Dear Cardano community,
We are aware of and reacting to the issue that many of you have raised regarding a significant increase in pool fees from one of the stake pools we are currently delegating to. Thank you to everyone who brought this to our attention, it’s great to see the community response.
I would not worry too much about it, every country has its share of bad apples. Everyone here knows you are one of the good ones!
Thank you for noticing community concern regarding the significant increase in pool fees. If I read their statement, all the delegators (which they claim it is their family and friends) are all agree of what they do. I think they forgot to ask 1 delegator which is the biggest of the delegator (Cardano Foundation). Now, the one that lost most of the reward is Cardano Foundation. I think it’s up to Cardano Foundation if you are willing to donate all your reward to the SPO, or like other common delegator, just leave the pool and choose another pool with decent fee.
Thank you @Cardano-Foundation for listening community voice
I think you should change the whole program.
Years ago having 25,000 wasn’t big deal, today it is. Most of countries in the world cannot make 25,000 dollars a year, remember that, including Southern Europe for example.
Second, you should consider spreading the amount delegated to more pools, 15M ada today its a huge amount and won’t be needed because we know with only 1M its possible mining a block every other epoch.
I do think that only 100 pools to be selected isn’t enough, we have 1700 pools now that are single operated, you could easily spread around at least more than 600 pools the amount you have and everybody would be ok with that.
Things are different, ADA challenges 2 dollar per coin, that way 25,000 represents in near future 50,000 dollars. In my country nobody have this yearly salary.
Because of this rule there are chances that my pool or any other pool to not receive the delegation
@Cardano-Foundation None of the pools in the last delegation have a 0% margin. Are pools with a 0% margin not eligible or is this just a coincidence?
You’re continually posting this same sentiment, but still failing to understand what proof of stake is.
The network doesn’t care how much an ADA costs or how much money you do or don’t have. All that matters is the amount of Ada you have compared to all ADA.
It is insane to give 15 mil stake to a pool with only 25k of their own. CF delegation represents an irrational delegation strategy. You’re begging to make it even more irrational.
With the amount of stake you have you should be delegating, not running a pool. Begging for everybody to ignore proof of stake is a horrible business model.
You should make money delegating, not lose money operating a poorly run pool (judging by your technical questions on this forum).
This is honest to goodness advice.
thats why they should reduce the amount delegated, I agree the amount is too much, but asking somebody in some country to start a pool with more than 30 thousand dollars, more than one full year gross of year income of any qualified professional?
you are closing the opportunity only for rich people and make zero sense to me.
one can start a pool small like 2,500 ADA and increase overtime, if they can mine blocks eventually delegators will be interested.
there’s no reason to deny them the opportunity. thats my point and technically speaking there’s zero difference between big pool and small pool, we all run the same client there’s no trust involved in this relationship.
my current country the average year income GROSS is 33,400 Dollars year, are you telling me somebody must stay a full year without eating paying rents and living? thats ridiculous. When they created this program maybe 25,000 wasn’t much money but today’s money is.
Unless you only wants rich business involved in this thing what’s ridiculous they should lower the criteria and spread around these 1700 independent pools we have.
I won’t ever change my opinion there are no reasonable explanation you can give me for this riches club coexist with Cardano mission.
this is just a reminder on how wrong you are. just 3K ADA in pledge but has enough stake delegations to keep mining and running
As a SPO who has had a CF delegation without any increase of delegation I can say 100% this isn’t about them wanting to grow small pools. They want to mint blocks and move along whilst “looking good” for the community. This isn’t about fairness or decentralization. This system isn’t actually decentralized. When the ranking system only is rated by size and all the top ranks are multi pool operators, where does decentralization really come into play? We need multi pool delegation and a ranking system that is weighted properly to show performance. Example our pool COSD has a ROA of 5.7% myself as a delegate I have a lifetime ROA of over 6% yet because (even with the CF delegation) we are buried in the ranks. With around 240 produced blocks. Its mind boggling that this is happening. All under the guise of decentralization and fairness to the people. I’ve been involved with Cardano since 2017 and love them a lot for many reasons but this part of it stings a little. COSD has an approved CIP written by Robert Phair and two heads from Emurgo. I urge all SPOs to read through this and understand that it is the most important CIP to implement into our system; and to also understand why they don’t want to.
Banned forever. 
noicee mate
It was a wish - not a confirmation 
In the CIP Editors Meeting on 23 February 2021, both CF Technical Project Manager @Frederic and IOG chief technical architect Duncan Coutts agreed upon and planned to address this issue. They seemed enthusiastic about it at the time but I haven’t heard of any progress made about the issue after about 2½ months, so I hope they will respond here or in a new thread.
We were discussing the issue that I commented upon here, regarding @shawnim’s earlier proposal to mitigate the problem by (I’m greatly simplifying here) crediting pool performance somewhat towards pool ranking, instead of ranking mainly by size. Even though that proposal has gone by the wayside, this issue is still being discussed, and needs to be discussed more. I was at this meeting to represent another CIP but was invited to speak on this issue based on this comment:
https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pull/21#issuecomment-783139851
It should be a relief to all the small SPOs, excluded from pool rankings no matter what their rewards, to hear Duncan confirm the reason for that exclusion and that it’s not the goal of the developers but a consequence of the design parameters that they were given: i.e. to very sharply limit delegated stake to K saturated pools and leave all other pools with nothing but their pledge (I’m “R” and “Robert” in this discussion, not fully credited in the meeting roster):
As recorded in these minutes, Duncan @ IOG says:
To get the full resolution from that meeting, we have to go to this video… since from there on, the minutes only mention “flag to researchers” and there the trail stops. Below is a partial transcript of the discussion summarised above plus the emerging plan to discuss this issue with researchers and develop an updated CIP to document and correct this issue:
Today, I believe there has been no progress about this issue because no new pull requests have been submitted that meet this description (anyone interested can subscribe to this feed on Github):
https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pulls
As I’ve said before on this forum, I think the Cardano Foundation support of small pools is extraordinary. The main reason our inclusion in the CF’s pilot delegation group in October 2020 left us back where we started, as it has done for most other small pools, is that the delegations were only done for 4 epochs.
Conclusion: If a 15 million ada delegation were to return to us for a period of 3 months it might well be enough to assure our pool’s viability… and it well might not, as long the problem of the K-pool all-or-nothing Nash Equilibrium remains a core component of Cardano’s design principles.
A provocative statement: @Cardano-Foundation With current ADA price levels, your delegation methodology creates a strong incentive against co-operation. As a result, we have 2000+ pools that are nearly useless to delegators.
How so?
ADA holders can co-operate to contribute to the PoS system in one of two ways:
Both approaches can result in pools having enough funds (delegations+pledge) to mint blocks more or less regularly, at least once every other epoch.
In practice we see a lot of (1) and very little of (2). Instead, there are hundreds or even thousands of pools with very little pledge and only a few delegators, even though these pools can’t generate consistent rewards for their owners. This means that there are many, many SPOs with not enough funds to regularly mint blocks who nevertheless choose to neither delegate nor pool their money with others in order to fund an attractive pool.
In other words, even small ADA holders deem it more attractive to become solo pool owners than to cooperate in one of the ways mentioned above.
Indeed, the current delegation programs by @Cardano-Foundation and IOG strongly incentivise such behaviour and I wonder if this is by intention and if not, how we could improve upon the program.
An illustrative example: Suppose I own 25’000 ADA. By delegating, I can expect to receive 1’250 ADA per year if the average RoS is 4.5%.
If I create my own pool instead and put the money as pledge, I would expect to mint a block every 40 epochs on average. One single block reward amounts to currently ~700 ADA, so the expected annual return would be about the same as with delegation.
So why bother with running a pool? Because I also would be able to participate in a lottery for which the ticket costs nothing and the chances of winning are substantial. The @Cardano-Foundation delegation program is such a lottery. Suppose there are 1’000 eligible pools, 50 of which are chosen every three months to get a 15M delegation, so the chance for a pool to win the lottery is a whopping 20% every year.
How much is the prize? Well, for a pool with 1% margin the expected value would be 20% * 15M * 4.5% * 1% = 1’350 ADA.
This means that, thanks to the CF delegation program only, running a pool can yield more than twice as much per year for an investment of 25’000 ADA than by just delegating the same amount.
Not only that, a pool with 15M stake will advance in the rankings and attract more delegators than a small pool, increasing the profits even more.
I argue that this is the main reason why there are 2000 out of 2600 pools with 100k pledge or less. Does that pose a problem to the stability of the network? I’m not competent to judge that. However, what I can say with confidence is that running a lottery and handing out free tickets is probably not the best use of @Cardano-Foundation’s resources.
So, assuming the Foundation agrees with my reasoning, what can be done about it if the goal remains to promote a healthy, diverse SPO community from which nobody is excluded because they can’t afford a high pledge?
One option would be for the CF to delegate pledge instead of stake. Instead of being delegator, the Foundation would become temporary co-owner of the pool and be entitled to the full pool reward times their proportion of the total pledge. An SPO using this instrument would thus have to pay a price in terms of a portion of the pool rewards.
Example1: SPO pledges 25’000, CF pledges 15’000’000. Then, CF would be entitled to 99.8% of the pool rewards.
Example 2: SPO pledges 1’000’000 , CF pledges 1’000’000. In this case the rewards would be shared evenly between the two.
A variant of this could be for the CF to set a policy that they would pledge a maximum of, say, 75% of the total. So, if someone runs a pool with only 25’000, the CF could add another 75’000 to that pledge, but not more. This would encourage SPOs to cooperate by pooling their pledge in order to get more external pledge from the CF.
Some SPOs might object and say “But what about my costs? I have to do marketing”, to which I would respond that no, you don’t. Money spent on pool marketing is wasted money. Any pool with sufficient pledge and reasonable fees will attract delegators. You only need marketing if you wish to set your pool apart from countless other, equally unattractive pools. If you cooperate with others, however, everybody would win.
It is a common misconception that pool rewards should be split to the same ratio as pledge contribution of each owner in a multi-owner pool.
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Good day!
By only having passed all this criteria, a stakepool will automatically be included in rondomize selection?
Or an application will be required?
Thanks in advance !
Kudos to Cardano Foundation, Frederick Gregaard, and Hinrich Pfeifer
Early adopters helped build the network. They risked everything to bring this plan to life. I don’t see why those who saw the vision and acted should not be rewarded for that. Sorry…
People can always delegate and grow their ADA. They can develop on the network. They can build a Stake Pool and find investors to share the price burden. The reason for the increase protects the network from bad actors. As price goes up more and more will try to attack the network. So actions must be made to secure it. Increasing pledge is one of those actions.
Edit: Forgot to add it as a reply.
I can see where you’re coming from, a bit exagerated but sure, early investors had an advantage and that’s playing out, most early SPOs have successful pools. And I do agree, the higher the prices the more bad actors will be attracted to the network… But bad actors get advantage by having less competition, e.g. less pools minting blocks.
The idea of this program is to make more pools mint blocks, so delegation will be as distributed as possible, making it nearly impossible to most won’t protect the network. Bad actors most likely already have the capital to make their pools mint blocks.
Thank you. As the ADA price goes up, this criteria discriminates against heavy investors that have less ADA in quantity but at the same value as earlier investors. Is it intentional to make it hard for new community participants to share in these opps?
If I paid average of 1.50 fiat per ADA for 5000 units, I have significant stake at risk to pledge.
Someone else bought at .40 fiat per unit for 5000 and has far less local fiat at risk.
This diminishes the meaning of their pledge and stake, yet they have greater chance of getting SPO work offered.
Why? What am I missing? They are a riskier member of the community. Thank you!
