In spite of the market downturn, it’s been a great year for ADA for Warriors. Running a pool and working on all of these different projects takes a lot of our free time and money. But our main 2022 goal was to work our butts off for the community and show them what we are capable of. The hope was that it would pay off somewhere down the road in 2023 and beyond, but that has already happened. Our pool has grown to over 575K ADA and we’ve increased our pledge from 5k (epoch 310) to 65k (epoch 377). With our current delegation, we have a chance to mint a block approximately 50% of the time. That’s WAY up compared to the ~10% chance we started the year on!
We also expanded our mission to include Captive Audience and 500 Rising. If you haven’t read up about the great work they are doing, please head over to their respective pages to learn a little more about each of them. (We promise you that it’s worth the couple minutes to read about them.)
Our final ADA for Warriors donations for 2022 were made today, December 27th. We haven’t received the ADA from our last 2 blocks yet, but we did want to go ahead and close out the donation year. The table below shows our donations to each of our missions for 2022.
| Mission | Total Donation |
|---|---|
| Third Option Foundation | $1795.56 |
| 500 Rising | $132.09 |
| Captive Audience | 1105 ADA |
2022 also brought us our first Catalyst proposal, but not only that, our first Catalyst WIN! The ADA Bug Bounty website was something we’ve discussed within Freeloaderz for a long time. We all liked the idea in general, so, on a whim, we put idea to “paper” and submitted it.
We are still excited that our project was selected by the community. We got fantastic support for the project to include Freeloaderz and The Cardano Army (and others as well!). We don’t want to let the community down, so we’re working hard to deliver something that will actually be used.
Progress is going well. Our Milestone 1 Proof of Achievement was sent in this month and accepted! This is more “work” than past proposals had to do, but we’re happy to see more requirements for projects to get their funding. Catalyst has a lot of problems, but it does seem like they are working hard to add accountability.
We have been steadily working on Milestone 2. Milestone 2 adds in the capbility to comment on bounties, vote bounties and comments up and down, claim bounties, and close bounties. If you’d like, you can follow our progress over on our ADA Bounties Gitlab project page.
Mehen is also still moving along well. The Cardano ecosystem really needs a fiat backed stablecoin and USDM will fill that need. There’s way more work to do, but we’re happy with how things are going. We have our Plaid KYC integration working and our base Testnet infrastructure in place. Good things will be happening in 2023 for Mehen!
We were one of the catalysts behind SmartClaimz. Steve Fisher (owner/operator of Swift Crypto LLC) developed the website for SmartClaimz. Even with the market downturn, SmartClaimz has expanded to 6 token projects to include: Hosky, CSST, FLZ, Gimbal, Pudgy, and HedgeCoin.
On the NFT side, we’re still working with MELD on their Bank Manager NFT’s. We don’t have a firm date yet, but the good news is that we are working out what we need to do for testing the platform and NFT integration.
Freeloaderz has grown from nothing to over 1000 Discord members in 2022. In addition to SmartClaimz, we’re working on a distributed DB Sync setup in an effort to help others offset the cost of hosting their own DB Sync server. That cost comes in the form of man hours and infrastructure costs. By load balancing DB sync requests over multiple DB Sync instances, we can help decentralize Cardano blockchain access.
Blockfrost and others have done a fantastic job with their API’s and services, but the community dependence on them is simply way too high. Our hope is that we can offer an alternative option to the community while also decentralizing the service.
We do what we can to contrubute to the Cardano ecosystem and to raise awareness (and donations) for our missions, but we wouldn’t be successful without our delegates. Your support is a big reason why we do what we do. It means the world to us. We truly hope that 2023 is an awesome year for each and every one of you!
Please contact us if you have questions or if you would like additional information regarding the 4WARD pool.