This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool operated by a technology-driven and performance-focused group of IT professionals spread around the globe: StakeLovelace [AAA].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool that is part of the Ardana ASPA and gives back to support humanitarian and environmental causes.

This initiative is a point of reference for everything Cardano and every week or two we will invite a Stake Pool Operator (SPO) to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.

Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.

Cardano SPO, interview with StakeLovelace [AAA]

Cardano SPO [AAA] are proud to be members of the Operators Guild

Hi, glad to have you here. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?

We are two SPOs who had our own pool brands on Incentivized Testnet and joined forces for Shelley mainnet launch, both with over decade long IT backgrounds (security and software development). 

I live in Australia and my co-owner is based in Portugal, so we have most time zones covered for our stake pool customer support! We try to have a decent geographic coverage for our infrastructure placements and in addition to existing US, Europe and Asia nodes are in a process of adding an African relay.

What’s the path that led you to Cardano and to become Stake Pool Operators (SPO)?

I watched a few of Charles’ videos back in 2017 during the big crypto FOMO run-up and over the next few years, during the bear market, I followed the project as it seemed to be one of the more transparent ones with regards to keeping ADA holders up to date with progress and goals. 

When, years later, Rust-based staking testnet came into existence, we became a part of a small friendly bunch of similar enthusiasts on Telegram, the group that later became known as Operators Guild. The Incentivized Testnet was certainly a wild ride (especially in the first third of its lifetime, with network stability being on a constant rollercoaster) but a lot of useful lessons were learned that prepared us for eventual mainnet stake pool operation.

What are multi-pools and how are they a danger to decentralization?

Multipools come in a lot of shapes, sizes and colors… some are rather inevitable (e.g. corporate entities with their hands on a lot of ADA, like exchanges and financial institutions), others are manifestation of people’s insatiable appetite for more profits, some are the fruits of SPO to ADA whale(s) relationships, and others might be a fundraising mechanism for the flavour of the month tokens-now-proct-later ISO. 

While it’s true Cardano is doing better than most, over 50% of active stake is delegating to a relatively small number of unique entities – and while it’s not meant to be everybody-who-spins-up-a-pool-gets-participation-award-prize stake pool network, there are still plenty of examples of disproportionate amount of stake, relative to the contributions to the ecosystem or some other worthwhile causes. 

It’s a volatile mix of fairly predictable human nature and protocol incentives, with some room for improvement and hope – we try to be part of the voice that questions the status quo and seeks transparency behind decision making (or lack thereof).

Cardano is expecting the Vasil hard fork in June. Can you tell us what will that entail and what are you looking forward to following this upgrade?

Major changes in Vasil, from my understanding, seem to be improvements on Plutus / smart contract side of things (with a few of the bigger under-active-development projects holding off their main releases until those changes are rolled out), but also expecting some node performance optimizations to be rolled out too, as this seems to be a year of node operation streamlining.

Thank you kindly for your time. Any final thoughts? Where can people stay in touch?

You can find us on Telegram, on Twitter or I’m usually roaming in the Stake Pool Best Practices channel as @homersapiens. Stake pool’s website.

Let’s try to keep the network as decentralized as we can, everyday decisions of delegators matter, as does delegator education (alas very little of it these days revolves around future network health). Hoping for some long overdue parameter changes to help the situation too – fingers crossed.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOHK.

Shiba Inu (SHIB), a Dogecoin-inspired decentralized cryptocurrency, just made a splash in the meme coin universe by landing a strategic partnership with the AAA game studio PlaySide.

In our previous piece on this subject, we had referenced a blog post by Shiba Inu’s lead developer, Shytoshi Kusama, to note that the project was gearing up to delve into the budding gaming sphere. That eventuality has now materialized in the form of a strategic partnership with PlaySide, the game studio behind popular titles such as Age of Darkness and Jumanji Epic Run. The studio’s press statement declared:

Binance Coin Just Became an Almost Perfect Deflationary Asset, With Over 500 BNB Tokens Burnt in the Past 24 Hours Since the Bruno Upgrade

“PlaySide Studios Limited (ASX: PLY) (“PlaySide”), Australia’s largest publicly listed video games developer, is pleased to announce it has entered into a material fixed price work-for-hire development agreement with Shiba Inu Games ….”

While revealing details of the agreement, the press release noted:

“Under the agreement, PlaySide will provide production, design, engineering, art, user interface and experience development services to Shiba Inu Games on a new game title during the 8-month term of the agreement. The development of the game will draw from the art of the Shiba token’s ‘Shiboshi’ NFT and will feature card collection, strategy, and battle mechanics. The multiplayer Collectable Card Game (CCG) is planned to be deployed on multiple platforms with a proposed launch date in Q1 FY23.”

Crucially, the contract does not entail any revenue-sharing arrangement with Shiba Inu Games – an entirely new division within the ambit of the Shiba Inu project. Once fully developed, the mobile-based, Shiboshi-inspired game would be licensed to Shiba Inu’s developers for use on Shibarium, the native blockchain of the Shiba Inu project that is powered by the SHIB token. As a refresher, the term Shiboshi refers to the 10,000 unique Shiba Inu NFTs. Apart from landing PlaySide, the project has also enlisted the veteran game designer William David Volk, a former VP of technology at Activision.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. Up until now, Shiba Inu’s differentiating factors were limited to its native peer-to-peer crypto exchange, dubbed ShibaSwap. However, with its foray into NFTs and the gaming metaverse, Shiba Inu now offers far more utility than the other competing meme coins, including Dogecoin.

Moreover, as per Kusama’s blog post, the revenue derived from Shiba Inu Games’ in-app purchases will be used, in part, to burn SHIB and LEASH coins. This step has phenomenal repercussions as it paves the way for a sustainable increase in the SHIB coin’s price. Currently, the SHIB token’s only systemic supply burn occurs when the generic name of a Shiboshi NFT is changed for a $100 fee paid in SHIB coins, which are then burnt. Should the project start utilizing in-app revenue to burn supply, it would dramatically scale up ongoing efforts to reduce 549.007 trillion SHIB coins that remain in circulation.

 

Despite the promising nature of these developments, the SHIB token remains in the doldrums currently, after having failed to recover from the broad-based Omicron-induced crypto carnage over the past weekend. As an illustration, the token is down around 6 percent over the past 24 hours, currently trading at the $0.00003577 level. Interestingly, SHIB’s current price level entails a loss of 59 percent relative to the all-time high of $0.00008845 registered on the 28th of October.