This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool operated by Softwarez at its Best (SAIB Inc), a software development company specialised in blockchain technology: ADA Philippines [ADAPH].
Last week’s guest was a family-run stake pool using a network of low-powered Raspberry Pi devices.
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 ADA Philippines [ADAPH]
Hi, glad to have you here. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?
Softwarez at its Best Incorporated, a software development business situated in Cebu, Philippines, runs the ADAPH Stake Pool. SAIB Inc. specializes in software services, particularly blockchain development with a focus on Cardano.
The company is managed by a young group of techies, programmers, and innovators, that was brought together by Clark Alesna, who has 15 years of experience in Software Development, he has been around Cardano for a long time, he later worked at Cardano Foundation, and has made a significant contribution with the launch of the Cardano Developers Portal and the Cardano NFTA. Our team once reported the Ryzen bug to the IOHK’s cyber security team, we have been professional and diligent from the start.
Our team has the same vision for the company: to be one of the top Cardano contributors in the Philippines and to continue to work hard to improve the world through decentralization.
We are also proud that our team currently is a service provider to dcSpark and is helping with the development of Flint Wallet and Milkomeda.
What’s the path that led you to Cardano and to become Stake Pool Operators (SPO)?
ADAPH founder – Clark Alesna, first learned about Cardano in 2017, and he quickly understood that the concept of Cardano is quite similar to his vision and goals for the world. He’s looked at everything, including the technical aspects, and he can’t find another chain that compares to Cardano.
ADAPH has been around since the start of the Shelley era, our stake pool brand name represents the Philippines because we want to raise awareness, provide financial freedom to our fellow Filipinos in the future, and bring adoption by providing technical services/solutions to local companies and with the government in the Philippines through Cardano.
We’re also committed to the Cardano community and ecosystem and will continue to grow and contribute to support the development of a strong future and decentralization.
As a software development company, what contributions have you made to the Cardano ecosystem and what’s in store for the future?
Our contribution is a spectrum of things from submitting github issues, submitting pull requests to developing our open-source software that could help Cardano. One of the biggest things we think we have contributed is something called IdentityToken, a token and protocol that can represent your identity, which is also open-source.
As we have seen growth in the Cardano ecosystem, we have seen traffic in the network, that’s why our team developed the Cardano Tx Submission Node, an open-source service, so we can all avoid overloading a specific server/relay mempool for pending transactions and overall helping with the confirmation times. We also developed hosky-swap.io which is not a serious open-source project, simply to provide an exchange for hosky tokens.
On top of technical contributions, we also focus on the situation here in the Philippines, we also organized humanitarian efforts to help the community.
Now that smart contracts have arrived, the ADAPH team wants to be a more serious contributor to the Cardano ecosystem, competing with the likes of Blockfrost and NFT-Maker, which are successful projects in the Cardano ecosystem, while also contributing to Cardano’s DeFi growth. Stay tuned for what’s coming.
What does the cryptocurrency and blockchain landscape look like in the Philippines? What possibilities do you envision for the country?
Similar to other countries, cryptocurrency and blockchain are not yet fully adopted in the Philippines, although it’s already been introduced and exists here, only a few are open-minded and knowledgeable on how it works and how it will benefit us. People are still dependent on a centralized financial system, that’s why our team in SAIB Inc. and ADAPH would like to boost the Cardano adoption through educating people, providing opportunities like staking, technical solutions and one of our goals is to someday be able to work on a Voting System for the Philippine Government using Cardano Technologies.
We understand that we have yet to make considerable progress on all of these, but we will not give up and will continue to strive toward our goal every day.
Thanks for your time. Any final words? Where can people stay in touch?
Thank you to everyone who has helped us grow; remember that decentralization is always the goal, so please support small pools and any effort for decentralization, and the rewards will follow if you think long-term because good things come to those who wait.
We still have lots of upcoming projects this year! For this to happen, we need your continuous trust and support! And one way to show it is by delegating to our pool ADAPH. And to get more updates, you can also visit our blog.
Feel free to send us a message or connect with us through our other channels: Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and Discord.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOHK.
