Staking in Cardano (3/3) Guidance for operators
This is a translation of the original IOG blog post
- Be transparent – Choose your pool’s operational cost as accurately as possible. Do include the personal effort (priced at a reasonable rate) that you and your partners put into the pool operation! You are a pillar of Cardano and so you have every right to be compensated by the community. Be upfront about your costs and include them in your pool’s website. Educate your prospective delegates about where the pool costs are going. Always remember that it is important to charge for the time you invest in maintaining your pool. In the short term, you may be prepared to invest your time and energy ‘for free’ (or after hosting costs, at an effective loss) but remember that this is not a sustainable model for the network over the medium and longer term.
- Don’t split your pool – With the coming changes in k (commencing with the move to k=500 on 6th December), we are already seeing pool operators splitting their pools in order to retain delegators without becoming saturated. Do not engage in pool splitting unless you can saturate a pool completely with your stake. If you are a whale (relative stake > 1/k) you can create multiple pools – but you should keep your leverage as close to 1 as possible or less. Pool splitting that increases your leverage hurts the delegators’ rewards, and more importantly, it hurts the decentralization of the Cardano ecosystem, which is detrimental to everyone. If you run and control multiple pools under different tickers, make a public statement about it. Explain the steps you take to control your leverage. Creating multiple pools while trying to conceal the fact that you control them is akin to a Sybil attack against Cardano. This behavior should be condemned by the community. You can calculate and publicize your leverage using the following formula:
Exchanges are a special kind of whale stakeholder, since they collectively manage other people’s stake. One strategy for an exchange is to avoid leverage altogether and delegate the stake they control to community pools. If an exchange becomes a pool operator, they can maintain their leverage below 1 by using a mixed pledging and delegation strategy.
- Set your profit margin wisely – Select the margin to make your pool competitive. Remember that if everyone delegates their stake and is rational, you only have to beat the (k+1)-th pool in the rankings offered by the Daedalus wallet. If your pool offers other advantages that can attract delegation (e.g., you are contributing to a charitable cause you feel others may wish to support), or you have acquired exceptional equipment that promises notable uptime/performance, make sure you promote this widely. When you offer such benefits, you should consider setting a higher profit margin.
- Keep your pool data updated – Regularly update the cost and margin to accommodate fluctuations in ada price. Give assurances to your delegators and update them about the stake pool operational details. In case of mishaps and downtimes, be upfront and inform your delegators via your website and/or other communication channels you maintain with them.
- Pledge as much as you are able to – Increase the amount of pledge as much as you comfortably can and not more. Beyond using your own stake, you can also partner with other stakeholders to increase the pledge of your pool. A high pledge signals long-term commitment and reduced leverage, and it unlocks additional rewards every epoch as dictated by the a0 term in the rewards sharing scheme calculation. As a result, it does make your pool more desirable to prospective delegators. On the other hand, remember that pledge is not the only factor that makes a pool attractive. Spend time on your web and social media presence and be sure to advertise all the ways that you contribute to the Cardano ecosystem.