Spectrum Pool

Announcements

Blocks mean Donations:

The blocks are rolling and so are our donations! Check out the donations page on kindstudios!!!

Announcement 2:

Update: we made a block in epoch 221! As I said, everything is and has been configured correctly! ;-)
Since SPEC didn't mint any blocks yet (I checked, the setup is good and validated, the Cardano Slotleader lottery just hasn't picked SPEC yet since we have a very small stake) I decided to continue running the "all pool earnings will go to Pencils of Promise" campaign untill at least the d parameter has reached 0.5!

Announcement:

To celebrate the launch of SPEC, for the next four epochs (Cardano Epochs 211-214) ALL of my operator profits with this pool will be converted to bitcoin and donated to the Pencils of Promise charity, which is focused on providing education to children around the world!

What do I get for delegating with SPEC?

98% of the rewards this pool produces will be distributed amongst the stakers. Minus the fixed cost of course. But that is held as low as possible at 340₳. The fixed cost money will primarily go into server bills, maybe an external security audit if possible. Generally I commit myself to to price-match the current market regarding Pool fees, as long as the bills can get payed without cutting back on security. But that is just about keeping the lights on. If this Pool turns a profit, I commit myself to use 100% of my profits for charitable purposes! This could either be charity or to organize and run events with a social cause (as a serial organizer of hackathons and meetups this last one comes quite naturally).

What do You get out of running SPEC?

Well for one I know which pool I am going to be staking my ADA with :-) On the other hand I do also have hopes of participating in Hydra node projects once that comes online with these nodes.
Should any money be made of this I am interested in investing it in inclusivity projects and getting the technology to people that have not been given the best chances.
Long term I want to turn Spectrum Pool into a German Non Profit that invests all its income into projects for education and integration, inlands or abroad.

What is this Pool made of?

TL;DR:

Longform:
Spectrum Pool is a set of nodes being built from source on debian and nix docker images and being hosted on geodistributed servers.
Relay nodes are sourced from Linode, AWS and Digital Ocean (more cloud providers to come) and are located in San Francisco, Ireland and Singapore (more locations to be connected in the future).
The Core nodes are running on bare metal servers in home locations (with at least 1000/100 connectivity). Currently those in are Germany but I'm setting up Hot-Standby nodes in other countries as we speak. The Core Nodes and Relays communicate via a dedicated VPN network I operate so there is very little access to them otherwise. If you want to learn more you can contact me via the spectrum pool twitter, my personal twitter account. Or just come and speak to me on one of the meetups and hackathons I help organize!
Long term the intention is to have most of this set up (ansible roles, docker files, ops scripts, etc) open sourced on the SPEC github account.

Anything else?

Other Pools you should definitely check out!

• FARM (20% Profits go to Social Causes) Donations
• LIV (20% Profits go to Social Causes)
• AIR (10% of the profits go to social causes)
• BRTHE (10% of the profits go to social causes)
• LIFT (Profits go to Social Causes)
• STR8
• ATM

Erata

This is to be a very open project and I'm thinking of ways to open up the live monitoring of these systems to the public without increasing the attack sourface too much. Other than that, the focus lies very strongly on automation and utilizing the blockchains data. There was a longer discussion some days ago about interconnecting relays. Currently a lot of operators currate their relay node's topology files manually. Spectrum does so via scripts. Currently it is still dependent on the adapools.io topology tool but in the long run the intention is to read these things out of the blockchain itself (the data is in the pool registrations alrady).

This page uses icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

Stats

Node stats, etc comming soon-ish!

OK, now I want to watch that fancy background

Sure