So after generating our keys, setting up the servers, validating our pool and registering our relays with topologyUpdater we now have an official Pool…
Now what…?
This is part II from our journey, see the other parts here:
- Part I: The technicalities of a stakepool no-one told you
- Part II: The first block will come… right… RIGHT??
- Part III: Where are we going from here
Sea of pools
There are currently many many pools. When you open the pool selection in Daedalus you are greeted by over 2.735 stakepools rated until a rating of 566. Everything with a rating above that is just thrown on the heap. This means you just have a place between 2.168 other pools on the heap.
You can think of a catchy name, great logo, make a beatiful site and have world-improving goals and still you are just one of the many pools in the list.
You can buy ads, post on forums, shout from the rooftops and that maybe gets your pool noticed, but then there is another problem…
Rewards
As long as your staked amount is not in the millions the chance to get a block is nihil. This also means that all your stakers really have to dedicate their Cardano to the pool and take the loss of rewards untill the pool is big enough.
This is not such a bad choice for yourself to make, but for others it does mean quite a loss depending on the amount of Cardano they staked. Others might believe in your pool but when there is not enough buy-in after a few epochs without rewards they will start to ask questions.
How much??
So after the pool was set-up my brother and me staked our own Cardano to the pool. To us this was quite an investment but in the grand scale of things we didn’t even make a dent. Our pool was like flotsom between pools the size cargo ships.
Earlier calculations were a lot more optimistic, saying that about 18k ₳ would be enough to have a block once in a while. Sadly the ecosystem has grown so much that new calculations1 indicate that you need at least 100k ₳ pledged and a lot of luck. So unless you have a significant start-capital or very rich friends you don’t make a chance to stand out as new pool.
That leaves us the questions: what do we do with our pool and is this what decentralized means? Something to ponder about…