February Update: CSPA, xSPO, Freeloaderz, and TOF!

Before I get into all of the details for the month, I offer a huge welcome to our 4 new delegates that joined in February. Our mission would have zero chance of success without you all. Thank you for putting your trust in us and thank you for supporting our mission.

Some good things are happening for our Cardano pool, ADA for Warriors. Besides our delegator growth, we minted our first block(s), joined new alliances, added a wallet service, and initiated our first donation to the Third Option Foundation!

First Blocks

We minted our first block in epoch 318. In fact, we had 2 blocks in epoch 318. Our ROA for that epoch was a whopping 30.662%! The operator rewards for the epoch were ~369 ADA and our (4 at the time) delegates received ~935 ADA. Unfortunately, we haven’t had any luck the rest of the February though. The pool selection algorithm is a weighted random selection with pledge and total delegation being a big part of that equation. To help this selection process, we’ve been buying the dip to push our pledge to 10k ADA (up from 5k at the start of the year). Once those transactions clear our exchange, the ADA will be transferred and our pledge will be increased. Be on the lookout for the update next week!

CSPA and xSPO Alliances

The SundaeSwap ISO and subsequent RISO showed the power of new DEX releases to pull delegates to pools that are participating in the process. Besides SundaeSwap, there have been a number of other projects that joined the Cardano ecosystem this year. The smart contract and DEX growth have brought a lot of new wallets to Cardano. In early February, there was an average of 9000 wallets added daily. With all of this growth, it was important for us to find new sources of information to get a leg up on new projects and opportunities.

After doing some research, we joined the Cardano Single Pool Alliance and the xSPO Alliance. Both alliances are a collection of small single pools that share a vision of a decentralized Cardano network where the big multi-pool operators, like Binance, don’t have as much control as they currently do. We also share information and tech tips, and help support each other’s social media to increase outreach. It hasn’t been long, but so far both groups have been great to work with. There a lot of smart and dedicated SPOs out there trying to help forge the future for Cardano.

Freeloaderz: A Cardano Submit API Service

Through these alliances, we found an opportunity to help support the community by joining the Freeloaderz coalition. This coalition is made up of Cardano stake pools that are offering Cardano TX Submit API access to their Relay servers. The API service helps improve transaction speed by allowing supporting user wallets to submit transactions directly to a Relay.

They offer two load balancers, one in the US and one in Europe. These load balancer URLs can be plugged into supporting wallets like Nami and ccvault to allow a user to submit their transaction directly to a Cardano Relay server. As designed, these transactions would normally go to a central server with all the other transactions. Depending on the network load, there could be significant delays in processing a particular transaction. IOHK has done a good job adjusting network parameters to keep up with the added network load, but services like this will take on more importance as the network continues to grow. (One interesting enhancement that IOHK is working on is direct Peer-to-Peer communication.)

First Third Option Foundation Donation

Out of all of these developments, initiating our first donation to the Third Option Foundation is the one we are the most excited about. From epoch 318, the operator rewards were ~369 ADA. That was our only active epoch this month, so that makes our total donation for February ~184.5 ADA. We transferred 185 ADA to our exchange, sold it, and initiated the USD transfer to cover the check that is being sent to the Third Option Foundation.

Below is a collage of the transactions (click the picture to zoom). Once the check clears, we’ll be updating our donation tracker on our website with the cleared check information. The final donation for February was $165.72 USD. It’s a start, but we truly hope that we can build off of that next month and make a larger donation.

Next Month

All in all, it was an exciting month for our pool and we look forward to what March will bring. Just know that we are constantly on the lookout for new growth opportunities for our delegates and for our mission. We appreciate you!

As always, if you have any questions or want more information about any of this, please contact us using our email or one of our social media accounts. Thank you!