This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool operated by Brian and Joe from the US who are involved in building software tools, including Pool Peek Mobile and GetPayda: M1 Crypto EAGLE Pool [EAGLE].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool operated by Ernie from the US who’s a member of the xSPO Alliance.

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 Column, interview with M1 Crypto EAGLE Pool [EAGLE]

Hi, thanks for your time. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?

We’re based out of Fairfax, Virginia, United States. There are two of us that run the stake pool – Brian and Joe. We’re both software developers with about 20 years of experience.  

Brian concentrates on a lot of backend software development and devops. He does the majority of the pool infrastructure and maintenance. Joe has a lot of front end and mobile experience. He is the social media manager and also builds a few front end tools, like Pool Peek Mobile and GetPayda. 

Our “day jobs” allow us to work together building software tools at a consulting business. Joe will be responding to the questions below.

What’s the path that led you to crypto, to Cardano and to become a Stake Pool Operator (SPO)?

When the pandemic first hit, I had a lot of extra time on my hands and used that to do a ton of research on cryptocurrency. I was intrigued by the science of it and all of the different ways that different chains were trying to solve similar problems. 

I really liked the whiteboard video that Charles did back in 2017 to explain why Cardano was the future. It drove me to want to participate in Cardano, and at the time, running a stakepool was the easiest way to do so. Cardano had a very low bar to operating a pool compared to other chains, too. 

You’re also involved in projects like Pool Peek Mobile and GetPayda, please tell us more. What are these projects about?

Pool Peek is a pretty popular site in the Cardano community. It’s primarily run by Shamrock pool (shout-out to Paddy!) and Brave pool does a lot of the social media work for it. I built a mobile app on top of that for Apple and IOS devices. It has some ELI5 features, including a stake pool “wizard” to help you pick a pool out of the 3,000+ pools available to you.

GetPayda is a fun side project for me. I wanted to build something on top of Cardano wallets to better understand the technology. GetPayda is intended to be an invoicing platform where you can send requests to “get paid” via a very easy to use site with native wallet integration.

Many from the Cardano community are also very excited about another blockchain, Ergo. What is Ergo and what are your thoughts about the synergies between Cardano and Ergo?

I’ve been a huge Ergo fan for a little over a year now. EAGLE pool actually runs to Ergo promotions from time-to-time to encourage other people to check it out. Ergo has been getting a lot of hype these past few days after Max Maher suggested that it could easily 100x from here, but ERGO is way more than just hype. There are a ton of things I should mention:

• Ergo has a solid community and a lot of people building cool tools on top of it. 
• IOHK is involved in Ergo. 
• Charles called it a top 10 project.
• Ergo has a native SigUSD stablecoin. 
• The privacy features are amazing. 
• ErgoDEX bringing a cross chain capability between Cardano and Ergo is great. 
• It had an extremely fair token allocation. 
• Anyone can mine it with a fairly minimal setup.

I’m excited for Cardano to use the NiPoPoW capability of Ergo to support offline transactions. This is a little ways in the future, but I think it’s a game changer. While I’m super excited about this, I would like to add that I don’t think Ergo needs Cardano to succeed. I think Ergo is strong enough to stand on its own.

Awesome. Any final thoughts? Where can people contact you?

We’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to interact with people from all over the world that like Cardano. Our delegators have reached out. We’ve participated in Catalyst and had funded projects in both the Grow Africa and Grow East Asia sessions. We’ve chatted with IOHK people from around the world. I didn’t realize how massive of a movement Cardano was until I stepped back and thought about it.

Related, I checked our Pool Peek Mobile stats to see what countries people have downloaded our app from. How can you not be bullish based on the map below? Cardano is here to stay.

Twitter is the best place to catch us.

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