Staking pool project

Awesome thanks for the info

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Hey @MegaWind,

From the site it sounds like you want to pursue this as a business venture, am I right on that point?
If so/otherwise - Did you have some particular business model in mind? Proportional dividends? Whales get improved terms etc.? Do you plan to run the pool business yourself?

What do you sell online and where are you based?
To be honest, I will probably start staking by myself then compare my numbers to yours to see if I have an advantage joining your pool. We will know soon enough

Hi @rin9s,
Yes, longer term I would treat it as a business venture - it would have to be to commit this level of high end equipment and security to it.

Short term I’m willing to do it at a loss to help Cardano since I believe in the project itself, and we already have significant network/computing resources available so it’s a good fit for how to contribute to the project. I’m a former software architect but I don’t know that I’m going to learn Haskell to contribute to the codebase lol.

As far as business model though - mostly we’ll just have to see how the staking terms are set next month for the Shelley release in order to determine what’s a win/win for both the pool(s) and the stakeholders.

Offhand, I could imagine a series of pools depending on a) size of stake and b)length of time stake is committed, with better terms for larger and longer stakeholders. And yes some form of proportional dividends would be a great option, it all just depends on what the staking rewards are which we won’t know until next month.

Anyway, exciting times for Cardano/Ada and looking forward to more developments as we get closer to Feb!

Hi @CosmosX,
We are a manufacturer and seller of lab grown gems including lab grown white and pink diamonds (for jewelry). Outside of Seattle, WA.

Re: staking yourself and comparing - absolutely.
If the pool has no net value add then it doesn’t make sense, and ultimately I can see it’s best if the Cardano network has both high speed pools and independent stakeholders b/c the diversity of nodes increases the robustness of the overall network.

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Great comeback @MegaWind, thx.
Overall business model presented succinctly, it will have to be dependent on stake size & time frame, and it’ll need to be worthwhile on some level for the folks running the servers.

I’m considering how to approach this but whether I start my own pool, or whether I will bring HW/Stake to some pool, I’m less interested in the profit side and more concerned with creating a federation of independent pools. Different pools, who could coordinate with regulation status and market reality. That’s why member pools will have to be totally independent on management / business entity side. The federation itself could handle all its limited responsibilities on a “peanut dividend” from the member pools.

Thoughts?

One more question - at this point would you find whales ( however ideological) or common folk (with an aim to have them delegate to you en masse) more attractive as pool members?
(Wonder if micro-payments could be an issue on the latter(?))

Hello everyone. We are planning to launch a staking pool as well.

I’ve spent quite some time researching the IOHK github projects, it seems that running a staking pool won’t be as trivial as running a random binary. There are potentially many different services to run. Also, running a staking pool is an ops challenge as uptime is critical. Currently there are absolutely no info about how delegation will work and I have no idea if clustering of different cardano nodes will be possible to offer HA.

That being said, whoever is thinking or working towards launching a staking pool I would love to get in touch.

Cheers

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Me too! Count me in, please!

I’m in.
Data Scientist and Python/Ruby Developer.

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I’m interested in learning more about Cardano’s staking nodes.

How can i create a staking pool? Is there a tutorial on that?

I just created a docker image for cardano-sl node, anyone can run a cardano-sl node via one command. Have a try here:grinning:.

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Do you know if I can run this node on a Docker on a NAS Synology DS716+II ? Thanks!

Absolutely ! I am running my node on a vps and its performance is not as good as your NAS.

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Define medium? 10K? 50K? more?

I would say that with the price going up, and Shelley release only in q2, i think that 50k would be considered “more than medium” - in the end this is to be a currency for the un-banked not just an impressive ROI for tier 1 country whale investors… Where will the 500 ada? 2000 ada? 5000 ada stakeholders stake? Any friendly pool doing anything for the community? We will try to gather here , at least 1000 people adafans . io/2018/01/14/first-ada-fans-meetup-barcelona-mid-september-2018/ :sunglasses:

Great! You don’t happen to have some instructions for setting up a node on Docker from a Synology by any chance? I found your node on the Registry list but I don’t know what is the execution command to enter in the Advanced settings/ Environment tab.

Exactly like on this Youtube link at 1:42 for Minergate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql4bnTNi9eM

The GUI is amazing, while I usually use CLI. AFAIK, you don’t need extra setting, just run and everything will be fine.:grinning:

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Hey Adafans,

Sorry you got flagged, probably for self promotion (really hard to understand where the commercial line here is…).

I think you’re right and that whales (not just 1st world either) pose the biggest threat to Cardano having any semblance to a democracy in how it’s run. The problem however is not the people, it’s the money. Some ordinary folk are greedy and egotistical, as are some whales, some folk are great. as are some whales.

I would go as far as a “No Whales Allowed” policy, where all are welcome, but there is a cap on an individual’s investment so that no one investor will carry the bulk of a pool’s stake and have too powerful a voting power.

Problem with that attitude is that the money is going to get to the pools anyway. What if we find ourselves in a position (which in the beginning we certainly will) where all that capital goes into whales’ pools holding all the ADA stake, and all the votes for Cardano’s future?

Yes, we must keep Cardano on track and make it democratized, but early on I think we have to have our own - “Non purely profit Driven” whales who believe in the project in order to compete. In the long term we should find a mechanism to separate “good stake” from “bad stake” and incentivise the exiting pools and their operators & investors to behave in a way that is beneficial for the project (and hopeful people in general).

Not a simple problem by any rate.

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Great feedback rin9s! Thank you! Sure the “whale” concept is a little abstract. Lets think about “big bag holders” like this - category I - ada fans that will hold cardano for long term (this is what you call a "good whale?) and cat II - ada holders that are in this just for profit - and fill sell at the right price and dont care about the community.
Both of them (by holding) lots of ada will do nothing to undermine its value … We also know from Charles’s last updated that cardano doesnt have “to many whales” and the distribution of “wealth” is rather balanced.

If this will be true when Shelley goes live - most likely that all whales and all groups of whales will create their own pools. The “dilemma” is - where will the small / medium holders stake? At a whales pool? Or can we “gather” 1000 Fans join and create a fan ruled pool + a community around it…

I see lots of “staking pool” cardano sites that pop up - but none of them is saying nothing about will they do for the community… is this ok? To make money from having a pool - and doing 0 for the community? Will Ada medium holders “fall” for this pools?

I would not call running a node and having a stake as well as being rewarded, however appropriate, is doing nothing for the community. First, you’ve parted with some $ for the stake, and second, while it may be a relatively small cost, you have to continuously maintain your node’s uptime/aliveness so the Cardano network can function optimally. Moreover, you may need to possibly expand these staking resources/nodes later on to handle more throughput, which means more cost to you.

There’s nothing wrong with making money while providing a service. The remuneration for any service is typically formed by demand and supply for such service, as is with anything else I suppose where money’s involved…