STR8 pool

What is your mission statement?

The "Cardano Straight ADA Stakepool" aims to secure the Cardano network by running a competitive 24/7 pool on decentralized, climate neutral infrastructure maintained by IT professionals. The low fees ensure longevity and sustainability of the pool, there is no other purpose, thus the name of our pool. This pool intention is to provide reliable Cardano infrastructure / protocol service with high desirability for you as a delegator.

STR8 pool highly appreciates anyone already delegating to us or planning to do so. We will do our best to get you the rewards you deserve for being an early adopter of Cardano! It is risk free to delegate your stake. Your ADA stake always remains in your control and custody when delegated to a community pool like STR8 Pool and it is never locked! You can move your tokens at any time even after delegation. Cardano has liquid, non-custodial staking without slashing. Consider delegating to STR8 today to earn rewards.

What are the three core values of your stake pool?

Reliability - Delegators can trust that our pool performs 24/7.
Honesty - We are an honest participant of the network, we vow to never ever cheat or exploit the protocol.
Transparency - We will never hide anything from delegators, even if it makes us look bad.

Who operates this pool?

I am Chris, a German IT professional with computer science background, with many years in the IT business. I am a Cardano enthusiast and Cardano Ambassador.

Whilst running and maintaining servers is just a hobby of mine, I engage in this way with multiple communities that I see value in. I bring many years of experience in maintaining Linux based servers. Running a pool is more fun to me than a serious challenge.

If you have any questions or concerns about this pool you can find me in Telegram under the name @ChrisSTR8 in all the relevant Cardano channels.

What is your history with the Cardano project?

As a technical person, I was drawn to Cardano in 2017 through Charles' whiteboard video and have followed the protocol ever since, watching AMAs and the like almost every day on the way to work and back.

I see a lot of potential in Cardano due to its' strong vision and methodical process, so I am very happy to provide the service of running a reliable stakepool for the community fostering network growth & strength.

Why Cardano?

Satoshi Nakamoto kicked off the traditional finance disruption with Bitcoin in 2008 (see whitepaper with hash 427c63b3 ... 5a982faa).

Cardano is a L1 blockchain build from the ground up, leveraging the learnings of thousands of crypto projects before it like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Cardano has the same security guarantees of Bitcoin Proof of Work implemented as Cardano Proof of Stake proven in a rigurous peer review process.

Cardano is an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO)-based blockchain retaining this genious invention of Bitcoin but expanding upon this with an "extended UTXO model" to unleash the full power of smart contracts like the accounts-based blockchain Ethereum.

What is the setup of your pool?

The pool is run off three reliable, redundant virtual private servers, one block producer and two relays distributed across different data centers in Europe / Germany and Asia / Singapore. All data centers are green and use renewable energy sources. With this redundant setup, STR8 pool never misses a block even during maintenance windows.

All nodes run on a modern secure Server OS with ample hardware resources and strong peering with easy scaling options to meet rising demands.

I do not want to bore you with elaborate real-time monitoring data of my pool, you can just expect that the pool works for you 24/7.

What are your plans for the future of your pool?

I am running this pool because I believe in Cardano's future and want to be a part of it. For this reason, I plan to run this pool indefinitely. I will try my best to keep STR8 pool performing the best it can.

I am active in the Cardano Shelley Testnet & StakePool Best Practice Workgroup Telegram group trying to help grow the community and implement all best practices for this pool and develop new best practices along the way.

Why should I delegate to your pool?

My hope is that my pool has high desirability for you as a delegator. I am committed to run STR8 pool indefinitely with reasonable but low fees. I am an IT professional so you can be assured I always have all best practices in place.

The effective pool profit margin is set dynamically between 0% and 4%, not to be confused with the variable fee. So you keep at the very least 96% of your reward. Please note we are talking about reward, not your staking amount.

Instead of the variable fee, I use the effective fee as a more stable and longterm guideline for the fee structure of the pool. Please see the explanation below. I will not suddenly raise my effective fees long term above 4% like what other pools starting with unsustainable fee structures will eventually do. As a delegator I want to give you peace of mind delegating to STR8.

Running a climate positive pool is important to me. Next to green hoster selection, I have for example supported the Veritree initiative with a donation of 1,000 trees to achieve a positive carbon footprint. I am a proud member of the Climate Neutral Cardano Community

What do you mean by "dynamic competitive" and "effective" fee?

A pool needs delegation to thrive and survive. Many delegators look at pool ranking sites for guidance, I do understand that. As long as pledge has no effect on rewards and thus rank, the main parameter relevant for the pool rank is the variable fee. I do tightly monitor market conditions including ADA valuation and dynamically set the pool variable fee to stay both competitive and sustainable at all times.

The Cardano protocol requires us operators to set a fixed fee of at least 170 ADA per epoch. Until October 27th 2023 the mimium fixed fee was 340 ADA per epoch. I call the combined effect of the fixed fee and the variable fee "effective" fee. I do not agree taking a fixed fee of 170 ADA independent of the number of blocks STR8 pool produces. My reason is solidarity with you, my highly appreciated delegator. By relying only on profit margin, we share the risk. I believe in Cardano and we are in this together. STR8 pool shares the good and bad days with its delegators by relying solely on the variable fee.

As long as there is a mandatory fixed fee of 170 ADA, STR8 pool uses a variable fee of maximum 3.50% long term. Should the fixed fee mandatory flag be removed in the future, STR8 pool will reduce the fixed fee to 0 ADA and increase the variable fee to a maximum of 4.00% long term.

Market mechanics might guide me to increase the variable fee up to 6.00% (with current minimum fixed fee) or 8.00% (with no minimum fixed fee) and alternate this with 0.00% epoch by epoch to arrive at an effective fee of maximum 4.00% year by year.

All variable fee adjustments are done at roughly the same time, preferably early in an epoch. Even in naïve wallet or pool explorer implementations which assume static fees in the ever changing dynamic and highly competitive crypto landscape, each dynamic fee component will thus be visible for at least ~ one epoch / 5 days for maximum transparency.

Pool fee changes take one epoch longer (3) than stake changes (2) to become effective in Cardano.

The following table transparently shows the fee effects based on total stake in the approximate height of the saturation point. All rewards are by epoch:

ADA staked [₳]	Variable fee [%]	Fixed fee [₳]	Effective fee [%]	Effective cost [%]	Delegator rewards [₳] ^*)
72,500,000	0.00	170 / 340	0.52 / 1.04	0.02 / 0.03	45
72,500,000	1.00	170 / 340	1.52 / 2.04	0.05 / 0.07	45 / 44
72,500,000	2.00	170 / 340	2.52 / 3.04	0.08 / 0.10	44
72,500,000	3.00	170 / 340	3.52 / 4.04	0.12 / 0.13	44 / 43
72,500,000	4.00	170 / 340	4.52 / 5.04	0.15 / 0.17	43
72,500,000	5.00	170 / 340	5.52 / 6.04	0.18 / 0.20	43 / 42

^*) As sample delegation a stake of 100k ADA is assumed.

(If you want to verify the formulas behind this table, feel free to view the full spreadsheet for calculation here. In the yellow cell your can enter your own stake to update the average delegator rewards.)

STR8 pools low at max. ~4% effective reward fee is actually 0.13% cost for delegators per annum if the gross expected ROS is 3.3%. Please remember crypto can fluctuate 2-10% per day, so I believe STR8 has very competitive fees even when the effective fee is at the maximum value.

Where do I get updates on this pool?

Updates are posted on Twitter and in the Straightpool Telegram group. I am proud that around STR8 pool a smart and helpful delegator community has formed, we chat about all things crypto at STR8_Talk Telegram group.

Currently, there are no plans to setup a mailing list for delegators as it is plausible the protocol will eventually have some form of wallet messaging in the official wallets from stakepool operator to stakepool delegators. We have enough email spam already, I would like to minimize any further spam by not contributing to collect yet another mailing list prone to abuse.

Can I earn any tokens other than ADA delegating to your pool?

Yes, my pool is supporting DripdDropz.io by running an extra relay for these spezial "Dropz". My pool is a so called "Droperatorz" pool, so when delegating to my pool, each epoch you can optionally collect extra DRIP tokens!

Sometimes, when I come by extra tokens, I also do random giveaways to a by lottery picked delegator in my Straightpool Telegram group.

Personally, I do not recommend giving up ADA rewards with a known value now and in the future with high liquidity for a promise of future tokens which might never come to market, with unknown value and low liquidity. Too often people have been burned giving up valuable ADA rewards e.g. staking to ISPO pools with little to show for in the end.

What is the name origin of this pool?

Straight in the sense of straightforward, straight ahead, straight high quality audio, no gimmicks, just works.

Where can I learn more about all of this?

This document was last updated on Februrary 18th, 2024

Straight Pool