CO2POOL — donations and activities

Dear delegators and friends of our pool,

we operate our pool CO2POOL as a single Stakepool out of conviction to support the Cardano network. Single pool means we will never run a second (or more) pools. In this way, we help to keep the network decentralised, and we also give other pool operators a chance to generate blocks, too. For this reason, we have also participated in the Cardano Single Pool Alliance (CSPA) from the early beginning.

At the same time, we were one of the first pools (since the beginning of the Cardano Shelley-Mainnet, epoch 208, 29th of July, 2020) to declare that they will donate part of their pool operator rewards. We named ourselves CO2POOL because we are particularly concerned about climate change. I am an environmental engineer by profession, and my son and co-operator of our pool is active in Fridays for Future. So we decided to donate 50% of our pool margin to climate protection purposes.

One is what you say, the other is what you do. So we want to set out here what we have done so far.

Donations

In 2020, we only generated a single block because we had hardly any Ada delegators. This would have resulted in only 11.4 Ada as a donation – hardly worth mentioning at the Ada prices at the time. Therefore, at the end of 2020, we increased the amount to €50 and – after polling our delegators and followers – donated it to the GreeForestFund (see certificate). With this donation, we were able to contribute to the permanent protection of 10 m² of old-growth forests in Germany.

Since mid-January (epoch 242), we have been generating blocks on a regular basis, as our Active Stake first rose to 3.5 million (thanks to a lovely whale we really appreciate), later to 6.7 million and now to 7.1 million thanks to the support of our growing number of delegators.  IOHK support has given us a decent boost – we are one of 100 pools supported with 3.2 million Ada for 3 months (until the end of April). Meanwhile we are generating between 3 and 12 blocks each epoch. Our pool is performing well – we haven’t missed a block so far and – despite our donations – we have a high Return on Stake (RoS) of 5.6% for our delegators.

Since mid-January 2021 – in just 10 weeks – we have already raised 762 Ada in Rewards for Climate Action. We asked our delegators in March which organisation we should donate to, and TreesForLife was chosen. We initially donated the equivalent of €635 for TreesForLife to plant a small grove in the Scottish Highlands (see slip). We have named it the “Cardano Grove”. Initially 50 trees will be planted there, in the future we will enlarge this grove through further donations, and our delegators and supporters can also take action there and have another tree planted for only 6 €. A really great project! Thanks to Christian Unger for the great reference to TreesForLife.

https://treesforlife.org.uk/groves/310498/

We will report on further activities and our donations here. The next donation is scheduled for the end of June 2021. We hope that our current delegators will stay loyal to us and that we will find new ones – because the higher the Active Stake of our pool, the higher the number of blocks and rewards.

Other activities

We conducted a survey in March among pool operators on what kind of energy they use to run the pool infrastructure. The result can be read here. The astonishing result of our (simple) calculation was that the Cardano Blockchain can be made climate neutral with relatively simple means.

We then have initiated a few activities to achieve this. We got in touch with IOHK to initiate an extended survey among pool operators to improve the database. We have also founded the Cardano Climate Neutral Blockchain Group (CNBG), in which 10 pool operators with similar goals are now exchanging ideas. The common goal is to be able to make the Cardano Blockchain as climate neutral as possible. It is encouraging that we are not alone, but that other pool operators want to advance climate protection, too. Almost all of these pools are smaller pools and usually single pools, far from reaching saturation. It would be welcome if there was a vote of the delegator’s feet from the big pool farms to smaller pools like ours or those of the other climate protection pools. It doesn’t change anything in terms of the delegator’s rewards, but it is positive for climate protection. Anyway, I can state that otherwise my son and I would not have been able to donate > 600 € every 3 months for the creation and preservation of forests. Thanks a lot to Cardano and our delegators!

Stefan Rehfus, CO2POOL, April 2021

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