Were you happily staking away at one of the XXL pools, until you heard it will soon be heavily saturated, preventing you from enjoying your maximum rewards for very much longer?

That’s right. From Dec 6 onwards, any pool larger than 64M ADA will produce less than optimal rewards for its delegators, forcing them to find a new ‘home’ for their ADA.

Low Fees Are High Enough For Big Pools

If you are/were staking with a large, 100M+ pool, chances are you chose one with a very low fee. Why pay more if the pool operator is enjoying great profits too? Even at 1% variable fee, the rewards for a 150M+ pool easily exceed 1,000ADA per epoch, per pool. That quickly adds up if you’re running five pools (30k ADA/mth) or even 11 pools (66k ADA/mth). More than enough to run a couple of server’s and a website wouldn’t you think?

Also pools which are adding considerable amounts of value to the ecosystem, as Ambassador and/or by hosting a podcast or Youtube channel, have been handsomly rewarded with monthly revenues easily exceeding 30k or 60k (or even 100k if you’re a Japanese Ambassador).

Why IOG Wants Pools To Be Smaller

IOG understood that such concentration of rewards does not contribute to Cardano’s long term vision towards decentralization and efficiency. A professionally operated stake pool does not need more than a few thousand ADA/mth, so IOG decided to re-shuffle the cards and let all delegators get educated in the process about what makes up a pool’s value, and what remuneration should fit that bill.

What Whales4ADA (W4ADA) Offers

  • Impeccable performance. Staking4ADA.org has reliably been minting blocks (>10,000!) ever since the very first days of the ITN, back in november 2019.
  • Sustainable staking. All our servers are self-hosted and directly powered by self-owned solar panels.
  • Full transparency with live statistics about assigned/minted blocks and pool health.
  • Ultra-low 1% fee, guaranteed until february 1st, 2021. Any change after this date will be widely announced at least 1 month (6 epochs) in advance.

…And What It Doesn’t Offer

  • Zero-fees. Great pools cannot survive on 340ADA per epoch. Granting a few % of your rewards to your operator will only cost you a handful of ADA after a whole year. If you are/were staking with a 0%, you are/were enjoying a short-term benefit that won’t last for very long. And remember: a pool operator with nothing to lose that lets you down only once, will quickly turn out to have cost you more than a few percent of your rewards!
  • Charity donations on your behalf. Our 4ADA and F4ADA occasionally donate to charity, since we believe that Cardano represents a unique opportunity to bring so much more value to the world than ‘just’ the fantastic network and community that we already are! Check this post to check out our most recent donation.

I’m Staking With 4ADA or F4ADA. Should I Delegate to W4ADA?

As long as W4ADA is smaller in size, moving your delegation to W4ADA is not going to make a big difference in rewards, since the minimum pool rewards of 340ADA per epoch weigh slightly heavier on the rewards from a smaller pool than on those from a bigger pool.

But even if W4ADA would become larger than 4ADA or F4ADA, the difference in rewards for you would be negligible: for every 100,000ADA stake, the difference in rewards after a whole year will be approx. 50 ADA for every 1% difference in variable fee. Yes, just 50 ADA. You can verify this yourself by using IOHK’s Staking Calculator HERE. Let me know if you need help in tweaking the parameters!

In return, by staying delegated to 4ADA or F4ADA, you automatically participate in donations we occasionally make to sustainability charities on your behalf.

Moreover, you will continue to enjoy great staking rewards, with the assurance that you are making a fair contribution to the quality and longevity of the Cardano network, which ultimately cannot thrive and survive on the basis of single 1% pools alone :-).

Happy staking! 🌞