INITIAL POOL STAKE OFFERINGS IN CARDANO: SundaeSwap
This article is a subsection of a larger article “INITIAL POOL STAKE OFFERING IN CARDANO: a critical overview”
Disclaimers
- 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.
SundaeSwap — reviewed by Artem
Things in the most anticipated ISPO started off with a vote to elect the community SPO’s that would play the role of scoopers. The team used the blockchain to record the votes, which simply put were coded self-transactions. However, vote recasting allowed the community to lobby in support of their preferred SPO’s with the highest perceived chance to enter the scoopers list. In that sense, the voting was a product of the delegators’ preference and the community lobbying. Perhaps a shorter timeframe would have helped to reduce the lobbying aspect.
What happened next was a massive stake migration to the pools run by the selected SPO’s. This led to serious backlash from single pool operators losing large amounts of stake to an ISPO that was almost two months away from even being announced. We can only blame the community for its eagerness. This was some serious FOMO. SundaeSwap took an impartial stance, not telling delegators to join, but not doing anything to prevent the unnecessary centralization of the blockchain either. That was the negative aspect of the ISPO. The total stake delegated was quite large and the centralization was unnecessary, but the ISPO itself lasted only 5 epochs.
Although it will take time, the team announced recently that in the future all pools with votes in the SPO election will first receive ADA stake from their escrow (orders in queue) and later from all smart contracts. A great decision in my opinion. It’s only a shame that the team did not use these pools for the ISPO as well. After all, there was no obvious reason as to why the distribution could only be through the elected scoopers.
There were complaints in the community about the low rewards. However, everyone had the necessary information to estimate the rewards and the total stake to the pools has been tracked since the votes. No reason whatsoever to complain. DYOR. Although the official rewards dashboard provides an epoch breakdown, it was not always timely updated each epoch, which is important in an ISPO with such short duration.
For a moment I was excited about what the team called Reverse ISO, but the post from the team was misinterpreted. SundaeSwap wanted to conduct a second stage of the ISO using poos from single pool operators, but only delegators participating in the previous ISPO would be eligible for rewards. In the meantime it seems like the team changed its mind and all previous pools plus the single operator pools will award rewards, and to all delegators. Personally, I would have liked to see the Reverse ISO exclusive for single pool operators and available for anyone, regardless of participation in the previous ISPO. This was an improvement, but falls a bit short to what it could be.
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It took over six months of closely following ISPO’s to put this together and ultimately for the benefit of the whole Cardano community. Please contribute.
$the.one.oracle
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