CO2POOL was one of the first stakepools on the Cardano Blockchain founded to use parts of the operator rewards to support meaningful projects that contribute to changing the world in line with the Cardano mission.
From the beginning, our main project was the climate-neutral Cardano Blockchain – hence the name CO2POOL.
We have already donated several times to climate protection initiatives since the pool was established – see here and here. The last donation of € 2,000 (approx. € 4,000) was made on Sept. 25th to Veritree for the creation of the Cardanoforest –we donated for 2,000 trees of the #1Milliontrees project. During COP26 in Glasgow, Veritree doubled all donations, so we donated additional 500 Ada for 1,000 trees to Veritree CardanoForest project on Nov. 6th.
Donations are usually made every 3 months – we involve our delegates and supporters by asking for suggestions and having them voted on.
The amount of the donation is of course also based on the respective price of Ada, and the success of our pool. The more delegators and Active Stake we have, the more blocks we can mint, and the more rewards our delegators and pool receive.
In the past we have donated our entire pool fee (1.9%) as well as parts of our fixed fee (340 Ada/epoch). This gives us a total donation rate of ~25% of our pool operator income.
We are pleased to be able to provide direct financial support for important climate protection projects such as our Cardano Grove in Scotland.
However, more important to us than financial support from donation – which many pools are now doing in many different projects – is to bring the topic of climate protection and Cardano blockchain technology together as a whole.
To push this forward, we have formed networks and are committed to working together with IOG and the CardanoFoundation and providing important impulses. You can read about our work here in the blog – and projects like the cooperation with Veritree, or talks with the UNFCCC that are currently underway, would not have been possible in this form without this time-consuming networking and our preparation of calculations and concepts.
We think that this substantive work is more important than just donating. Unfortunately, the time spent cannot be expressed in Ada, but it has been considerable in the past months, and all these activities run parallel to the everyday operation of the pool, my daily job as an environmental engineer and father of two kids, and also my son and co-pool operator, who is still at school and preparing for his A-levels alongside climate protection activities, is very involved (e.g. on the topic of tokens, NFT’s and in the Cardano Alonzo Purple Testnet).
We want to continue these activities in the future, and we want to contribute to the Cardano blockchain becoming THE standard for engaging NGOs and climate protection projects.
At the same time, in addition to these network activities, we will continue to donate to climate protection and deal with it transparently. We will continue to document all our activities / donations.
We will maintain the current rate of about 25% to donate and gradually increase it to 33% as the number of our delegates and Active stake grows.
Our wish is to be able to operate the CO2POOL sustainably and to establish it as a permanent part of the Cardano network. For this, we depend on your support. We thank you very much for supporting us.
Stefan Rehfus, CO2POOL, October 2021