Time for a pool update again, although it will be a short one, as there is not much to report. As always let’s start with the IOHK Blog posts published since the last pool update!
First pool Update of 2023. I hope all of you got into the new year happy and healthy!
Last year was tough for many people. The world is slithering from one catastrophe to the next and many can not find adequate relaxation. Especially when looking back at such years, it is nevertheless important to practice gratitude and to realize what is really important for you in life. What are my goals? What have I achieved? What am I grateful for? How can I make the world a better place?
Only when each of us makes a contribution, how small it may be, can we move forward as a human society. There is a division between people in many parts of the world. I think it would do everyone good to be respectful, compassionate and kind to each other, to be generous and give back, to listen to each other, to try to understand other views and opinions and not just surround yourself with people who have the same opinion as you. Take care of yourself, your environment and your fellow human beings. For a hopefully more peaceful future and a planet on which we can still live in the future.
I would also like to thank each and every delegator who supports this pool. FAIR is still a single pool and independent of any commitments to any entities. I am there to provide the best possible service to the network and the delegators. FAIR focuses on the technical and operational aspects, there is not much marketing here nor am I a big influencer. You guys are great and make the operation of this pool possible. Once again, every effort will be made to maintain the decentralization of the network and to ensure an all-time stable and proper operation of the pool.
Now as always, let’s take a short look at the IOG Blog post since our last pool update.
Looking back at those past few epochs we generally saw a pretty good performance. There weren’t overly many lost battles and our overall luck was also fine. Epoch 384 was a quite bad epoch with only 38 Slots assigned and in addition to that one ghosted and two stolen blocks. Epoch 386 on the other hand was a fantastic epoch with 73 produced blocks out of 73 assigned slots. The highest number of blocks FAIR ever produced in one epoch. But wait in Epoch 387 there are even more slots assigned (78). So the chances are not bad to break our previous blocks per epoch record again.
Big thanks again to all delegators and a warm welcome to all the new delegators that joined the pool recently. All of you are making the operation of this pool possible. Please contact me if you have any questions.
Below are the new blog posts since the last pool update and of course the detailed performance of the last epochs. Apart from that, there is not much to report. The pool is running reliable and performant and there weren’t any issues. You can always check out the pools health status here: https://fairpool.statuspage.io/
As you can see, we had some lucky epochs lately. The overall luck of the above epochs is around 111.9% and we did not lose many blocks due to slot or height battles either. The ROA is therefor also very good. Epoch 378 is also looking great with an assigned luck of 137.95%.
If you have any questions or just want to talk, I always have an open ear for you just write me on any of the available channels in the footer.
That’s all I have for you today. Talk to you soon! 🙂
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 🙂
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 don’t hesitate to contact me (all contact details in the footer). That’s all I have for you today! Talk to you soon 🙂
It’s a bit quieter here at the moment, but you can be sure that everything is going on as usual in the background. Cardano doesn’t stop, the development doesn’t stop and the innovations don’t stop. So let us start with the new IOHK blog posts since the last pool update and then we take a brief overview over the performance of the pool.
In this video Polina Vinogradova, IOG’s research engineer walks us through the Babel Fees – a novel mechanism that allows the payment of transaction fees in user-defined tokens on Cardano.
Chief Scientist of IOG Aggelos Kiayias breaks down new advances in the Ouroboros consensus algorithm.
Performance and assigned slots
Epoch
Leader
Ideal
Luck
Confirmed Luck
Produced
Confirmed
Missed
Ghosted
Stolen
Invalid
344
38
39.23
96.86%
91.77%
38
36
0
1
1
0
345
34
38.8
87.63%
87.63%
34
34
0
0
0
0
346
49
38.84
126.16%
121.01%
49
47
0
1
1
0
347
35
38.64
90.58%
87.99%
35
34
0
0
1
0
348
31
38.78
79.94%
77.36%
31
30
0
0
1
0
349
31
39.02
79.45%
79.45%
31
31
0
0
0
0
350
41
39.51
103.77%
103.77%
41
41
0
0
0
0
351
52
39.59
131.35%
118.72%
52
47
0
3
2
0
352
48
39.59
121.24%
121.24%
48
48
0
0
0
0
353
39
39.59
98.51%
93.46%
39
37
0
1
1
0
354
51
39.55
128.95%
121.37%
51
48
0
0
3
0
355
44
39.66
110.94%
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
We had some pretty good epochs recently but also some unluckier ones. Let’s hope our luck continues. Otherwise, there were no special occurrences with regard to the pool. Everything runs stable and reliable.
If you have any questions, criticism or just want to talk don’t hesitate to contact me (all contact details in the footer). That’s all I have for you today! Talk to you soon 🙂
Updates are currently released a bit more irregularly than usual, but still contain all the important performance data of the pool as usual. So let’s see what we have.
As usual there are unfortunately quite some ghosted and stolen blocks. We already improved our infrastructure to keep propagation times and therefore ghosted blocks as low as possible but we are still dependent on other pools infrastructure and some pool operators just don’t really care enough even though they are hurting the network with it. Let’s see which protocol changes we will see in the near future and what effect they will have.
That’s all I have for you today. Talk to you soon! 🙂
Long time no see. I was on vacation and took a break from the digital world. I think it’s always good to distance yourself from the things you deal with every day and take some time out to clear your mind. It is remarkable how new impressions, nature and exciting experiences can stimulate you and how much energy can be gained from them.
But let’s go back to topic: Although I was not active the pool was monitored at all times and there were no problems.
Maintenance & Pool Upgrades
As announced in the last Pool Update several parts of the Pools infrastructure were upgraded:
There are now four relays spread across different countries to provide good interconnection within the network as well as resilience in case of disaster.
The main block producer as well as the backup block producer were upgraded to more powerful servers.
The high availibility solution including the automatic failover was tested and the system works as intended.
The Monitoring solution was moved to a fully managed system to reduce maintenance effort for that part of the infrastructure
Existing alerts were adjusted and the incident response system was improved.
Nothing special occurring during the shown epochs. Some were luckier, some were a little less lucky. Overall everything is in the expected range and we only see the usual ghosted and stolen blocks due to slot and height battles.
That’s all I have for you today. Talk to you soon! 🙂
First of all I want to thank each and everyone one of you for returning after the Sundae RISO or staying with me in the first place! We saw a quite big hit in stake after the ISO but quickly recovered afterwards. I really appreciate that.
SundaeSwap ISO and RISO
SundaeSwap ISO and RISO are over and it is possible to claim your ISO rewards via https://dripdropz.io/ now. Claiming your ISO rewards via DripDropz will come with a small fee of around ~1.6 ADA (plus ~0.18 ADA TX Fee). If you want to avoid this ~1.6 ADA fee you can wait for SundaeSwap to implement their own claiming solution which should not come with this fee. If you participated in the RISO your rewards are not claimable via DripDropz, you’ll need to wait for the SundaeSwap claiming solution. I’ll let you know if I have any more information about this. Don’t worry the rewards will be claimable for at least one year (so something around Q1/2023).
Cardano Submit-API and FreeLoaderz.io
As many Wallets already offer the option to use a custom submit endpoint for transactions instead of using their endpoints, I setup a Submit Endpoint for you:
https://submit.fairpool.eu/api/submit/tx
That endpoint uses an infrastructure of dedicated distribution relays connected to many peers inside the Cardano network to get your transactions onto the chain. The performance should be significantly better than the public options during high congestion times (e.g. highly anticipated NFT drops) as there are likely less users on this submit endpoint than on the endpoints of the wallet providers. If you need any help setting your wallet don’t hesitate to contact me.
I also joined https://www.freeloaderz.io/ a coalition of Cardano Stake Pools offering access to their submit APIs to help improve transaction speeds and spread the load among the network. Several submit APIs are sitting behind an HAProxy load balancer that you can also use to submit your transactions depending on your location:
During the next few weeks I’ll upgrade several parts of the pools infrastructure. If you are subscribed to any notification bots you may see alerts about some relays being occasionally down. I assure you that there is enough redundancy in place that there will be no influence on the block production of the pool whatsoever.
The goal of these upgrades is to make the pool more future proof and have enough spare resources in place. I will also add a fourth relay and spread out the relays to even more different countries to be prepared for any eventuality and to be well interconnected within the network.
Looking at the past epochs we saw a great performance during the 323 – 325 with each over 110% confirmed luck. 322 could have been a good one too but unfortunately we saw 5 ghosted blocks due to nearby other slots. 326 will end as a rather unlucky one as we were assigned only 41 slots which is way under the expected 49 slots.
That’s all I have for you today. Talk to you soon! 🙂
Some interesting epochs are behind us, the SundaeSwap ISO is over, the SundaeSwap RISO is starting, the congestion has decreased but is is still noticeable. Let’s get straight into it.
SundaeSwap ISO and RISO
The last Snapshot for the inital SundaeSwap ISO was taken 14th February and thus the initial ISO has ended. Sundae ISO Rewards will be available through DripDropz March 1st or later this year through a SundaeSwap faucet (if you want to avoid the DripDropz fee). Rewards will be claimable for at least one year, so no reason to stress about it. Please take a look at the ISO Dashboard for all the important dates for the ISO as well as a reward estimation. Also take a look at their Twitter and medium page where all major updates will be posted.
The initial SundaeSwap ISO led to a lot of criticism and concern about decentralization, as a huge amount of stake was accumulated in the pools of the 30 voted Pool Operators. Many of those were Multi Pool Operators which also led to a decrease of the minimum attack vector (MAV). To mitigate this development the Reverse ISO (RISO) was introduced to the Community and approved by a community vote. Please check out the linked article for all informations about the ISO and the Reverse ISO Dashboard for all participating pools and important dates.
While it is still up to debate within the community whether the RISO was a good or bad idea, it certainly reached it’s goal to move stake from the initial ISO pools to those of the RISO and also increase the MAV again.
Take the current quite crowded network, add to that the recent parameter changes and the long existing bug that causes a degraded propagation times of the blocks within the network during reward calculation and you get many ghosted blocks. Those ghosted blocks are due to height battles which are resolved by the protocol and which outcome we can’t influence. I still hope we see that issue resolved in the future; otherwise we will have to live with a bigger amount of ghosted blocks.
That’s all I have for you today. Talk to you soon! 🙂
Cardano is currently suffering from a very full chain. Transactions sometimes take a long time, but at least they are executed and the fees remain unchanged. Therefore good news first: Block size will be increased by 8KB taking it from 72KB to 80KB and in addition Plutus script memory units per transaction will be raised from the current 12.5M to 14M. This will take effect very soon at the boundary of epoch 319 on 4 Feb at ~21:45 UTC. This will further increase the capacity and allow more transactions. It is very special how quick and easy Cardano can make such protocol changes without any kind of fork.
SundaeSwap ISO
The SundaeSwap DEX started January 20th and since then executed nearly 65000 thousand orders and has around $70M total locked value (at the time of writing according to defillama.com). Due to the current situation of a congested chain and a very high initial demand for certain Liquidity Pools (especially Sundae/ADA) orders can take several days to process for those specific liquidity pools. Orders for other Pairs are usually processed much faster. Once we have worked through the backlog, the execution time for all pairs will be roughly the same. You can check the queue for the different Liquidity Pools in the Queue Section of the DEX.
Please take a look at the ISO Dashboard for all the important dates for the ISO as well as a reward estimation. No further information has been released yet about the claiming process or when you will be able to claim your rewards. Keep an eye on the official SundaeSwap Announcement Channels
As we can see we recently were more on the unlucky side with overall luck often below 100%. In addition we lost some blocks due to height and slot battles, which we can’t really influence from our side. Epoch 318 looks pretty fine though and I hope we won’t see too many stolen/ghosted blocks.
That’s all I have for you today. Talk to you soon! 🙂
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