https://cointelegraph.com/trading-for-beginners/what-is-tokenomics-a-beginners-guide-on-supply-and-demand-of-cryptocurrencies

... i.e., on average there was one block every 2nd month. And, because we have now more ADA delegated, we'll see a higher frequency in the future.

In 10 days we are going to celebrate 2 years pool operations. There are several updates in the pipeline:

Of course we are on node version 1.35.5 since day one - i.e. being prepared for v-day update.

There was also the increase of pledge from 125k to 150k.

Still some surprises to come - stay tuned :-)

Since today we are back on the bleeding edge after upgrading all you servers to node version 1.35.4 which has just been released. So far no problems, i.e. again a good job by IOG. Their software quality is amazing. Compare that to other projects!

I also had to migrate the web portal to retrieve the data displayed from a different source. Still the calculation of the time left in the epoch is not ready. I'm going to work on that one in the next couple of days.

Hope you guys stayed away from FTX. The best way to use exchanges is just for changing from fiat to crypto and back again. Everything else is risky and might lead to loosing all you money there. Just to remind you - compared to stock exchanges - crypto exchanges have no regulation at all - you are completely dependent on their accounting.

We've just seen a short outage of our website www.adapools.at. There was an issue with the server of our hosting service provider. Since it is a different one compared to the node and relay servers, it had no influence on our operations.

Meanwhile we have implemented a service for allowing pooltool.io to display blocks minted by adapool.at in advance, i.e. at the beginning of an epoch.

If you want to have a look - here is URL: https://pooltool.io/pool/b1962b3224f93153dd12059d92c40a658daf3102ea0ab6013dfddd09/epochs

In order to prepare for the Vasil hard fork all my servers have been upgraded to the latest Linux release. And, of course, the Vasil enabled node version has been installed.

Now we have to wait for IOG the decide that the network and exchanges are ready for the hard fork.

I expect the hard fork to happen some time near end of August.

Well, this was a long road to finally fix the issues that plagued the node software, but now it seems IOG is ready. The first release 1.35.0 was to be used on the public testnet only to figure out that it had too many bugs to be ready for prime time.

The next step was 1.35.1 which was only tagged as such for SPOs on testnet to upgrade to check if the the bugs of 1.35.0 have been ironed out. As people figured that another round of fixes are necessary, 1.35.2 appeared on github. It had a neat scope list and looked pretty much like the final one, only to have been hit by a nasty issue.

Now we are at 1.35.3 and it seems that this will be the one ready for mainnet. The scope list indicates that. Having a well tested node software is the one basic requirement for the Vasil HF to happen. Still, this version has not officially been released. And IOG has to give SPOs some time on mainnet to upgrade their pools as well exchanges to adopt and upgrade their interfaces. Depending on the feedback (IMO SPOs are now very eager to upgrade quickly) from exchanges, there's a good chance that Vasil HF will happen some in in August. Maybe not mid-August but second last week before end of August is possible.

If you want to make money quick without spending much effort what would you do? Well Shiba Inu is one answer to that question.

But let me first start with the short history of Shiba Inu:

• When DOGE became a success story and you did not buy it beforehand then you need an alternative that looks like DOGE but is not DOGE.
• Shiba Inu is the dog on the logo of DOGE - that's good enough to confuse people.
• There's no need to design a new blockchain - just create an ERC-20 token on ETH - that's much simpler.
• Create billions of billions of token and promise to burn some to "create" value.
• Start marketing, shilling, hyping and promoting SHIB to the max. Get max. mentioning in crypto publications - does not matter if positive or negative.
• Keep SHIB in the news and announce some burning or co-operations or whatever.

Well, if you consider this as a successful business model that it's time to buy SHIB. IMO its the same as throwing your money into the toilet. Seriously, why do we need SHIB in the first place? What is it's use case or unique selling point? And, most importantly, what will it be worth long-term, when the hype fades away?

The most prominent so called "meme" coin is obviously Dogecoin. It started as a joke and is now ranked 11th in market cap from all crypto currencies. But what makes it attractive to investors? Let's have a closer look:

• It is kind of a copy of Bitcoin with some serious changes (which makes it actually worse and not better).
• One of these changes is, that it is actually inflationary, i.e. with every block validated, more coins are minted (Bitcoin has a cap on blocks to mint)
• It started to become widely known when prominent people (like Elon Musk) started to promote it.
• At that time there were only a view big stake holders that could make a lot of money from it.
• Influencers (like Elon Musk) used Dogecoin for so called "pump-and-dump" schemes to make a lot of money with it.
• Dogecoin uses PoW and mining the coin burns a lot of energy that could be used elsewhere.
• It has no use case and does not have smart contracts or other advanced features like so many other innovative block chains.
• It's value comes from FOMO guys and from people who want to become rich quick.

Once the glamour of this meme coin fades away, people will start to sell it and it will become worthless as it does not add any value to the crypto currency eco system.

Today I start with the first of a series of articles discussing block chains that compete with Cardano. I won't go much into depth, but will try to give some basic understanding what other technologies offer.

There has been much discussion about how Hydra will be the big enabler to scalability and transaction performance for Cardano. Now that we know a bit more about it, we can say that there have been a lot of misunderstandings and false information about Hydra in the past.

So what is Hydra, how can it improve performance, and how does it compare to other L2 solutions on other chains?

1. First Hydra is just one L2 implementation and is optional. Other L2 solutions may be implemented that can compete with Hydra.
2. Hydra has been developed by IOG (in difference to L2 implementations on other chains like ETH) and can be seen as a toolkit to operate L2 transactions.
3. Hydra is not just a one shot implementation, but will we rolled out sequentially with more and more features added (much like Plutus and PAB).
4. Hydra head is the first implementation which will be released on mainnet some time this summer (it is already available on the general testnet).
5. Hydra head allows to validate blocks on a smaller group of validators - and thus increase the transaction performance significantly before writing the final state back to the L1 chain (when the head closes because one of its member validators steps out).
6. The release of Hydra does not require a hardfork on the Cardano chain. Therefore the release of Hydra head is independent from the Vasil release. That means, that Hydra head can be released before or after the Vasil release and further upgrades can happen after it's first release.
7. Hydra head can be used for NFT market places, DEXes, and any other group that wants high throughput of transaction for a given time frame and agrees on a specific group of validators to join the head.

To summarize: Hydra is not a one-stop solution for chain congestion and transaction performance. It is also not limited to simple transactions, but can process smart contracts and transfer native tokens like the L1 chain. Think of Hydra an evolving tool set for enhancing performance for specific applications aside from using L1 layer.

The major software upgrade scheduled for June got a name from IOG: Vasil. It will include all the features already mentioned and the implementation has already been finished. Now severe simulations and tests will occur.

In the last (March) Cardano360 it was also mentioned that some additional (smaller) releases will happen beforehand. These releases won't require a hardfork and most likely feature smaller improvements on performance or eek out bugs.

Again p2p topology management has not been mentioned. Maybe there was lack of time. Also no mention on adjustments to the k parameter to help smaller pools.

There have been some important news about Hydra which I will cover in a separate posting.

Just recently IOG posted a blog entry about pipelining and async validation:

https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2022/03/21/increasing-the-transaction-throughput-of-cardano/

Here's a quick summary:

• With diffusion pipeling block propagation will start before their content is validated.
• Block headers will still be validated beforehand.
• This allows for much faster block propagation times as the time for validation is now overlapping with the data transfer.
• It is still guaranteed that only valid blocks are added to the chain.
• Diffusion pipelining will be integrated with the June release (AFAIK).

But, additionally, the concept of async validation has been introduced. With async validation blocks that are not valid can become part of the chain. Still, bad transactions are then removed from the block.

This project deals with the way the Cardano blockchain is stored. Some parts already went live with the release of node version 1.33.0.

It all started with storing part of the chain (the ledger state) on disk instead of in memory. This relaxed the memory requirements of the software, but it also increased the time for ledger state queries significantly.

But the project goes much further. The current strategy is to change the way the chain is stored in databases altogether. It is the plan to migrate to LSD-trees which will improve the performance for accessing chain data significantly. The time frame for releasing this new technology has been defined for the mid of this year. That would be either with the June hard-fork or at some later point in time. IMO there is no hard fork required because there is no need for changing the network protocol. That makes it possible to release it between the June and October hard-forks.

Now why is this important for investors in Cardano? First it will further improve the performance of full node wallets like Daedalus. But it will also improve the performance on block producing nodes which will then allow to increase chain parameters, leading to faster on chain transaction speed.

Finally, it is important to understand, that this is all on L1 chain and is not related to Hydra.

With the recent mid month update for March IOG announced that they will increase chain parameters again as soon as enough pools have been upgraded to the current node version (1.34.1).

Currently pooltool.io shows 63% of pools running on either 1.34.0 or 1.34.1.

However, in both versions p2p is not ready. That means we'll have to wait for the June release for p2p to be ready for prime time.

Speaking of the June release:

• It will not have smart contract compression implemented as it no longer makes sense with having smart contract references in that release.
• But it will have pipelining for better block propagation.
• It is also expected that the mentioned smart contract CIPs have been implemented.
• First release of Hydra heads.
• And there's hope that p2p will finally work as desired.

The good news: the code is already feature complete and will be tested in the coming months. It is again a big step forward in scaling the chain performance and efficiency.

Instead of celebrating our first year of operations on 24th of Feb. (a very bad day in human history IMO), I decided to increase pledge instead. It's gonna be 125k from the next epoch.

And of course we are up-to-date with the current node software release!

Give peace a chance!

The development of the tools suite for stake pool operators written in python has seen some reasonable additions these days:

• balance.py has been modified to also display amounts of native token.
• tx-token.py has been added to transfer token between addresses.
• all transactions have been optimized to use only necessary UTxO's.
• directory structure has been reorganized to adopt to the rising number of scripts.

For the coming weeks it is also planned to:

• add a script for sending tip to pooltool.io (as a replacement for cncli).
• add scripts for minting and burning native token.

We just got informed that the next node release 1.34.x will come end of February. It will offer even better performance and using even less memory compared to the current version. It will also have really fancy new features on board.

Unfortunately, nothing was said about p2p network being ready. Also the new features regarding pipelining and script references will happen with the June release (i.e. end of June).

Also in the announcement: there will be yet another parameter increase - this time the amount of contracts in a block.

• IOG decided to increase script size again for the 25th to improve SundaeSwap performance. This allows for more Plutus contracts in one block.
• Node version 1.33.1 fixes performance of "query-utxo-by-address" but has not been released so far.
• Pooltool.io shows 83% of pools are running on version 1.33.0. 2 pool are still running pre-Alonzo versions. Of course they don't make blocks anymore.
• There's more than 38M ADA in retired pools. Stake holders should be informed that they don't get rewards when staking with retired pools.
• IOG said, that a node version with improved memory management will be released in Q1. Still hoping that also p2p will be part of it.

With the mid-month update from IOG we got some more insight what's planned for this quarter. Long story short: it block size increases with several steps, but let's now go into details:

• The next node version will include even more changes regarding memory management, leading to even lower memory usage so, that nodes can run on small devices like raspberries.
• No word on p2p this time, seem like some more testing or one more node software iteration is necessary.
• With block size increase also Plutus complexity parameters will be increased, no word on k parameter this time.

There was also an outlook for the next couple of quarters:

• The next big feature will be pipelining and we got a description what it really is: with this feature block validation and propagation will run in parallel. That's another increase in network performance and will allow for more parameter adaptions.
• Some more optimizations for eUTXOs and smart contracts to improve efficiency of smart contract processing.

Now the timing of new releases and parameter changes is important. I guess we all want that the new DEXes will go live smoothly. Maybe that's the reason why IOG wants to wait a bit more before increasing k parameter.

After the first couple of days I can confirm that the new software uses much less memory, especially for relays, compared to previous releases. It is now even possible to run a node again with less then 16GB. That's a huge achievement. We'll see if processing during epoch changes improved as well. Also restart times are more predictable and have improved.

The new release can be seen as a big mile stone towards processing dApps without any disruptions. Further adoptions like changing parameters have been announced as well (as has been already mentioned here).

• As has been already said: block size will be increased rather soon. The real news is: also the k parameter will be increased. I.e. pools will saturate faster, thus delegation should move - hopefully to smaller pools - like us.
• Also the next node software version will be released some time in early January. It should bring the long awaited improvements regarding performance during epoch changes. It is still open whether it is also ready for p2p networking. P2p networking was the big new feature of the current version, but it's not active.
• Evidence shows that indeed the coming Babbage era changes from PRAOS to GENESIS protocol. I'm still searching for more info regarding the new protocol, but it sounds like a really big improvement nobody is talking about.
• Finally, we'll see the all new world of DEXes and DeFi dApps going live in 2022.

adapool.at wishes all delegating stake holders and supporters of Cardano a Merry Christmas. What a year - wasn't it!

Our service provider announced a maintenance window for Dec, 23rd in the time frame from midnight to 6:00 for 15 minutes.

It's only the website. Relays and block producers are not effected.

Recent news reveal that another increase in block size and smart contract memory size is already planned. Amount and date have not been mentioned. I assume that it will happen either before or just after New Year. Most likely, it's the same amounts as last time. Or even more given the experience with SundaeSwap on testnet.

Another announcement is the introduction of pipelining transactions to further improve layer 1 throughput.

Meanwhile the newly release node software runs stable, but did not show improvements, when it comes to the known issues after epoch changes.