This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool which gives its delegators discounts when buying ADA at any of the Boinnex Crypto ATMs: Cardano Abu [CABU].
Last week’s guest was a stake pool supporting projects which help to improve social stability, with servers running in a CO2-neutral way.
This initiative is a point of reference for everything Cardano and every week or two we will invite a Stake Pool Operator (SPO) to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.
Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.
Summary
Cardano SPO, interview with Cardano Abu [CABU]
Hi, welcome to this column. Tell us something about yourself, where are you based and what is your background?
Hey, I’m Bryan! I’ve been running the Cardano Abú Stakepool since August 2020. I’m from Cork in the south of Ireland. It’s known as the rebel county and is the second biggest Irish city after Dublin. I’ve spent around 10 years working as a Project Manager across a few different industries. I enjoy travelling and think it’s really cool that the Cardano community is so geographically dispersed. I hope to meet more of the SPOs dotted around the world.
How did you discover Cardano and what motivated you to be part of this ecosystem?
I first discovered Cardano by chance in 2017. I was contracting as an IT Project Manager and looking for a new role and a recruitment agent mentioned a remote role working with IOHK on the Cardano project. I joined IOHK and worked as a Project Manager for a few months on the Shelley release. It was a great experience and it was actually Cardano that introduced me to Bitcoin and the wider crypto ecosystem. I went down the rabbit hole as they say and I’ve been involved in crypto ever since. I’m a big believer in Cardano for a number of reasons, but the main reason is the community and the team at IOHK.
The Cardano Abu stake pool is sponsored by Boinnex, can you tell us more about this? What kind of services do you provide?
I founded Boinnex in early 2018 as a small Irish crypto startup. At the time there were no Bitcoin/Crypto ATMs in Ireland and I saw a gap in the market. I set up a Bitcoin ATM as a test really and then it expanded from there. We now have 18 machines throughout Ireland and also do some research, development and consulting work in the crypto space. As far as I’m aware we were the first operator to add Cardano (ADA) support to Crypto ATMs. Here you can find some blog posts about that for anyone interested
We’re currently working with an Irish College on a PoC Application that’s integrated with Cardano that I’m pretty excited about. Hopefully in early 2022 we should have something built that we can share.
Looking at the broader crypto market, what do you think is required to reach a significant mass adoption? How long do you think it will take?
There are a few obstacles to mass adoption. A lot of people think they have missed the boat, but we’re still very very early in the adoption lifecycle. The key for me is around education and making it easier for the average user to get involved. There’s quite a steep learning curve with crypto and the average person might not have a lot of technical knowledge. This is where education and better user experiences are important. Managing private keys and being responsible for key security is not not something that everyone wants to do. More services that make it easier for people to hold crypto and be confident about the storage will definitely help with more adoption.
The different on-ramps such as exchanges and Bitcoin ATMs are also important for adoption. Making it as easy and frictionless as possible to go from fiat to crypto and vice versa is important. Integration is also key and when we start to see more integration between different chains and with the existing financial system I think that will help with mass adoption.
I reckon that over the next 10 years we’ll see more and more of traditional finance move over to DeFi. Probably in a decade we’ll have reached the late majority in the adoption lifecycle.
Any final thoughts? Where can people stay in touch?
There’s a famous quote in Gaelic (an Irish sport) that sometimes reminds me of the crypto space: “take your points and the goals will come.” ????
People can reach out to me via email, Twitter and Facebook. Always happy to meet new people involved in the crypto space.
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Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOHK.
