[Pool Update] Epoch 242 & 243

Hey people!

Combined Pool Update for Epoch 242 and 243 today. First and foremost, thank you for your continued support and the trust you have placed in this pool. The payoff for you came the last few epochs with a great average 6-epoch ROA of ~7.1%.

Hardware Upgrades

I recently did another pool update: As I already told you I moved to new servers some time ago but I wasn’t 100% satisfied.
The performance of the servers is great but I thought another relay at another provider as well as another country makes sense for the decentralization and the reliability of the pool.

So that is exactly what I added: Third relay is online and running for over a week now and is also registered on the chain. So its now also visible for everybody. You can check it out at the “About” tab in Adapools.

A nice side effect of the new relay is the reduced propagation time, which has been rather high lately and has improved significantly with the additional relay. This change is currently not yet reflected by the explorers, as this calculation takes some time / blocks.

I’m thinking a lot about the future and how we can contribute to dezentralization even more. I do not want to give up hosting servers at a state-of-the-art data center with all its advantages like high performance and high reliability but also do not want to depend on its (extremely unlikely) failure. The step I have already taken is to have servers at different providers and in different countries. The next step is to build up another “small” home server, which will live at my location.

It will act as a backup if everything else fails (which is highly unlikely but nothing is impossible). I’m currently looking into building an efficient and environment friendly solution for this. It adds some cost but I think its a good way to diversify between full bare metal hardware and data center servers, so its kind of the hybrid way. Hope you like it 😉

Hardware wallet Pledge & Pledge increase

As promised every rewards earned will be reinvested into the pool and everything that is left will be pledged. I’m happy to announce that I will increase the pledge of the pool again in the next few epochs.

Recently, the cardano-hw-cli and a new Ledger firmware was released. The cardano-hw-cli is a software with which it is now possible to use a hardware wallet for pledge and rewards. This means that these funds will be much better protected against theft and misuse in the future. Of course I will use this possibility and I have already taken the necessary preparations.

You can see this by the fact that the pool now has two owners. I have control over these two wallets, one of them is the old pool wallet and the new owner is the hardware wallet.
This is what will happen: the funds of the old wallet including rewards will be completely transferred to the new wallet. So there will be a withdraw of the previous rewards but this will have no further consequences. Once I did the according transactions you’ll be able to track them via the blockchain.

Fund2 Voting Results

The counting is finished and the results are now available. 250.000$ were distributed to 11 projects to implement their proposals. Those are the winning proposals:

  • PoolTool platform upgrade
  • Ouroboros over RINA
  • Haskell/Plutus/Marlowe education
  • Create a message-signing standard
  • Liqwid: Cardano lending markets for decentralized finance
  • Cardano for mobile DApp developers
  • GimbaLabs – starter kits and tools
  • Lovelace Academy for Marlowe and Plutus
  • Sign Tx Arduino
  • Pet Registry DApp with ₳Pay
  • Japan Cardano Governance Association

Take a look at this IOHK blog post for more information about project catalyst and some more information about the mentioned projects: Project Catalyst – the first winning proposals

And for even more Project Catalys information check out the Project Catalyst Dashboard – Cardano Governance – by Daniel Ribar which is a great source of information.

Performance for 241

|======================================================================================|
| Leader | Ideal | Luck    | Adopted | Confirmed | Missed | Ghosted | Stolen | Invalid |
|======================================================================================|
| 3      | 2.85  | 105.26% | 3       | 3         | 0      | 0       | 0      | 0       |
|======================================================================================|

In epoch 241 three blocks were assigned to the pool and all of those three blocks were produced successfully (100% assigned performance). In relation to the statistical estimation of 2.85 blocks we are at a luck of ~105%.

Leader Schedule for 242

|============================================================================|
| # | Status    | Block   | Slot     | SlotInEpoch | Scheduled At            |
|============================================================================|
| 1 | leader    | -       | 19187878 | 7078        | 2021-01-15 23:42:49 UTC |
| 2 | leader    | -       | 19266125 | 85325       | 2021-01-16 21:26:56 UTC |
| 3 | leader    | -       | 19381764 | 200964      | 2021-01-18 05:34:15 UTC |
| 4 | leader    | -       | 19539651 | 358851      | 2021-01-20 01:25:42 UTC |
| 5 | leader    | -       | 19549272 | 368472      | 2021-01-20 04:06:03 UTC |
|============================================================================|

In epoch 242 there are five blocks assigned to us which is over the estimation of 3.44 blocks thus leaves us again at a luck of over 100%, specifically at about 145%, which means that we will see very good rewards for this epoch.

Leader Schedule for 243

|=======================================================================|
| # | Status | Block | Slot     | SlotInEpoch | Scheduled At            |
|=======================================================================|
| 1 | leader | -     | 19651555 | 38755       | 2021-01-21 08:30:46 UTC |
| 2 | leader | -     | 19763163 | 150363      | 2021-01-22 15:30:54 UTC |
| 3 | leader | -     | 19844956 | 232156      | 2021-01-23 14:14:07 UTC |
| 4 | leader | -     | 19989141 | 376341      | 2021-01-25 06:17:12 UTC |
|=======================================================================|

In epoch 243 we are heading for four blocks. With an estimate of 3.64 blocks this leaves us at 109% luck.

That’s all I have for you today, thank you for reading and your interest. As always: Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or just want to chat. Talk to you soon! 🙂