Last updated a year ago
Cardano's decentralization is dropping. It's increasingly hard for new Stake Pool Operators to get established in Cardano, and a large risk and investment until maybe reaching profitability.
Introducing a Free Tier to PoolMan.io which grants small SPOs (<250K ADA staked) a 6 month fully managed stake pool operation, and a chance to reach profitability and stand on their own going forward.
This is the total amount allocated to Free Tier for Small SPOs - Fully Managed SPO Service.
Please provide your proposal title
Free Tier for Small SPOs - Fully Managed SPO Service
Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA
15000
Please specify how many months you expect your project to last
6
Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated
No
Original Language
en
What is the problem you want to solve?
Cardano's decentralization is dropping. It's increasingly hard for new Stake Pool Operators to get established in Cardano, and a large risk and investment until maybe reaching profitability.
Supporting links
Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?
No
Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'
No dependencies
Will your project's outputs be fully open source?
No
License and Additional Information
The output is free use of our platform, which by nature is not open-sourceable.
Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal
Community
Who you’re targeting, how you’ll reach them, and why this matters for Cardano.
One of the absolute key value drivers for Cardano is its level of decentralization. It sets us apart from the rest. It's absolutely vital to nurture the ecosystem around decentralization, in order to keep this advantage. With the free tier of PoolMan.io we're targeting all individuals and corporations with an interest in Cardano, and offering a very easy way of getting started with their stake pool. We'll reach our target group through X, Discord groups and Telegram groups, with paid advertising as a fallback strategy.
Provide a list of key activities of your project?
What are your success metrics?
Onboarding 35-50 new Stake Pool Operators (pool created after 1st of September 2025) and 50-65 existing small SPOs. Getting new SPOs into Cardano is important, but it's equally important to help the small and struggling SPOs already on Cardano, who are considering closing their pools. Giving these people some extra runway will help them in their efforts to attract stake, become profitable, contribute to Cardano's decentralization and stand on thier own legs again.
Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem
We propose a Free Tier to the PoolMan.io fully-managed stake pool service, which allows anyone to run their own pool without any technical knowledge. Simply upload the nescessary pool keys for block production, click the Start-button, and rest assured that all your blocks will be created for you. All you need to do is update your KES-key and OpCert every 3 months.
It is vital to onboard new SPOs, with new marketing methods and values, in order to keep Cardano's level of decentralization best in class. Removing the main entry barrier for new SPOs is a great improvement for the ecosystem, and enables more people to come and try it out. It could be crypto influencers wanting to dip their toes in the Cardano ecosystem, getting involved and start promoting their pool and Cardano on their channel. It could be a whale wanting to move away from a huge pool and start their own operation. It could be crypto corporations that currently stake with large MPOs, that want to start a new income stream by running their own pools. Crypto people from other chains could be enticed to try starting an SPO business on Cardano, and get introduced to the ecosystem that way, and hopefully stay. Anyone who wants to try out the business of running a Cardano stake pool, promote it and grow it, will now have a very easy way of getting started!
This proposal not only helps support the level of decentralization in the future, but as a side benefit also helps to onboard new users from other crypto ecosystems, curious about becoming an SPO, thereby driving adoption.
There will be a 6-month claim period, starting from the date where the funding has been announced. The first 100 SPOs to claim the Free Tier will receive 740 ADA credits in their account, to be used on the PoolMan.io platform, corresponding to 37 free epochs of pool operation (20 ADA per epoch). Once received, they must be used within 6 months before they expire.
Only pools with less than 250K ADA in Active Stake can claim the Free Tier.
A few words on decentralization:
We expect to be asked about the seemingly centralizing effect of having a single entity run 100 pools for other people. While it might seem that way, there are very import nuances. PoolMan only ask for 3 files to be uploaded; VRF-key that determines which slots are allocated to the pool, and KES-key+OpCert that are used to sign the blocks. We can never take control of a pool and change parameters, touch the pledged ADA in any way, change rewards address or anything else. Your pool is safe. We can create blocks on your behalf, and that's it. The uploaded KES-key can instantly be made useless if the pool owner generates a new KES-key and creates a new block with that key.
The damaging effect of centralization of SPOs is the ability of a few people to collude in order to censor transactions and similar control of the blockchain. It's bad to have a single person control 5% of the stake in the system, as that power is very hard to take away. If PoolMan ever got compromised for any reason, and started acting maliciously, the power could very quickly be taken away by the SPOs in question, and in any case automatically disappear as the KES-keys expire (as they only last 3 months, before having to get renewed). That's a very important distinction to make between PoolMan.io and large multi pool operators.
PoolMan is primarily aimed at small SPOs, and even if PoolMan has 200 pools with 1 million ADA staked each, the network power of those pools is the same as just 3 fully saturated single pool operators.
Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community
Main impact:
Side benefits:
What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?
Our platform PoolMan.io is already operational. Adding the Free Tier is simple. There are no risks in regards of ability to deliver this project. Once the project is approved, the Free Tier will be available on the website.
Milestone Title
Free Tier has been available for 2 months
Milestone Outputs
All SPOs with less than 250K ADA active stake have had the ability to sign up for the Free Tier for 2 months at the time of this milestone. The proposal is about providing our managed stake pool service for free for small SPOs, hence the output should be measured in time available.
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone will be whether the Free Tier has been available to claim for the 2 month period, along with the actual service being delivered. The platform must have been operational in the period.
Evidence of Completion
All Free Tier pools will have to accept, when signing up to the service, that their ticker, pool name, start date and duration will be included in our reporting to Project Catalyst. We will provide at list of pools that has signed up to the PoolMan Free Tier along with dates of sign up.
Delivery Month
2
Cost
5000
Progress
30 %
Milestone Title
Free Tier has been available for 2 more months
Milestone Outputs
All SPOs with less than 250K ADA active stake have had the ability to sign up for the Free Tier for 2 more months at the time of this milestone. The proposal is about providing our managed stake pool service for free for small SPOs, hence the output should be measured in time available.
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone will be whether the Free Tier has been available to claim for the 2 month period (if less than 100 Free Tiers spots already taken), along with the actual service being delivered. The platform must have been operational in the period.
Evidence of Completion
All Free Tier pools will have to accept, when signing up to the service, that their ticker, pool name, start date and duration will be included in our reporting to Project Catalyst. We will provide at list of pools that has signed up to the PoolMan Free Tier along with dates of sign up.
Delivery Month
4
Cost
5000
Progress
70 %
Milestone Title
Free Tier has been available for 2 more months
Milestone Outputs
All SPOs with less than 250K ADA active stake have had the ability to sign up for the Free Tier for 2 more months at the time of this milestone. The proposal is about providing our managed stake pool service for free for small SPOs, hence the output should be measured in time available.
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone will be whether the Free Tier has been available to claim for the 2 month period (if less than 100 Free Tiers spots already taken), along with the actual service being delivered. The platform must have been operational in the period.
Evidence of Completion
All Free Tier pools will have to accept, when signing up to the service, that their ticker, pool name, start date and duration will be included in our reporting to Project Catalyst. We will provide at list of pools that has signed up to the PoolMan Free Tier along with dates of sign up.
Delivery Month
6
Cost
5000
Progress
100 %
Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources
We are offering a Free Tier for up to 100 Stake Pool Operators for 6 months each (37 epochs). The price for an epoch for low-stake pools is 20 ADA per epoch. The total value from this proposal is hence 74.000 ADA, if the full number of Free Tier seats are claimed within the 6 months period. Since we only ask for 15.000 ADA in this proposal, which is less than our actual cost for delivering the project, we consider this a marketing effort and marketing cost as well. We do not expect to make a profit from this proposal, if fully utilized.
How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?
Regarding quantifiable metrics, the Cardano ecosystem gets a 79% discount (74.000 ADA PoolMan credits for 15.000 ADA Catalyst funding) for the actual service it self. On top of that, this project can potentially realize all the benefits mentioned before, including:
Keep in mind that the requested funds does not fully cover our expected costs to deliver this project. We will be providing the rest of the funds ourselves.
Terms and Conditions:
Yes
Robin Olsson is the CEO and main driving force behind PoolMan. He is a software engineer with a proven track record as CTO in multiple companies and now works as an IT-consultant and entrepreneur. In order to have redundancy and effective workload handling, a small team of part time workers have been hired to handle social media and devops tasks.