PSP Annual Report: A Year in Review 2023-2024

Cardano completed four years on 29th July 2024 since mainnet launch and so do PSP on 30th July 2024 successfully running the stake pool for four years . We are thankful to the SPOs, who helped and guided us in running our pool uninterruptedly. We are also thankful to the delegators, who trusted us as their stake pool operator but due to lack of delegation, we were unable to mint blocks.

In these four years, we have not achieved much and have not been able to go ahead with our vision due to a lack of delegation support. But in epoch 497 PSP minted its 23rd block on 15th July 2024 with an active stake of 131.55K₳, luck 802% and ROA 13.678%, receiving delegation amount of 121.05K₳ from a single delegator. We are thankful to the delegators for making this happen.

Pool parameters remain the same as the last year except the fixed costs, which has been reduced to 170₳ to attract more delegation to our pool. We are not able to increase the pool pledge to 10K ₳ as promised as we are not minting blocks and the VPS bill is increasing with increased resources and data size.

As we have low delegation support to our pool we are not minting blocks in every epoch. Running a stake pool on a cloud server is expensive but at the same time, it's reliable. So when block minting is not on schedule we will run our stake pool in-house to cut down the VPS bill and when block minting is scheduled we will again move back to a cloud server for its reliability. By adopting this hybrid approach we can run our stake more efficiently and cost-effectively.

As delegation/stake to our pool increases and we mint blocks more frequently we will continue to stay on cloud VPS for its reliability and maintain an uptime of 99.99%.

Digital Ocean will remain our preferred cloud service provider as usual. We prefer Digital Ocean due to its flexibility and reliability.

Now when block minting is scheduled our pool runs on three servers, core and Frankfurt relay on cloud and India relay in-house. We chose relay cloud server at Frankfurt for better connectivity and to avoid propagation delay. When block minting not on schedule it runs on two servers core and relay in-house.

Pool Parameters:

Pledge 5.10k₳

Fixed Costs 170₳

Margin 1%

Server Details on cloud (present):

OS: Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) x64

CPU: 8vCPUs

Memory: 32GB

SSD Disk: 240GB

In regard to the parameters a0, d, k:

a0 - pledge factor: Right now no minimum pool pledge is fixed by the IOHK.

d - decentralization factor: The parameter d became zero in epoch 257 on 31/03/21. That means the Cardano node is now fully decentralized.

k - saturation factor: Parameter K still remains at K =500, which was changed from K=150 in December, at Epoch 234, the max saturation level has been lowered to 64M ₳. IOG proposed to raise K from K=500 to K=750 in near future.

We still have neither received delegation support from IOHK nor from Cardano Foundation CF. We are trying our best to promote our pool to receive delegation support.

Till now we have not shared much about our personal side. Government regulation on crypto is in progress. Trust and faith on government policy on crypto regulation is still uncertain.We will definitely share our personal side when all when things are all in order and our pool is successfully minting blocks.

As always we will continue making quality content in Blockchain Technology, Cardano and Ethereum. Also, continue helping others in understanding the basics and become self-motivated in taking the next leap forward with blockchain technology.

Till now due to a lack of funds, we were not able to support any project or helped others in need to carry on with our vision. We are looking forward to your support during this third year of our stake pool operation. You can make a big impact on others' life simply by delegating your stake. Support us to transform our vision into action. Together we can make the world a better place to live in with equal opportunities.

Added pool milestones page on our website to keep you updated with the latest milestones that we cross as we move ahead with our stake pool operation. You can visit our pool milestones here.

Support us. Let's grow together. See you in the pool.