achieve these numbers. Let’s say each person that is in your pool is staking 25,000 Ada on average so you would have to have 876 people in your pool. I think both of those values are reasonable. I think there are going to be enough people who have enough Ada to fill your pool if it grows. This current example assumes that there are roughly 87,600 people that will be participating across all the pools. Again I think this is a fair number and as Ada’s popularity grows there will likely be more than enough Ada and people available to stake.

To me the biggest hurdles in the idea of hosting a staking pool are the following:

  • Amount of rewards available per epoch since you can only obtain a certain percentage of the overall rewards per epoch based on the number of participating pools.
  • Expected annual percentage return from staking. No solid expected number has been given to us as far as I know. It’s going to be tough to charge 0.5% if you’re only getting a 2% annual return.
  • The value of Ada. This could make or break the success of trying to host a pool regardless of how many rewards you’re getting overall. At current price it looks as if it’s not worth the trouble, but if the value of Ada increases as hoped for it could be huge.

This is just a high level perspective that gives some finer details and there are a lot of gaps to fill in if you actually tried to do this, but based on this it appears that it certainly could be profitable given ideal circumstances.

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I’m still reading your post but I have a comment on this point, there’s about 20billion Ada that’s locked up that will be distributed as incentives for staking. Every year the reward percentage will gradually decrease. The fees that are collected are funds for the treasury that we as a community will get to vote on how to spend, it’s a way of future proofing the platform. I suppose once the initial 20billion is distributed as incentives, we would switch to fees to propel the network but that’s at least a decade away.

Duhh! I knew that and completely forgot about it. I get too deep into the numbers sometimes and forgot the basics. Anyways this mistake changes things greatly for the better. I wrote a quick script that allows me to just “plug” in the numbers so if that 1,200,000 value were to change to be something more like 6,000,000 or 28,000,000 I should be able to quickly calculate the output values that I supplied in this post.

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