2023-03 Cardano Foundation Delegation and 101k Pledge Update

News Date: 2023-03-05 00:00:00 +0000

January and February have brought some major updates to our pool. The fist big update is that we were one of the pools picked to receive this round of Cardano Foundation delegation. The second is that we’ve reached a major milestone for our pledge! One other big piece of news is that we’ve also been providing CPU and GPU compute capacity for Nunet’s testnet. (There are some benefits to our delegators, which will be explained below!) In spite of the rocky economy/market conditions, it’s been an exciting start to the year!

Cardano Foundation Delegation

We forgot that we applied for the Cardano Foundation delegation, so it was an even more amazing surprise to be selected! They delegated over 14.5 million ADA to our pool! We’re finally minting blocks every single epoch, with an estimated 13 blocks per epoch. We know it’s only temporary, but we’re happy that our delegators and missions are reaping rewards from this delegation as well.

There were 267 valid applications according to their Cardano forum post. They made a short list of 51 pools, and then 45 were randomly selected from that list.

This influx of delegation has allowed us to hit the 100 block milestone within 16 months of starting our pool. For a single, small pool, that’s a huge milestone!

We are still at the minimum 340/0% fees, so if you are looking for a new pool, now is a great time to switch!

101k Pledge and ADA Bounties

Our second big update is related to our Project Catalyst Fund 9 project, ADA Bounties. We submitted our Milestone 2 (January) and Milestone 3 (February) Proof of Achievements. Milestone 4 will bring ADA Bounties to Cardano Preview for testing.

If you aren’t familiar with our project, you can read more about it on Ideascale and in this ADA Pulse article.

We have been re-investing a lot of the funds received into our pool. With our latest re-investment, we’ve finally hit 101k pledge! (100k pledge is cool, but 101K is the new 11!)

Nunet

Another big update is that we applied and were chosen by Nunet to provide CPU and GPU compute for their testnet. This allows us to finally repurpose our Eth mining rigs while contributing to the Cardano ecosystem. We reconfigured one of our rigs since Nunet currently only supports NVidia GPUs, but it was something we wanted to do anyway. The dual AMD and NVidia setup was pretty difficult to maintain. It isn’t a big issue if you aren’t trying to change power settings, voltages, memory speeds, or GPU speeds, but it’s a whole other story if you are! At some point they suspect they’ll have AMD support but most of our cards were NVidia 3090’s and LHR 3080’s anyway.

It’s been interesting to be a part of their process. Their software team is fantastic. As a Ubuntu user, it’s been easy to install and use their software. Their documentation is top notch as well. Because of the team and how smooth things have been going, we do expect this project to be successful (although nothing is ever guaranteed!).

One other exciting piece to this is that Nunet has an Earndrop where ADA for Warriors’ delegators can earn NTX (the Nunet utility token) by delegating at least 150 ADA with us and also holding at least 10,000 NTX in the same wallet. Their official announcement was posted on Medium.

Mission Donations

January was extremely slow for our pool, only one block was minted. February, however, was another story! We minted and received rewards for 57 blocks through 4 epochs! Our 340/0% fee for the 5 active epochs produced 1700 ADA. 30% of that goes to the Third Option Foundation, 10% to 500 Rising, and 10% to Captive Audience.

(The USD donations to the Third Option Foundation and 500 Rising were calculated using the 2023-03-06 UTC day opening price of ~$.34/₳)

Below is the amount donated to each mission on March 5th, 2023. Their links are included if you would like to donate directly to their causes.

Third Option Foundation $173.40

500 Rising $57.80

Captive Audience 170 ₳

Wrap Up

There’s so much more coming in 2023. We didn’t even touch on Mehen/USDM, but that is still very much alive. The Regulatory landscape is shifting almost daily, but we’re still working through it all. ADA Bounties will ultimately be deployed. The Meld Bank Manager is expected to launch fairly soon with SmartClaimz as it’s front end. Last, but not least, Freeloaderz, (well, mostly one Freeloader truthfully, Envy), has been working diligently on a distributed DB Sync service.

The market and economy will probably be terrible the rest of 2023, but we’re building. When we pull out of this mess and get back to the bull market, we’ll be ready!