Refunds

It is not easy to attract delegators as a small pool operator and this is due to the cursed minimum 340 ADA fixed fee and here is why.

The problem

At the time of writing (June 5th, 2022), the reward for minting a block on the Cardano blockchain is ~640 ADA and due to the minimum fixed fee of 340 ADA the actual pool fee per epoch with one minted block will be 53% (340/640*100). For stake pools big enough to mint e.g., 17 blocks per epoch the fixed fee will account for only ~3% in fees, but this will also require about 17M ADA in total stake, here is a plot that illustrates the impact of the fixed fee per June 5th, 2022.

We at TECH pool belives that this is unfair for our delegators, so we have come up with a solution.

The solution

How it works

To refund: 640*0.97 - (640 - 340) = 320 ADA

The Cardano blockchain do not allow NFT transactions of less than 1.5 ADA, therefore, delegators eligible for refund less than 1.5 ADA will be pooled together for each epoch and random winners will be drawn, this lottery is weighed on stake, so the partcipants with the highest stake will win more often. Currently (as of 2nd of November 2022), delgators with a smaller stake than ~15.000 ADA will be participating in the lottery, while those with a larger stake will get a refund every epoch.

Refunds so far

About

About TECH Pool

TECH pool is running on a ASUS PN51 (4 core, 16 GB RAM), a low-power computer drawing less than 45W of power - less than the power consumtion as a non-LED light bulb. TECH pool utilizes one relay, located in Sortland/Norway, the relay is rented trough a Norwegian VPS provider (www.deploi.no). By running both stake pool and relay in Norway we assure that (i) the whole TECH pool infrastructure is powered by 100% renable energy like hydro or wind and (ii) we aid the decetralization of the Cardano blockchain by avoiding popular VPS service like Amazon AWS or DigitalOcean. This infrastructure has prooven reliable as the pool has been online ready to mint blocks 24/7 since its deployment in 15th of April 2021.

For any questions you can contact us on Twitter or Discord.

About me

My name is Bjarne, I entered the Cardano community in January 2018 and been active in the ever since. I have both a Bachelors- and Masters degree in computer science, and currently employed as a scientist working on data analysis using machine learning and sustaianble solutions for food cultivation. I am a TECH entusiast - I love to invent, build and develop usefull solutions that utilizes new and interesting technology, my hobbies include, developing and programming, skiing, mountain hiking and speedriding.