INITIAL POOL STAKE OFFERINGS IN CARDANO: Empowa

by THE.ONE.OR₳CLE

This article is a subsection of a larger article “INITIAL POOL STAKE OFFERING IN CARDANO: a critical overview”

Disclaimers

1. This is not financial advice. I have no training whatsoever in the finance sector and I am in no way or capacity a licensed financial advisor.

Empowa — reviewed by Bruno

To my absolute shame this is a project that slipped through the cracks of my delegation schedule so far, even though I was aware of it from the beginning.

This project brought innovation by providing utility to their NFT’s, which can increase ISPO rewards up to 120%. A great incentive for owners to delegate and a great treat for those who bought these low mint editions. The details on these bonuses are clear, but unfortunately buried in the FAQs, when they should be right next to the ISPO basic information.

A negative aspect that was later corrected, was the initial formulation of the base rewards. Instead of providing the amount of EMP earned per ADA staked, the team provided the ratio per ADA forfeited in benefit of the pool, which is both impractical and proved to be misleading, with many delegators failing to understand this formulation. There are more implications to his rewards scheme, under which the rewards become directly dependent on pool performance, that is entirely of the team’s responsibility and ultimately an unfair approach, since pool performance it’s out of the delegators hands. Changing the rewards to an EMP earned per ADA staked, as in other ISPO’s, is more transparent and practical, but also puts the onus on pool performance on the team, rather than on the helpless delegators, as it should be.

The rewards calculator provides an epoch breakdown, but the delegators are missing a counter tracking the percentage of tokens distributed in the ISPO as whole, which is currently at ca. 50%. On a positive note, the team is now conducting an elegant public sale, split in consecutive rounds with a fixed maximum allocation that ensures a fair distribution of the tokens.

Figure 8. Percentage of total supply earned per epoch with 1M ADA staked. Bonuses for staking without NFT’s shown in red palette: for 1–9 epochs (baseline), for 10–14 epochs (+10%) and for 15+ epochs (+20%). Bonuses for staking with community/Catalyst NFT’s shown in brown palette: for 1–9 epochs (+50%), for 10–14 epochs (+60%) and for 15+ epochs (+70%). Bonuses for staking with community/Catalyst NFT’s shown in mustard palette: for 1–9 epochs (+100%), for 10–14 epochs (+110%) and for 15+ epochs (+120%).

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