[Pool Update] Epoch 356 โ€“ 367

Hi people! ๐Ÿ™‚

Let’s take a brief look at what’s currently going on in the Cardano Ecosystem and some Updates about the pool.

New Status Page

Since I was not 100% satisfied with the old status page, I have now switched to a new provider. You can now check the current pool status on https://fairpool.statuspage.io/. This page is always available even if the pool website is down. We are currently monitoring the status of the following components:

  • Website
  • Producer
  • Relay01 – Germany
  • Relay02 – Austria
  • Relay03 – Finland
  • Relay04 – United States
  • Cardano Submit API
  • Monitoring

You can see the current status of those components as well as the historical data. You will also find updates about current incidents or maintenance. So this is the first place to go if you suspect a problem. If an incident or maintenance event has already been reported here, work is already underway to resolve the issues. If not, never hesitate to contact me.

Main Producer Server Upgrade

In the past few weeks we saw some missed slot leader checks popping up in our monitoring. To explain: The producer has to check every slot (every second) if he is the leader for this slot and then produce a corresponding block. So if the producer misses a slot leader check, he would also not produce the corresponding block if he is the leader for the missed slot.

Of course, we absolutely want to avoid that. We have used servers based on AMD Epyc 7702P so far. This CPU has a very high core count, but does not offer a high CPU clock. Since the Cardano node cannot currently exploit the full potential of many cores, we switched to a server with an Intel Xeon 2356G processor. This offers less cores but higher clock speeds of up to 5 GHz and thus provides the necessary computing power for the Cardano node. Since the migration, we have not seen any missed slot leader checks during the epochs. This is exactly what we wanted to achieve. Note: Due to the missed slot leader checks we did not miss any blocks!

FreeLoaderz PSPO

Good news for you: FAIR is part of the FreeLoaderz PSPO (Promotional Stake Pool Offering). We are already a participating pool in the FreeLoaderz Loadbalancer for quite some time. Check out [Pool Update] Epoch 323, 324, 325 & 326 for more information why you may use our enpoint to submit your transactions, how to use it and what FreeLoaderz is.

The FreeLoaderz PSPO means that you can claim FLZ (the FreeLoaderz Governance Token) in addition to your ADA rewards by just delegating to FAIR (or one of the other participating pools). Read through their short medium article about the PSPO to get all the important information: FreeLoaderz PSPO Medium Article

Note that you can claim FLZ every epoch or let them accumulate and claim them at the end of the PSPO (approximately in December). Besides FLZ you can also claim HOSKY and CSST every epoch (those do not accumulate).

Have fun with your tokens. For those who do not wish to participate: You do not need to claim anything or do anything. You won’t get randomly sent any tokens you do not want from FAIR ๐Ÿ™‚

New IOHK Blog posts

Introducing Ofelimos: a proof-of-useful-work consensus protocol

Ofelimos explained

Mithril proof of concept is now open-source

Input Output Globalโ€™s $4.5m blockchain research hub at Stanford University

Zk-SNARKs: updatable setups on the blockchain

Advancing digital identity through DID core specification

Vasil: what to expect

Cardano, 5 years on

Systematizing blockchain governance

Cardano360 September 2022

Happy 5th Birthday Cardano


Performance and assigned slots

EpochLeaderIdealLuckConfirmed LuckProducedConfirmedMissedGhostedStolenInvalid
3554439.66110.94%105.90%44420020
3563639.9190.2%85.19%36340110
3573940.0297.45%92.45%39370110
3583939.9997.52%95.02%39380100
3593341.2979.92%77.50%33320010
3604540.28111.72%109.24%45440010
3613744.7982.61%75.91%37340120
3625446.25116.76%114.59%54530010
3635246.25112.43%105.95%52490030
3645545.95119.7%117.52%55540100
3654844.74107.29%107.29%48480000
3663944.6987.27%78.31 %39350220
3674744.84104.82%

If we calculated the mean luck over the shown epochs we had a confirmed luck of ~97.08% while our assigned luck is ~101.15%. We saw quite some stolen and ghosted blocks. However, after the successful Vasil hardfork, some improvements are now active that also enhance the block propagation times. We should see significantly less height battles and therefore significantly less ghosted blocks in the future. This is not only good for the pool and rewards, but also for the overall network health.

If you have any questions, criticism or just want to talk donโ€™t hesitate to contact me (all contact details in the footer). Thatโ€™s all I have for you today! Talk to you soon ๐Ÿ™‚