LEAD Stake Pool 500 Mainnet blocks
LEAD Stake Pool is delighted to announce we have recently minted our 500th Mainnet block! To celebrate this milestone, we are currently looking to give away 100 ADA to 5 lucky delegators to our pool. To enter simply delegate a minimum 500 ADA to LEAD. The winners will be announced 2 epochs after we reach 500 delegators. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or Telegram to find out when the winners are announced.
A massive thank you to all our delegators for making this possible! Your trust, support and passion for our pool means everything to us and we could not be more grateful. We have certainly come a long way since our very first block in the very first SPO epoch, all the way back in August.
Despite being a long term holder and believer in Cardano, we originally launched our pool with “only” an approx 50k pledge. We were very lucky to get some early delegators onboard who we met via Twitter, a post on the Cardano Forums and the Cardano Australia Telegram channel.
These early delegators gave us the drive and determination to learn more and helped us take the plunge to increase our pledge further to encourage others to join us. At the time of writing, we have a declared pledge of 382,000 ADA (increasing all the time) which we hope proves our commitment and dedication to our pool operation.
Coming from a Computer Science background enabled us to get the pool up and running relatively quickly with some guidance from the massively helpful community over on the Cardano Stake Pool Workgroup Telegram channel. We were part of a number of the Mainnet candidate test environments, where it felt like we were doing updates to our Cardano nodes every other day (we are sure other SPOs remember these times fondly too). So when the time eventually came to launch for the Mainnet we were ready and raring to go.
However, marketing was something we had no experience with whatsoever and is a major part of running a successful pool. As we believed in Cardano and were confident that the price of ADA would increase, we chose to be a semi anonymous operator simply known as Banksy (we figured people do not go around telling everyone how much money is in their bank accounts so…) and that Twitter and Telegram were going to be our main battle ground. We also decided that we wanted to be completely open and honest with our delegators, sharing all important information about the pool operation regardless of if the news was good or bad and figured these two platforms were the perfect place to do so. We see the pool as being owned by all our delegators just as much as us and we often use the phrase “Together we are LEAD Stake Pool”. We believe this type of openness is something our delegators truly appreciate.
We acknowledged that maybe we could gain more delegation if we were ‘YouTube famous’ but we did not believe it was worth taking this risk. We did however start producing some basic education videos for delegators to help explain some of the main concepts and parameters for the Cardano blockchain, something we plan on picking up again as soon as there is some further updates. We are thinking long term with our operation and all types of security are always at the forefront of our mind.
Despite not having the same sort of social media following as some of the biggest pools/farms we believe that we have done quite well for ourselves with 14.8m ADA currently staked with LEAD from 318 unique wallet addresses. In addition, we are currently ranked 251st via Daedalus and 88th on ADAPools. We are also in the top 300 pools for declared pledge and have a solid 5.303% Lifetime ROA (higher than a-lot of the larger pools).
LEAD is a Secure, Reliable and Trusted stake pool which is also operating on the Cardano Testnet. This means that we are helping to test the latest releases of the Cardano Node along with also testing our upgrade and scripting procedures before deploying anything to our Mainnet nodes. This is why we are so confident in our pool operation.
From all of us at LEAD, thank you for taking the time to read this post (our first ever on Medium!), we will be sure to provide further updates in the future too.
We are deeply passionate about our pool and for the future of Cardano (roll on Alonzo and Smart Contracts!) and would love to welcome some new delegators to join us at LEAD (do not forget about our giveaway competition mentioned at the top of this post!).
Please be sure to head to www.leadstakepool.com where you can find all our pools details along with much more information.
Alternatively please reach out to us on any of the social channels mentioned in this post. We are here to help and would be more than happy to answer any questions or queries you may have.
We hopefully look forward to welcoming you onboard to LEAD Stake Pool sometime soon :)
Together we are LEAD Stake Pool
Cheers
Banksy