Cardano SPO Column: Cexplorer.io [POOLS]

This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool operated by the creator of ADApools.org, an explorer for stake pools: Cexplorer.io (formerly ADApools) [POOLS].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool working to educate and introduce people from their local and global community to Cardano.

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, interview with Cexplorer.io [POOLS]

Hi, glad to have you here. Tell us something about yourself, where are you based and what is your background?

Hi, first of all thanks for your interest and for your initiative. 

My name is Josef and I come from the heart of Europe – the Czech Republic. I’ve been a big cryptocurrency enthusiast since 2017, as a weird mix of developer, devops and marketing expert. Currently, I’m mainly responsible for the leadership and direction of the ADApools project which will be renamed to cexplorer.io. Besides that, I’m responsible for associated community websites, such as cardanoassets.com, adaex.org and others.

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

The path to Cardano was a natural and logical progression. In the beginning one makes some mistakes and gets caught up in various scam projects. I take this as almost an educational necessity for every crypto-fan. Without this experience one would mindlessly buy crap. 

Like when the current generation of newbies was buying LUNA in the middle of a death spiral and wondering why it kept falling even after the 99% fall when it was perfectly clear that the fall was far from over. Anyone who did even basic research would know that. 

That is, given risk management and the fact that crypto is here not for a few months but for a few decades or more, one needs to choose carefully projects with a real potential to succeed. One of the few such is Cardano, which is being developed on scientific principles. It never does any good to sit in a lot of places at once – so let’s say my choice was 3 thematically totally different projects. One of which is just Cardano, and that excited me even from a non-investment point of view just because of the eUTXO model and the scientific approach.

We are actually a group of friends and investors and we are all big Cardano fans, so the logical outcome was some deeper involvement in the Cardano ecosystem.

Originally, back in the ITN (Incentivized Testnet) days, ADApools were more of an experiment, but it took off and grew into a project that more people are currently working on. Even now, in the current downturn, more than 10,000 people visit it daily.

As for my pool (POOLS), the ideal and original idea was that the community would sufficiently appreciate my activity and the pool with a 4% fee would be saturated and cover the running costs and development. Unfortunately that hasn’t turned out to be the case, which I actually understand. So it was necessary to improvise a bit over time.

You’ve created some tools for the Cardano ecosystem like ADApools.org and CardanoAssets. Can you tell us what they do and what have you learned from creating them?

ADApools is the first explorer for Cardano. I would say it was created in parallel with PoolTool. The original focus was purely on pools, as even no reasonable transactional outputs were available at the time. There was no db-sync at the time, just node doing a json dump with pools that got processed.

Today the situation is considerably more pleasant despite a bunch of db-sync ills. ADApools.org offers a full-featured browser for transactions, assets, just about anything you can imagine on Cardano. In conjunction with this, we’ll be gradually rebranding to cexplorer.io. For the record, “cexplorer” is the default database name in db-sync, hence the name. If you’re wondering what I learned, I certainly got a much better understanding of how Cardano works in the background and discovered new contexts. This makes me happy because it shows that my choice of Cardano was correct. I definitely improved my English and last but not least learned to work better with PostgreSQL 🙂

As an OG, what advice do you have for new people coming into this space? What are the most important facts to know about Cardano?

I think the general crypto guide applies. So be careful when dealing with private keys. By the way, hardware wallets like Ledger are great. When trading, always verify that the token you are exchanging is indeed genuine (check policyId/fingerprint) and not a fake. 

Cardano is pretty user friendly at the moment. It’s definitely worth reading some basic information for beginners – especially how staking works, when you receive your first rewards, etc. I definitely have to mention the following. Don’t hold ADA coins at centralized exchanges because of, say, an extra 2% per year. Most centralized exchanges are hurting the ecosystem (especially Binance). 

Secondly, what is the point of holding a decentralized cryptocurrency if you have it on a centralized platform? You lose the freedom and benefits that Cardano offers: staking, voting, participating in the development of the ecosystem. I’d rather lose 2% a year than risk something negative happening to the exchange and the exchange being forced out of business. It wouldn’t be the first time in the crypto industry, and we’re likely to see something similar in the future. 

Thank you kindly for your time. Any final thoughts? Where can people stay in touch?

Thanks again for reaching out and for the interview.

Finally, I would like to add this. Cryptocurrencies are very risky, nobody doubts that today. They offer great potential for upside as well as downside. Personally, I think Cardano offers one of the best risk/reward ratios in the long run (NFA 😉 ). 

Thus, congratulations to all those who favour sober reason and are with Cardano over outright gambling like with Shiba and 9999 alike. I sincerely hope that with the passage of a few years we will not regret our decisions.

You can follow my efforts on Twitter.

I will be glad if you visit the new site Cexplorer.io, which will be live at the end of June.

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