This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a single pool operator who creates meticulous content for KNOW Cardano: Cardaknow [KNOW].
Last week’s guest was a Stake Pool operated by a family who’s driven by the mission of supporting Cancer Research by donating part of the revenue.
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.
Hi, welcome to this column. Please introduce yourself, where are you from and what is your background?
Hello. I am Sahil (@burgercrux), from Kentucky USA. I am a Software Developer with extensive experience in DevOps technologies. I have been a Cardano Stake Pool Operator for 4 months now. I have worked in Silicon Valley for 6 years before deciding to go full time on Cardano. I am currently enrolled in the Plutus Pioneer Program and working on Cardano NFT Projects. I also run a testnet pool and support the developer community within Cardano.
Why Cardano? And how did you end up operating a stake pool?
As I mentioned, given my experience as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE/DevOps) – starting a stakepool was the easiest way to contribute to Cardano. Like so many of us, I found Cardano very late – in early 2021. Since then, I have learned more about Cardano than any other blockchain – because of its clear roadmap and transparency detailed in the monthly Cardano360 updates. And as a developer, I can relate to the meticulous approach in delivery. At the end of the day, we are dealing with individuals’ hard-earned money while trying to fix the problems of Centralization.
Your https://cardaknow.io/ website is a great resource to learn more about Cardano. Besides being a knowledge base, are there any further plans?
I am documenting my learnings on our website which I hope can become a resource for new users entering the blockchain space. One of the easiest ways to learn something new is to visualize it and so CardaKNOW is emphasizing more on Infographics along with the text. Currently there are three major categories published on the website. Blockchain Basics, Cardano Basics and Cardano Updates.
We are working on covering dApps, Catalyst Projects, NFTs and Price/Market movement. I understand not every-one is interested in the intricacies of Cryptography and Blockchain. But I am confident these articles will help people navigate the uncharted waters and hopefully avoid becoming a victim of scams. One of my personal hobbies also includes learning about Personal Finance and Tax Optimization. So maybe I will include that too in the future – for educational purposes.
In one of his latest videos, Charles Hoskinson spoke about ADA decoupling from bitcoin, can you share a few thoughts about this? Can Cardano surpass Bitcoin?
Cardano is under active development and Bitcoin has seen major adoption. BUT Bitcoin is under development too and Cardano has seen decent adoption as well. What I mean is BTC and major alts go hand in hand. A lot depends on the next few years as Cardano evolves. Ethereum – even today as big as it is – depends on the price movement from Bitcoin. Bitcoin represents the majority market cap for any single coin, which easily influences the prices of the rest of the coins. But $ADA is more resilient than others. ADA was $1.70 when BTC was $60,000. Now ADA is at $1.80 when BTC is $37000. Can Cardano decouple from Bitcoin prices? Maybe. But it has a long way to go and a lot of work to catch up to.
Thank you for answering. Something else you would like to say? Where can people find you?
We run our pool with Production level infrastructure – using 100% renewable sources of electricity – along with monitoring and alerting. I also have developed rolling updates as new stable versions of the Cardano node are released which helps reduce downtime. We are fortunate enough to receive delegation from IOHK as that helps a small pool like us tremendously. And to be competitive, we have reduced our pool fees to 0% to produce more rewards for our delegators and to attract more delegation. We have now consistently produced 50+ blocks for 20+ epochs.
If you like our work on https://cardaknow.io, consider delegating with KNOW and supporting our mission. Connect with us on Twitter and Telegram.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOHK.
