Since the launch of Shelley Mainnet, there now have been 9 epochs with staking rewards.

In 45 days, some pool operators have managed to collect rewards ranging from 100k~250k ADA, or the equivalent of roughly 6,500~16,500 USD per month 😲.

Hundreds of other, less fortunate operators, collected little to no rewards at all 😩.

Staking4ADA's total rewards so far (until epoch 219), are 24.6k ADA (4ADA: 11.2k, F4ADA: 6.1k, W4ADA 7.3k), or the equivalent of 1,640 USD per month 🙂.

We sincerely would like to thank all our delegators for sticking with us. As a group, we have been able to make a significant contribution to the Cardano network!

Fortunately, our pool rewards will let us cover our expenses (we recently purchased a tiny but powerful 15-Watt server to serve as a spare pool relay and block-producing node), but we can do more!

Besides banking the unbanked and becoming the world's financial operating system, as Charles likes to remind us, I think this new staking revolution presents us with a unique opportunity to do so much more than just prevent more cash from flowing into some of those deep shareholder pockets.

All of our pools will therefore each dedicate 100% of the rewards of a single upcoming epoch to a specific charity.

We have identified two and would like to receive your suggestions for the third.

Thanks to one of our delegators to 4ADA, who goes by the name of D.24 on Telegram 😉, 4ADA's rewards from epoch 224 will help charitywater.org, who are on a mission to give access to clean water to anyone who doesn't have that today.

F4ADA's full operator rewards from epoch 225 will be donated to amazonwatch.org. This organization is quite active in protecting the rainforest and advancing the rights of Indigenous ("native") peoples in the Amazon Basin, through campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability, and the preservation of the Amazon's ecological systems.

If you know a great destination for W4ADA's rewards from epoch 226, let us know. This would preferably be a charity related to our oceans so it matches with the pool's theme.

Send your suggestion via email, Telegram, or Twitter. You can find the appropriate links on our homepage: staking4ada.org.

As tweeted a few days ago and extensively explained in our blog post "With apologies - we missed some blocks".

While your rewards as a delegator for epoch 221 will be lower than what you are used to from us, this will NOT have any negative impact on the rewards from future epochs! Our ROS will probably look a little less attractive for a while, but should still be higher than the ROS of most other pools.

Unexpected things happen, including two network-relays failing at the same time without telling us 🤦‍♂️.

What is important for you as a delegator is to know when stuff like this happens!

Even if some pools did not lose a single block thus far (or at least not that we know about), some of the major upcoming changes of the Cardano-node software, including the implementation of new p2p-algorithms for example, will for sure re-shuffle those ROS-statistics all over again.

Happy staking!🌞

Jos