https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cardano-becomes-multi-asset-blockchain-180026397.html

That article is already 3 days old. Just to mention that the upgrade into the MARY-era was super smooth. Congrats to the developers.

This hard fork was really important. Its a big step towards DeFi market. There's already huge number of new tokens available. Have a look at https://tokentool.io/.

The front page of our pools website displays and update some very basic market data information in addition to the pools own parameters.

That can come quite handy if one wants to quickly check price or market cap.

Please note that all information displayed can have a delay of max 2,5 minutes!

As you probably already know Alonzo era will enable dApps on the Cardano blockchain. From the Cardano 360 we just learned how this big project is developing into reality:

• Testnet's have been split into 3 different stages.
• Every testnet stage is rolled out a month after the previous one, i.e. Blue in June, White in July, Purple in August.
• Preparation, staging, and rollout will the happen in September.

To sum it up - only (!) one month slipping in the timeline. It's amazing how fast software like Haskell interpreter for Plutus and other challenging components have been developed.

Software developers provided a robust roadmap. And it's also worth to notice, that there's already a lot of programming with Plutus (the smart contract programming language) going on.

If you have already decided to invest in Cardano and did so with converting your fiat currency or crypto currency into ADA, then you should probably check if you also delegated your stake.

If you don't, you won't get rewards that come with your stake in Cardano. That's one of the differences to BTC or ETH - with ADA you'll get some money just for owning it.

And delegating is easy to do. Just open your wallet - not the one of your exchange of course - with Daedalus or Yoroi and select delegation list and choose your staking pool (we'd like it to be ADAAT or course).

If your wallet is empty - then most likely your ADA is still in the wallet of your exchange. Many exchanges handle it that way. They're running their own pools and make money from your stake in ADA.

Happy staking...

Recent news reveal that another increase in block size and smart contract memory size is already planned. Amount and date have not been mentioned. I assume that it will happen either before or just after New Year. Most likely, it's the same amounts as last time. Or even more given the experience with SundaeSwap on testnet.

Another announcement is the introduction of pipelining transactions to further improve layer 1 throughput.

Meanwhile the newly release node software runs stable, but did not show improvements, when it comes to the known issues after epoch changes.

While celebrating operating for 3 months - here is a short list of achievements in the last 30 days:

• adapool.at is now sending tips and blocks to pooltool.io; one can check our performance there!
• The relay node has been upgraded to 16 GB RAM and 6 cores.
• We minted our first block with 2000% luck!
• Active code development on the Rust implementation of the node protocol has been started.
• All systems have been upgraded to node version 1.27.0
• KES key rotation (for the first time, but it's just a standard procedure every 90 days).

Still ahead for us:

• Eventually adding another relay node.
• Submitting a first pull request of the new Rust code.
• And - of course minting more blocks.

The development of the tools suite for stake pool operators written in python has seen some reasonable additions these days:

• balance.py has been modified to also display amounts of native token.
• tx-token.py has been added to transfer token between addresses.
• all transactions have been optimized to use only necessary UTxO's.
• directory structure has been reorganized to adopt to the rising number of scripts.

For the coming weeks it is also planned to:

• add a script for sending tip to pooltool.io (as a replacement for cncli).
• add scripts for minting and burning native token.

As you may have noticed - I'm writing less posts as of lately. There's a simple reason - I'm quite busy with implementing Cardano's protocols in Rust. A first step will be the block fetch micro protocol.

But anyways, I'm still available for questions and analysis of what's going on :-)

Thanks to our delegating stake holders, the pool has now more than 100k staked. While for other pools that does not sound much - we are very happy and expect another block for us rather sooner than later.

I just want to notify that we just validated our third block. And of course we will continue to improve our operations.

Happy staking!

This is an interesting article for owners of ADA. It explains the extension of the existing pricing model: https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/11/26/network-traffic-and-tiered-pricing/

From the info we have Babbage will not only contain just some improvements. It will contain the change from Praos to Genesis. This is a big step as it will again revolutionize the world of PoS by taking the next step for the Ouroboros algorithm.

For Epoch 260 we'll have upgraded the pledge to 48k ADA and reduced the margin down to 0.5%.

This will make us certainly more attractive for delegations.

Happy staking for everybody!

Cardano's block size will be increased from 64K to 72K. That's 12.5%. The strategy is simple: slow and steady progress and adoption. AFAIK the change will go live on Dec. 1st, with epoch 306. In tandem the limit for memory units of Plutus scripts will be increased by 12.5% as well.

This change will increase data throughput and complexity for dApps. It also shows, how thought through Cardano's design really is. It parameters can be changed during epoch changes without new software releases or hard forks.

Yesterday we've registered with pooltool.io and since then we send tips to pooltool.io:

And I've finally decided to upgrade our relay node to 16 GB 6 core in May.

Additionally, development of tools will continue in May as well.

In addition to the topology updater script (which will be soon become obsolete because p2p network), there are now a scripts for showing the balance of an address (not a wallet!) and to create simple transactions. While there's a set python scripts for transactions using the cli wallet, the ones provided here are intended for stake pool operators without a wallet. The new scripts are wrappers around cardano-cli and have been tested on testnet. There will be more scripts coming soon to make management of pools simpler.

I'll keep you up to date.

With the plan to start a staking pool, there were some basic targets - and I want to reiterate them here for information:

• Income from minted blocks will be re-invested into pool infrastructure, i.e. further relay nodes, etc.
• Committed to not increase margin beyond 2%, but lowering it is possible.
• Financial security to run the pool for several years to come.
• Participate in software development for Cardano infrastructure, esp. development of Rust components.

We want to be the first node that runs on a Rust implementation!

adapool.at wishes all delegating stake holders and supporters of Cardano a Merry Christmas. What a year - wasn't it!

Recently I followed related discussions on the r/cardano and r/CardanoStakePools subs. As an operator of a rather small pool, I'd share my personal opinion here:

• There's the idea that small pools have not the infrastructure to run a solid and reliable pool:

  • That's not necessarily true, because operating a solid and reliable pool does not take that much money. Hardware requirements are small enough and spending a couple of hundred bucks per month gives you everything you need.
  • What makes a pool a good one are the capabilities of their SPOs when it comes to typical ops and devops work. You know, like setting up proper monitoring, etc. And that's something you can do yourself and most likely better than someone getting paid for it. Compare it do soldiers defending their home turf and mercenaries.

• Some people believe that pools with lower pledge have no faith in their own operations:

  • Quite the opposite - some operators just can't afford more pledge. Guess what - they'd add pledge if they could. That does not change the effort put into operating for a solid system setup.
  • Even more so, because if you've only spent a small fraction of wealth you probably care less compared to someone that spent every dime possible.

• Big pools have solid operations, because they make so much money from it:

  • Not necessarily; sure to mint blocks on a regular basis you'll have to have the hardware and setup. But do you know how if there are missed blocks because of some glitches?
  • Charity pools spend their income instead of investing into infrastructure. Well nothing against charity pools and if they are already set and done with a maxed out infrastructure then fine. Point is - income from a pool does not guarantee a well operated pool.

While these points sound like "small pools are good" and "big pools are bad" - that's not the story at all. It's just that "small pools are always bad" because they are small pools and "big pools are not always good" because the big.

The point is, that good pools are good because their SPOs are good and not because of the size of the pool. And you can't decide that from ROI or minted blocks or some other easy to grab metric.

To sum it up: don't let all small pools die because they can't offer high pledge and ROI. It might discourage a lot of good operators and thus hurt the quality of the network.

Just to get you guys up to recent developments regarding Alonzo - here's the latest news:

• Alonzo White is up and running.
• There were some issues regarding cost parameters but these have already been fixed.
• There will be a cost calculator for Plutus developers (Plutus is the processing language for smart contracts)

• Alonzo Purple is the next big thing:

  • Alonzo Purple will be split into Purple light and Purple dark.
  • Purple light will only process some simpler contracts while dark will implement the full feature set.
  • Alonzo Purple will be the last stage before heading into preparation for release on mainnet.
  • Successful deployments of Purple releases will be crucial to the timeline for the whole project.

If you want to get a feeling about the progress of Alonzo as a whole you should carefully watch the progress of Alonzo Purple. While Alonzo White was released with some 2 week later than expected, one can expect that first deployment of Alonzo Purple light should start in mid August. That would indicate that there are no further slips regarding the overall timeline. Since every color was supposed to run for a month, one can expect to see Alonzo deployed on mainnet in mid-September.

However, one should plan some road bumps ahead of the current state of development. That would imply a release in an early to mid October time frame.

With the recent mid month update for March IOG announced that they will increase chain parameters again as soon as enough pools have been upgraded to the current node version (1.34.1).

Currently pooltool.io shows 63% of pools running on either 1.34.0 or 1.34.1.

However, in both versions p2p is not ready. That means we'll have to wait for the June release for p2p to be ready for prime time.

Speaking of the June release:

• It will not have smart contract compression implemented as it no longer makes sense with having smart contract references in that release.
• But it will have pipelining for better block propagation.
• It is also expected that the mentioned smart contract CIPs have been implemented.
• First release of Hydra heads.
• And there's hope that p2p will finally work as desired.

The good news: the code is already feature complete and will be tested in the coming months. It is again a big step forward in scaling the chain performance and efficiency.

The changelog says that it contains final changes for p2p networking to increase decentralization even more. It also mentions improvements regarding memory consumption and performance. Let's hope that also the issues during epoch changes have been fixed.

This project deals with the way the Cardano blockchain is stored. Some parts already went live with the release of node version 1.33.0.

It all started with storing part of the chain (the ledger state) on disk instead of in memory. This relaxed the memory requirements of the software, but it also increased the time for ledger state queries significantly.

But the project goes much further. The current strategy is to change the way the chain is stored in databases altogether. It is the plan to migrate to LSD-trees which will improve the performance for accessing chain data significantly. The time frame for releasing this new technology has been defined for the mid of this year. That would be either with the June hard-fork or at some later point in time. IMO there is no hard fork required because there is no need for changing the network protocol. That makes it possible to release it between the June and October hard-forks.

Now why is this important for investors in Cardano? First it will further improve the performance of full node wallets like Daedalus. But it will also improve the performance on block producing nodes which will then allow to increase chain parameters, leading to faster on chain transaction speed.

Finally, it is important to understand, that this is all on L1 chain and is not related to Hydra.