[separator headline=”h1″ title=”Hey Mr. Pool operator, you look a bit pale”]

Wow, stuff is happening all the time in Shelleyland, I could be writing up stuff all day long!

But my time is probably better spent analyzing the network and tweaking the set-up, in order maximize rewards and best serve your interest as a delegator.

But let me tell you, that hasn’t been and still is not easy.

With the previous v0.8.5 release of the jormungandr software, life as a pool operator was very hard, but also very straightforward:

  1. check your pool 24/7 (scripted for OK results, manually for much better results)
  2. whenever not in sync: restart
  3. collect rewards (that is the easy part 🙂 )

Now, with the new v0.8.6, the game has changed, and it took most pool operators a day to wrap their heads around it:

  1. check your pool: “oh look at that, it never loses sync, no need for restarts. I can finally catch some sleep LOL”
  2. wait for blocks to get produced: “huh, perfect sync but my blocks evaporate!?”
  3. collect some rewards, and go back to 24/7 monitoring, this time for CPU-spikes, and perform scripted or manual restarts as required

You’ve guessed it: the job of pool operator has become slightly more complicated yet again. But that’s OK, nobody signed up for free money rolling in by doing nothing anyway, right? 😉

[separator headline=”h1″ title=”On to the dry stuff: numbers”]

[separator headline=”h3″ title=”4ADA”]

Epoch 34 was great with 28 produced blocks leading to a record 33.5k ADA rewards total. Clearly this has led to the influx of new delegators, so we can hopefully look forward to lots of new block assignments in epoch 36 (remember, slot leader assignment is a game of chance).

Epoch 35 however is going to show a very different picture, as:

  1. The changeover to 0.8.6 came with network instability (giant fork)
  2. 0.8.6 is stable and always in sync, deceiving many operators by letting them think blocks were going to come in automatically
  3. 4ADA received a very low slot leadership allocation (only 20), making a tough job even tougher…

We are probably going to finish at 16, putting us at a 20% missed block ratio, which probably is our worst performance ever.

So, when checking your rewards for 4ADA tonight; no need for serious anxiety: we’re back on top of all the Testnet quirks and fully confident to get ample blocks rolling in again very soon.

[separator headline=”h3″ title=”4ADA2″]

Epoch 33 showed us that this small pool’s rewards can really fly with just 5 blocks, but a little more patience is still required: we got 4 blocks allocated in epoch 34 but missed 2. Today (epoch 35) we unfortunately only had two allocated–both successfully produced.

If you currently delegate to 4ADA2, I strongly recommend you to stick with us a little longer: our total stake almost doubled today, so we will have lots of blocks coming our way in epoch 37, probably epoch 36 as well, which will finally provide the kickstart needed to drive this pool to 50M+ stake in no time!

Happy staking, and do not hesitate to comment or ask any questions you have down below.

Jos

P.S. Our website may sometimes be a bit slow… perhaps a small price to pay for the reassuring thought that this is a natural consequence of our decentralized clean-energy philosophy, which calls for a solar power, self-hosted set-up. And not to worry: our website and stakepools are on different machines 😂.