Cardano SPO Column: DOG Pool [DOG]

This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool whose mission is to help dog shelters find loving homes for stray dogs: DOG Pool [DOG].

The previous guest was a stake pool that donates to charities that are helping disadvantaged students to complete their education.

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 DOG Pool [DOG]

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

First of all, thank you very much for taking time to write a blog to support different pools. We really appreciate your help! 

We are a group of Technology professionals and passionate dog lovers from different countries who also love the philosophy of Cardano. We believe that Cardano can make a better world not only for humans but also for animals.

DOG POOL mission is to help canine charities to give rescue dogs a home, and prevent them being killed in inhumane ways. We believe that all together we can make dogs live much better. We are descendants of Argentinian-born Taiwanese, two of us currently live in Taiwan, we have a technician living in Argentina and our SPO is living in Australia.

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

Knowing the lack of transparency, bureaucracy, remittance restrictions, inflation and currency devaluation in the South American banking system, we have been looking for ways to preserve the value and defend our property rights.

We first came across cryptocurrency through Jose, the SPO of ADA ONE POOL, who is our friend and has been promoting CARDANO with free talks in Argentina since 2018, and because we listened to him, we sold our Bitcoin to support Cardano because we wanted to support decentralization. 

Now we are back in Taiwan to study and continue to promote CARDANO in Taiwan, but since we are dog lovers (one of us even adopted 5 dogs) and we think the idea of CARDANO is also diversity and inclusion, we want to be able to do something for dogs and promote CARDANO in Taiwan at the same time, so we decided to set up a pool to support decentralization of the CARDANO blockchain by doing our part.

Please tell us more about your mission, how are you helping dogs find a loving home? Are you involved with dog shelters and charities?

Most of our help so far has been in the form of monetary sponsorship, volunteering, encouraging dog adoptions, helping with donations to cover medical expenses, and helping some stray dogs shelters find willing adopters. Currently we are working only with four small stray dog shelters and only two of them accept ADA. 

We know that big or famous shelters could catch more attention and get more donations, so we are only looking for smaller shelters to donate to. We have successfully helped seven dogs find homes. We are not involved with dog shelters nor charities but sometimes we volunteer in some activities. We prefer to donate to dog shelters that accept ADA.

If anyone knows of stray dog shelters that accept ADA donations, we would love to work with them and would be grateful if you would contact us.

If you had to explain why Cardano matters to people outside the ecosystem, how would you go about it? What are the benefits of crypto and blockchain in everyday life?

As mentioned earlier, CARDANO is different from other blockchains in that it is an academic blockchain, with a scientific approach, peer reviewed, energy efficient, decentralized, has many stake pools on topics related to climate, animals, oceans, education and charity, and many other related projects that have a positive impact on the world, which can make the Cardano blockchain better known to people outside the ecosystem.

In addition, it can deliver true freedom of wealth and asset management to people as masters of their own property, eliminating the need for intermediaries to increase transparency and reduce the chance of corruption in the banking system and government. So CARDANO must do well in GOVERNANCE, many people are looking forward to it!

Awesome. Any closing thoughts? Where can people stay in touch?

Our long-term goal is to let more Taiwanese know about CARDANO, although our pool is small and we don’t have many delegators, we sincerely hope our pool could continue to grow, although currently almost all small pools are facing the difficulty to find delegators, and the current protocol doesn’t help much small pools, and we really hope it could be changed soon in the future. 

We also hope that more people will become aware of our pool and mission, and support small pools so that we can truly support the decentralization of CARDANO. We are a small single pool with a big heart and beautiful mission. Hopefully we can grow more soon and help more stray dogs in the world!! 

If you want to contact us, the most common channels we use are TWITTER or write to us at our email address.

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