Pool Landscape Report - June 2023 Week 1

Table of Contents

Pool Landscape Updates

(5/15/23 Epoch 412 -> 05/30/23 Epoch 415)

Binance is Back with New Pools, A Call To Action for Pool Re-Delegation, Cardano Foundation Reward Sharing Scheme Polel Results, BALNC Pool with 4.88% ROS Last Epoch!

Welcome back to the BALANCE Stake Pool Landscape Report. Here’s the big macro picture of what has changed since last time.

Eight (8) New Pools, New MPO FIGMENT, NEW GIRL Scoop

Since 5/15/23 Epoch 411, the following pool actions have taken place:

  • Eight (8) new pools were created since the last pool group dataset review/update.
  • One (1) pool belongs to the IDP, which is IDO PASS DAO. From their website:

    "IDO PASS DAO is a Launchpad, DAO, Incubator, On-Chain Mapping. IDO Pass DAO is the first Cardano DAO to focus on IDOs, launchpads, and Blue chip CNFT fractionalization."

  • FIGMENT is a new pool group forming, with two (2) pools so far. They are an institutional Stake-Pool-as-a-Service (SPaaS) company that honestly has a very sophisticated website. It reminds me of Vanguard's style. From their website:

    "Digital Asset Staking Built for Institutions. The complete staking solution for 200+ institutional clients, including asset managers, custodians, exchanges, foundations, and wallets, to earn rewards on their digital assets."

    • It's interesting how these VC Staking Services, or Staking Pools as a Service (SPaaS), have Cardano at the bottom of their list (or even shown at all) despite its top 10 market cap. Go figure. figment_shot
    • Regardless, it's good to see Cardano joining their service group and API. Maybe we should welcome them and let them know we agree there are no risks to staking and how much better it is than Ethereum...also that Community Delegation is the best option.

  • One (1) existing pool was added to the NEW GIRL group (the pool has approximately 51 mADA). This is a very curious development, with NEW GIRL creating new pools previously and the group activity.

Note: If you are curious exactly which pools, you’ll need to join the Matrix Group Edits Chat to find out! See below.

Huge Drop in Staked Ada on May 18th

On May 18th there was a pretty big drop in Staked Ada! This was attributed to Binance continuing to de-stake Ada. But then, a few days later, a pretty decent U-Turn? What is going on?

staked_ada_u_turn

Binance is Back with New Pools for K=1000

So Binance is back. They still have their 64 BNP Pools, but low and behold they are creating new pools for K=1000 (or 32MAda Saturation Limit) configuration. Insider tip offs, or smart and proactive?

Regardless, the new pools stole our friend BrotherShip Pool’s Ticker BSP! How rude. Now how will people know who is the real BSP of the Cardano Single Pool Alliance.

Perhaps the best we can do is make some social media noise by engaging with this tweet by Pool.pm.

Noteworthy Community Updates

Topic: SPO Reward Sharing Scheme (RSS) Parameter Vote: k and minPoolCost

Well, by now you know there was a great “experimental” voting event for SPOs over the last few weeks. By “experimental”, it really was a serious litmus test, and the first semi-official Cardano Governance voting event.

If you follow us at BALANCE, you are probably already well aware, but just in case, here’s the Cardano Foundation tweet.

The SPO Poll on the Reward Sharing Scheme: k and minPoolCost was a significant catalyst that prompted individuals to contemplate the pools they delegate to, their representation, and, most importantly, the long-term security and decentralization of Cardano through the staking equation parameters.

Stake Pools and Ada Staking Rewards play a crucial role in the monetary policy, blockchain consensus (block minting), as well as in providing resistance against Sybil and Off-Chain Government Attacks through Ada holdings and decentralization.

The Reward Sharing Scheme (RSS) Staking Equation holds immense importance in terms of game theory incentives for long-term decentralization and, consequently, the compelled classification of Ada as a commodity by the SEC.

AdaState.net did a great job of tracking the poll live and providing results in a exportable .csv format. You can see it here.

The Cardano Foundation (CF) deserves credit for effectively hosting this poll, conducting meetings with SPOs, responding to questions, and being accessible on Telegram Channels (special thanks to Markus) as well as the Forum.

At BALANCE, we possess a deep understanding of the Reward Sharing Scheme (RSS) or the equation governing Staking Rewards for pools and delegators.

We believe that none of the options presented in the poll would offer the freedom of choice and the necessary conditions for a free market, allowing Stake Pool Operators to thrive and determine their own rewards without being restricted by a minimum fee.

Here’s the official statement for the BALNC Pool vote:

If you’re interested in a detailed explanation of how Multi-Pool Operators can exploit the current reward sharing scheme system through minimum fee “farming” and coercing other pools to join them in imposing high fees, the Great Army of Spies has done an excellent job of breaking it down. They have been a strong advocate for Single Pools and decentralization. We highly recommend watching his video:

That being said, the next few days is the window of opportunity to find a stake pool whose opinion you agree with, and re-delegate your stake. In reality, this is basically a wallet holder’s vote for a pool representative, who will work for the future you want to see in Cardano.

To Delegate is to Vote!

Don’t know what’s up, DM us on Twitter or Join our BALANCE Matrix Chat room, we would be glad to provide eduacation and answer all questions.

Note: We have nothing against MPOs and their choice to operate at higher fees, they should be able to charge for their tool building and exceptional service. However, not all pools choose to run at 99.99999% uptime reliability, and by design multi pools have more time upkeep, hardware, and maintenance to attend to. If the RSS was geared toward incentivizing Single Pools, their time, hardware, and effort would be consolidated, and the fees would not need to be so high. The Multi-Pool Model is purely to gain as much minimum fee to remain profitable and spread low fees overall amongst many pools. Even IOG does this model, altough the RSS paper clearly dictates this is harmful to the chain. You are more than welcome to command a high fee for your service, but not all pools choose to run at this level of capacity, and the blockchain is more than resiliant and reliable with many distrubited pools.

Single Pool Spotlight: A4G Post Pool Voting Dashboard

This week the Single Pool Spotlight Award goes to Ada4Good A4G for his Cardano Pools & K=1000 Dashboard.

In his work, A4G used BALANCE’s Public Pool Group API which we are thrilled about!

Thank you for the contributor page to refernce sources like BALANCE and others, we appreciate it as we grow and build out our capabilities for the Cardano Community! This is the strength of the Community, working together.

Checkout the Dashboard here

a4d_dashboard

What We’re Paying Attention To

In addtional to BALNC, there’s quite a few (okay ton) of pools more than willing to provide exceptional service! OTG Pool has a well founded request!

  • Revuto has added Indigo’s #iUSD stablecoin staking to their platform services. Revuto has 34,000 followers on Twitter and is a subscription management service. Not entirely sure how this works, but based on their user base this is a good adoption deal. We’ll have to dig into it, or let us know!
  • Memecoin craze, sounds fun, but stay safe, and take profits back into $ADA for your Generational Long-term Wealth Fund, of course staked to BALNC!

BALANCE Updates

The BALNC Pool Seeing Great Rewards Lately: 4.9% ROS for Epoch 414!

The BALNC Pool has been experiencing amazing rewards lately! For the last Epoch 414, we achieved a 4.9% Return On Stake (ROS), and over the past four (4) epochs, we achieved a 3.9% ROS!

balnc_epoch414_ros

No longer is there a low ROS excuse to not delegate with us. Aside from the BALANCE Web App service we provide, the BALNC pool is hot!

Sidenote: Have you noticed that with the drop in Binance Stake and overall Staked Ada decreasing from 70% to 60%, it has resulted in more blocks won for your pool?

If you think about it, despite having the same number of pools, there is now less Staked Ada and more block supply available to mint. With an increase in block supply and a decrease in demand, it becomes easier for small single pools to win a block-effectively causing a difficulty drop (using Bitcoin mining terms).

Call to Action: Audit our Pool Group API and Join our Matrix Group Edits Chat

We would like to call for an audit of our Public Pool Group API and invite you to let us know if there are any mistakes. All suggestions are welcomed.

https://www.balanceanalytics.io/api/groupdata.json

Join us in the Group Edits Chat Room in our Matrix Balance Space! Become an On-Chain Cardano Guardian. Alternatively, you can DM us on Twitter.

balance_matrix_chat

Cheers,

  • The BALANCE Team
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