🎯 Goals
- Dive into the blockchain world on a technical level, hands-on.
- Learn about the Cardano ecosystem.
- Learn how to maintain a Linux server.
- Make some money if possible or at least cover the server costs and donate to science.
👍 Noteworthy
- Duration: April 2021 - May 2022
- Total effort: ~ 80h (difficult to say though)
- 💀-reason: Could hardly keep up with the Web3 evolution. Also, increased traffic on the blockchain required more expensive servers.
- Greatest challenge: Marketing!
- 💝: Donated 680 CHF to science!
- 💡: Not your keys, not your coins
🤔 Thoughts
In a nutshell: we set up a staking pool on the Cardano blockchain. It consisted of one block producing and 2 relay nodes. We failed at marketing, but managed to earn enough ADA so we could donate some $$ to science.
I learned much less about blockchains than I thought I would, but then again I didn't really read much deeper into the tech than I needed to run the server.
To my surprise I quite enjoyed setting up, maintaining and automating tasks on the Linux server. I definitely know more about keeping a server secure than before.
Marketing. How naive I was about this topic. I thought I could just create a twitter account, write some tweets and people would come begging to stake their ADA with our staking pool. That didn't really work... at all. Also, I noticed how clueless I am about growing social media accounts.
Alternatively, I thought, I could just spread the word in my circle of friends and acquaintances, and that would lead our pool to get some traction. Couldn't be further from what happened. Turns out, people I know are just not much into cryptocurrencies. The ones that are, usually just hold some BTC or ETH.
The Cardano community is super supportive and there are some individuals that put a lot of time and energy into the ecosystem.
Decided to stop the project. One reason: I cannot keep up with all the stuff that is happening in Web3 and in Cardano. Hard to separate the noise from the signal.
Another reason: The traffic on the blockchain increased a lot once NFTs were introduced, at least on our servers. That led to some instabilitly, which crashed the node more and more often. I suspected that the block producing node probably lacked memory (it had 16GB), but I couldn't verify this. Renting a machine with more than 16GB in Switzerland felt like too much of a commitment on our side.
Over a period of roughly one year, we donate over 680 CHF to science related projects, specifically to the ETHZ Foundation. Very happy about this one 🥳
We "managed" roughly 117k worth of ADA at peak times. This might sound a lot, but it was not nearly enough to make this endeavor profitable. We kind of broke even.
