Hey people,
I’ve just been watching the transition from epoch 211 to epoch 212 and I can tell you that I’m always excited when I think about how Cardano is currently doing, how well the community is holding together and how we are on track to permanently change our future. I would like to seize the opportunity to recapitulate the last epoch 211 and to give a short outlook on epoch 212.
The less pleasant news first. Unfortunately, the pool did not produce a block in epoch 211 despite a promising stake. In this regard I have to state the following: The pool was online the entire epoch with no downtime and no technical problems whatsoever. In epoch 211, 2160 blocks of community pools could theoretically be produced with parameter d = 0.9. With a total stake of about 10B ADA the following calculation results: 10B / 2160 = 4.62M, which means that a pool needs an average of 4.62M stake to produce one block. Unfortunately, a little luck is also necessary. But we did not have this luck this epoch. This also means that we will not receive any rewards for this epoch. I was hoping to reward you for your stake until the last block and I am honestly a bit disappointed that it didn’t work out.
But let’s talk about the better news: The pool has handled the epoch transition flawlessly. Some other pool operators had some problems here, but these will be solved with future updates of the software and we will get an even more stable network. Another positive aspect is that even very small pools were lucky in the slot lottery of epoch 211. The smallest pool had a stake of only 20.2k and still had the enormous luck to produce a block. And you know what, I think that’s great! Because it shows that all SPOs have the chance to participate in the network and that even the smallest pool helps to stabilize and decentralize the network. In total, over 250 different pools have produced blocks, which is a lot considering that only about 10% of the blocks in Epoch 211 were produced by the community.
Let’s take a look at epoch 212: At the beginning of this epoch d was reduced to 0.8, which means that the community will produce twice as many blocks as before, around 4320. The total stake at the beginning of the epoch was around 12.76B according to the same calculation as before a pool needs about 2.95M stake to produce one block. The active stake of this pool is 7.37M. We should therefore have again a quite good chance to produce one or more blocks. One more thing about the rewards, as long as d >= 0.8, all pools will receive full rewards depending on the percentage of their stake of the total staked ADA. So it makes no difference if the pool produces 1 or 10 blocks, the rewards remain the same. This will change once d is < 0.8.
Last but not least I would like to thank all of you for delegating your stake to this pool and thus placing your trust in us. With your decision to delegate to a rather small pool you actively support the development and decentralization of the network. No matter what happens in this epoch, I assure you that this pool will remain, I will continue to actively participate in the community and will be available with all means and knowledge to further advance Cardano.
Hope you’re staying with us! Talk to you soon 🙂