Cardano SPO Column: LambdaHoneypot [HONEY]

This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool co-owned by two good friends running on bare metal in London with additional relays around the world: LambdaHoneypot [HONEY].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool stake pool operated by two brothers that support charities helping foster children find a loving home.

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.

Cardano SPO Column, interview with LambdaHoneypot [HONEY]

Hi, thanks for your time. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?

Lambda-Honeypot runs on bare metal in London with additional relays around the world. We run 5 different relays over 4 continents. The pool is co-owned by two good friends.

In the past we have contributed to several charities and have adopted Parly the Moonbear who is also our mascot and the bear in our logo!

One owner is based in the UK and operates the pool. They have over 15 years experience in the IT sector and built and maintains the pool, having even moved the pool’s physical location with minimal down time and no missed blocks.

The other owner lives in Germany and helps in marketing and managing social media. Previously they have experience in Chemical Engineering, but are now focused on bringing up two young children.

What’s the path that led you to Cardano and to become Stake Pool Operators (SPO)?

We have always been big believers in crypto and the decentralised nature of it. We wanted to be more involved and hopefully contribute to the ecosystem using the experience we have with software development and system administration. After an initial attempt with Ethereum on Proof of Work we quickly became bigger fans of Proof of Stake when these chains started to emerge, largely due to the poor environmental impact of PoW mining.

We evaluated several options and decided Cardano was the best implementation of Proof of Stake for us to be involved in. This was largely based on the lack of any punishment (slashing), the fantastic community and the lower cost of entry compared to other chains.

What has been your experience as admins of the Cardano Single Pool Alliance (CSPA)? What do you think can be done to help single pools, especially small ones who are working towards minting their first block?

Overall it has been a very positive experience! It’s great to see so many SPOs committed to keeping Cardano decentralised and trying to keep the minimum attack vector of the network as high as possible. The list of current members can be seen here.

We are starting to see some great projects that focus / benefit CSPA members, for example VendingMachine, TosiDrop and StakingDAO. Projects that focus on single pool operators are great for raising visibility and giving delegators a reason to stake with single pool operators over established multipool groups. 

Regarding small single pool operators looking to mint their first block we recommend the F2LB initiative. We have been part of this initiative since the very start of our journey and they have helped many SPOs get their first blocks.

We also recommend the xSPO alliance, which is designed to help extra small size pools. They have a great community on discord helping each other and details can be found here.

You mentioned you’re working on Golang tools for SPOs. For those who don’t know, what is Golang? And how will these tools help Stake Pool Operators?

Golang is a programming language and we are working on SPO tools written in that language. Currently there are a lot of well known tools written in the RUST programming language, and Cardano itself is written in the Haskell language. 

We aim to push forward Charles Hoskinson’s recently shared vision of helping Cardano become a polyglot ecosystem. This means producing tools and components in a variety of programming languages.

At present, our tool only offers a simple way for SPOs to calculate leaderlogs with a timezone adjustment using IOG’s leaderlog implementation. For anyone interested the project is based here and is open source.

Great contribution. Any closing remarks? Where can people contact you

We would like to say a big thank you and highlight the support we have enjoyed from the Cardano Foundation (CF) and Input Output Global (IOG). This support allowed us to mint not only our first Block but now our 500th and was a life saver after going through 47 blockless Epochs.

The delegation from CF and IOG has also helped us follow our pool’s mission to help Bears, Bees and Delegates. Which we do through Charitable donations and offering consistent bonus rewards on top of block rewards to our delegates. We also actively support and engage with our delegates by offering sponsorship to fundraisers or sports events they participate in and asking for their opinions on pool matters.

To get in contact please send us a message on Twitter, Reddit or join our Telegram or Discord groups which can be found through our website.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG.