Cardano Tales

It is December 2020, X-Mas still some days away. There is lots of time with the family and long telephone conversations with friends about this/that. Cardano comes in focus again and we are playing with the idea of participating in the project more actively. The idea of running the ASTOR Stake Pool gets born. We wanted to have a strong technical focus that would eventually allow us to deploy block-chain technology into corporate cloud based IT infrastructure. The thing would need to be programmable, have good support for Tx metadata, be scalable, secure, allow integration with existing data streams, and so on. Basically, a solid building block for IT solutions of the the future. Cardano, was the most promising candidate that we could find. Of course, it needed to be Docker , run on multiple hardware platforms and have Kubernetes support built in. The journey began with tying to build Cardano on arm64 (i.e. the RaspberryPi4) and learning Nix so that we eventually can propose stuff u...

I’m happy to let you know, that ASTOR has paid out the second round of dividends to loyal delegators.  As always, we only keep what is actually needed to run the pool - the rest goes to delegators and charity . Everyone on equal terms, including the SPO.  This time we could pay out a little more than last time , because of reduced cost for running the pool. A small percentage I use for research for the upcoming Alonzo area (i.e. spinning up scalable Kubernetes cluster to try stuff out).  Here are the details ...   The next round of payouts for period [254..260] will happen in E262.  Update: I recently joined the Plutus Pioneer Program so that eventually I can bring all of this to Cardano as a smart contract. This will have a massive effect on future payouts, because the tax man will not get the lion share any more. You’re welcome to come on board.