Refunds

Attracting delegators as a small pool operator is not easy, and the minimum 170 ADA fixed fee is the reason why.

The problem

At the time of writing (August 11th, 2024), the reward for minting a block on the Cardano blockchain is ~420 ADA. Because of the minimum fixed fee of 170 ADA, the actual pool fee per epoch with one minted block works out at 40% (170/420*100). For stake pools big enough to mint, say, 15 blocks per epoch, the fixed fee accounts for only ~3% in fees, but that also requires about 15M ADA in total stake. The plot below illustrates the impact of the fixed fee as of August 11th, 2024.

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

The solution

TECH pool will refund the fixed fee to its delegators. This is possible because we have developed Python-based software that refunds the fixed fee automatically. Delegators do not need to send us a receiving address; all they need to do is stake with TECH pool, and the refund will happen automatically when they receive their staking rewards.

How it works

The software refunds the fees in proportion to each delegator's stake. Here is an example of a recalculated 3% fee with one block produced:

To refund: 420*0.97 - (420 - 170) = 157 ADA

Refunds of less than 1.5 ADA are accumulated; the refund is only sent once the total owed is above 1.5 ADA. For example, if a delegator receives 0.5 ADA on average per epoch, a refund of 1.5 ADA will be sent every third epoch. Paste your staking address (it starts with ‘stake…’) below to find out what TECH pool owes you in fee refunds.

PLEASE NOTE:
As the total stake of TECH pool is currently 68.69M ADA, the total pool fee is below 3%, which means there are no refunds at the moment. The refund mechanism will be activated automatically if the total stake drops below 15M ADA.

Refunds so far