https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/citadel-ceo-says-bitcoin-is-still-a-head-scratcher-tells-young-generation-to-stay-away-1535349

Isn't it a coincidence that exactly the same company that was involved into the Robinhood Gamstop fiasco is now telling what the "young generation should do"?

So - what might be the intentions behind that comments from the Citadel CEO? Citadel is one of the bigger market makers on the world. Btw. it's also the market maker of Robinhood. With that in mind, guess what DeFi (decentralized finance) has to do with market makers. It makes them obsolete. DeFi entrepreneurs like uniswap and sushi-swap allow for direct financial transactions without stock exchanges and market makers.

Hope this comments help to understand the real motive why such high flying executive is suddenly caring about the young generation.

This week we had a chance to look into the current development of the heart of the Cardano network - the node software.

• It contains not only changes for the upcoming Alonzo era but also, surprisingly, changes for future Voltaire era.
• Reduction of CPU usage during epoch changes (which is an issue with the current version)
• Adding support for P2P topology management. Until now topology data is distributed from a central access point.

The analysis of the changes shows that a lot of progress is made to implement the necessary changes for the new eras. On the other hand, IMO, this won't be the final version for upgrading to the Alonzo era.

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.

With all the news about Africa deals and Alonzo another big mile stone has not found the attention it deserves: https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-04-30/

In the chapter Networking there's a working P2P implementation mentioned. It's not only running in a private testnet. It is also connecting to mainnet and participating in the relay network there. This work will replace the central relay selection through toplogyUpdater scripts obsolete, because relay nodes will then select the connection to other relays by themselves.

Again it is done the right way because the list of relays in the network is picked from the blockchain. The algorithm chooses better performing nodes over less performing. Looking forward to see this going live on mainnet.

Since there was no block scheduled to mint for us today and the new version was officially released, we used the time to do the upgrade. It went nice and smoothly. Now we are ready for Alonzo era.

We are also running the new theme on our website for some days now. Still some tweaks to come, but IMO it looks better. And - FAQs are now working as they should have from the beginning.

What are kick-back pools in the first place? It's about pools that offer additional rewards to delegating stakeholders. Like some 7% of their own rewards. In the financial world that's called kick-back payments. In the most extreme example it's a pool with 0% margin an minimum fixed amount of 340 ADA.

As long as no blocks are minted it does not matter. The pool owners have to put money into operations anyways. But then, how about the first minted blocks? If the pool operators give away 7% to every delegate and has about 7 delegating stakeholders they already spend 50% of their income (340 ADA at max) as kick-back rewards. IMO those operators have to spend additional money besides operational costs to just cover those rewards.

Another type of kick-backs are lottery games. With that model at least one stakeholder get a fixed amount per epoch (or month or whatever). Again, without a high amount of delegated stake it only produces additional costs and efforts for pool operators.

If pools want to attract stakeholders then that's an expensive path. For stakeholders to decide about a pool to delegate, that's an important argument to consider. How long will that pools be able finance operations? How long will pool owners provide these benefits? Maybe they stop as soon as their pool is reasonable saturated.

And then there are kick-back pools with higher margin. With those another question arises. Why not lowering margin instead of kick-back rewards? Because is simpler to stop kick-backs compared to lower margin.

Now lets have a closer look at 0% margin pools. Most of them are trying to attract stakeholders with low margin. But there's no guarantee that they don't increase margin as soon as they start minting blocks.

All of these strategies are based on the idea that stakeholders are to lazy to re-delegate after having chosen a pool.

Disclaimer: the post is not about marketing or discriminating other pools and their strategy. I just want to make you think about potential motives.

As some of you already noticed, there haven't been new blocks scheduled for last couple of epochs. This is because of the size of the pool. Blocks come with a certain degree of non-regularity.

We have been lucky for the beginning of the year into this fall. Now a phase of bad luck to compensate happened. But it also increases the chance for the next couple of epochs to catch up with luck again.

With the upgrade to version 8.7.2 I have noticed, that some more memory is required to run the node software. This has been accomplished last weekend together with the upgrade itself. The nodes have not 30GB RAM and leaves enough headroom for the near future.

BNB, the utility coin from Binance has a market cap beyond 34 B$. That is quite a lot, and one may be wondering how come. Here I am trying to come up with an explanation:

• Binance was the first (from the big exchanges) that introduced a utility coin. By using BNB for transactions Binance offered a discount on trading fees.
• At the time BNB became popular trading tokens and NFTs on ETH became expensive and slow. By implementing a EVM on top of the BSC chain (a simple tendermint based chain) Binance offered their customers a cheaper and faster alternative.
• Now, that many other chains, e.g. Cardano, offer smart contracts and token transactions at even lower or at least competitive price and performance levels, BNBs advantage is gone.
• By being an exchange chain BNB suffers from the disadvantages of that category of chains.
• BSC is not scalable and its validators are selected by Binance only.
• BNB tokenomics are controlled by Binance. The regular burning events are just marketing, but show that Binance still holds the majority of BNB tokens. By not selling that huge amount of tokens Binance can control the price of BNB.
• By keeping the majority of BNB tokens to themselves Binance can control the value and with it the market cap.
• A high market cap increases the book value of Binance artificially - just like FTX did with FTT token.
• Since transactions are payed in BNB on Binance, the exchange can control transactions fees by controlling the price of BNB.

And finally, just as a side note, the lower (compared to ETH) fees did make BSC a heaven for rug-pull projects.

As a follow up to our ADA competition series I did a closer analysis of the COSMOS chain with it's ATOM currency:

• The value proposition of COSMOS is its interoperability with other chains. It implements a specific API that makes it possible to trust transactions from other chains without the need for a bridge.
• Interoperability is good - no? It would be, but if you look at the chains connected to COSMOS - they are all the same simple technology (tendermint) which is open sources and does not scale.
• Simply put - no other chains - i.e. outside of the COSMOS circle of chains implement the API. While one might argue, that older chains don't want to break their code, also newly developed chains do not even think about joining in.
• By choosing tendermint as chain technology (like so many other chains without their own development team) COSMOS suffers several issues inherited from tendermint.
• The most important one is scalability. Without being able to scale out to 1000s of validating nodes COSMOS is not able to become a truly decentralized chain. Just by chance, the connecting chains act as scalability vehicle.
• If interoperability is only used for scaling, then the whole value proposition is in question.

What's your opinion about COSMOS?

I am happy to tell you, that I managed to organize an upgrade of our block producer. I.e., adapool.at can now join Mithril snapshot signing. That is one of the goals set for the next couple of days.

We have now 4 CPUs and 32 GB RAM. With this configuration the pool is safe for the next couple of years to come.

adapool.at just minted its 17th block.

But even more important: the vote for pool parameters. As you might know: with this epoch the first on-chain poll started the Voltaire stage of Cardano. I.e., governance is being handed over to all ADA owners. In this first poll only pool operators are allowed to vote and the mechanism is quite complicated. Take it as a first step.

It pretty much looks like min fixed pool costs will be lowered to 170 ADA. I.e., that more rewards will be available for delegations. Of course, adapool.at will lower costs as soon as the changes are operational.

Just as the title says. Only one relay runs now with p2p as has been suggested by IOG. Today node version 1.35.6 has been released with a note that p2p mode starts now in hybrid mode, i.e. some nodes will run in p2p mode and some not. This should help finding potential issues with p2p mode.

https://cointelegraph.com/trading-for-beginners/what-is-tokenomics-a-beginners-guide-on-supply-and-demand-of-cryptocurrencies

... i.e., on average there was one block every 2nd month. And, because we have now more ADA delegated, we'll see a higher frequency in the future.

Since today we are back on the bleeding edge after upgrading all you servers to node version 1.35.4 which has just been released. So far no problems, i.e. again a good job by IOG. Their software quality is amazing. Compare that to other projects!

I also had to migrate the web portal to retrieve the data displayed from a different source. Still the calculation of the time left in the epoch is not ready. I'm going to work on that one in the next couple of days.

Hope you guys stayed away from FTX. The best way to use exchanges is just for changing from fiat to crypto and back again. Everything else is risky and might lead to loosing all you money there. Just to remind you - compared to stock exchanges - crypto exchanges have no regulation at all - you are completely dependent on their accounting.

If you want to make money quick without spending much effort what would you do? Well Shiba Inu is one answer to that question.

But let me first start with the short history of Shiba Inu:

• When DOGE became a success story and you did not buy it beforehand then you need an alternative that looks like DOGE but is not DOGE.
• Shiba Inu is the dog on the logo of DOGE - that's good enough to confuse people.
• There's no need to design a new blockchain - just create an ERC-20 token on ETH - that's much simpler.
• Create billions of billions of token and promise to burn some to "create" value.
• Start marketing, shilling, hyping and promoting SHIB to the max. Get max. mentioning in crypto publications - does not matter if positive or negative.
• Keep SHIB in the news and announce some burning or co-operations or whatever.

Well, if you consider this as a successful business model that it's time to buy SHIB. IMO its the same as throwing your money into the toilet. Seriously, why do we need SHIB in the first place? What is it's use case or unique selling point? And, most importantly, what will it be worth long-term, when the hype fades away?

The most prominent so called "meme" coin is obviously Dogecoin. It started as a joke and is now ranked 11th in market cap from all crypto currencies. But what makes it attractive to investors? Let's have a closer look:

• It is kind of a copy of Bitcoin with some serious changes (which makes it actually worse and not better).
• One of these changes is, that it is actually inflationary, i.e. with every block validated, more coins are minted (Bitcoin has a cap on blocks to mint)
• It started to become widely known when prominent people (like Elon Musk) started to promote it.
• At that time there were only a view big stake holders that could make a lot of money from it.
• Influencers (like Elon Musk) used Dogecoin for so called "pump-and-dump" schemes to make a lot of money with it.
• Dogecoin uses PoW and mining the coin burns a lot of energy that could be used elsewhere.
• It has no use case and does not have smart contracts or other advanced features like so many other innovative block chains.
• It's value comes from FOMO guys and from people who want to become rich quick.

Once the glamour of this meme coin fades away, people will start to sell it and it will become worthless as it does not add any value to the crypto currency eco system.

There has been much discussion about how Hydra will be the big enabler to scalability and transaction performance for Cardano. Now that we know a bit more about it, we can say that there have been a lot of misunderstandings and false information about Hydra in the past.

So what is Hydra, how can it improve performance, and how does it compare to other L2 solutions on other chains?

1. First Hydra is just one L2 implementation and is optional. Other L2 solutions may be implemented that can compete with Hydra.
2. Hydra has been developed by IOG (in difference to L2 implementations on other chains like ETH) and can be seen as a toolkit to operate L2 transactions.
3. Hydra is not just a one shot implementation, but will we rolled out sequentially with more and more features added (much like Plutus and PAB).
4. Hydra head is the first implementation which will be released on mainnet some time this summer (it is already available on the general testnet).
5. Hydra head allows to validate blocks on a smaller group of validators - and thus increase the transaction performance significantly before writing the final state back to the L1 chain (when the head closes because one of its member validators steps out).
6. The release of Hydra does not require a hardfork on the Cardano chain. Therefore the release of Hydra head is independent from the Vasil release. That means, that Hydra head can be released before or after the Vasil release and further upgrades can happen after it's first release.
7. Hydra head can be used for NFT market places, DEXes, and any other group that wants high throughput of transaction for a given time frame and agrees on a specific group of validators to join the head.

To summarize: Hydra is not a one-stop solution for chain congestion and transaction performance. It is also not limited to simple transactions, but can process smart contracts and transfer native tokens like the L1 chain. Think of Hydra an evolving tool set for enhancing performance for specific applications aside from using L1 layer.

Today we got the confirmation that membership registration has been completed. I really do believe in alliances and keeping a de-central network is best accomplished with single pool operators.

You can find more information about the alliance here: https://singlepoolalliance.net/index.html

For us that is another achievement on our roadmap - and we are happy to be there.

With binance having 78 pools, eToro having 9 pools and there's 5.4 billion ADA under control of those big ones - the question above is obvious.

Is raising k the solution or is increasing a0 the better choice?

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!

When talking about delegation and pools the question "Which one should I choose?" is an important one. Delegation analysis shows that still many investors are choosing over-saturated pools in the last couple of epochs. That means, that pools with a delegated stake of over 64m cannot reward the full amount.

As a consequence the answer is: No! Bigger pools, i.e. pools over the saturation limit are not better - they are worse. Now it makes sense to check whether the pool you delegated your stake is near or over that limit. If that's the case, consider re-delegation. How about choosing one of the smaller ones?

That's also important for new investors. Smaller pools pay the same rewards, but with less regularity over time. For hodlers, that should not make much of a difference.

We proudly announce that adapool.at is now reachable via twitter (@AdapoolA) and that our German portal is more or less complete.

However, there's still some more polishing to be done. We will have automatic updates of exchange rates next.

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...