Please describe your proposed solution.
The solution in a single paragraph:
Ray is a stakepool operator that regularly asks his delegators to which charity the current quarter's dedicated 10% of stakepool profits should go. He's compiling a list of three organizations he has trusted relationships with and creates a quick Voteaire.io poll for his delegators to participate in. After verifying he is indeed owner of WORG pool, he sends the link to the poll and a summary to his delegators. Somehow, Evita, who Ray has never met (and whose wallet address, Discord handle or phone number he does not know) gets both a Discord notification and a text message about the upcoming poll. She votes that same evening, happy she did not have to worry about missing the vote, after all the work-related distractions that kept her busy throughout the week.
As we approach the era of governance on Cardano, more and more polling systems are being built, both for the purposes of use in DAOs, but also for the purposes of Stakepool operators engaging with their delegators. SPOs contact their delegators and even prospective delegators in matters of blockchain parameters, community building, raffles, charitable contributions, ISPOs (Initial Stake Pool Offerings), real world meetup organization and many other topics. This affects both the part time stakepool operators as well as SPOs that have made running a stakepool or multiple stakepools their primary source of income.
Recent polls initiated by IOG and CF around stakepool parameters have shown that many SPOs want to engage with their delegators with regards to their opinions for the purposes of polling, but many found out that there are several problems with actually reaching your delegators, because Cardano itself is no scalable messaging-solution that can be leveraged. Other major problems are:
- Delegators have vastly different sets of messaging apps and social networks in which they are active
- There is no system that keeps delegators social identities separated from their delegated wallets, making it so that often times you have to dox your wallet to engage in conversation with someone based on holdings or delegation
- Wallet providers could build solutions but are occupied with more important problems to solve at the foundational level, and without the majority supporting the same set of protocols, people not using a supporting wallet would still be left out.
On the delegators' side, a different set of problems exists, which also can be solved with the same set of technologies. Delegators want to know about changes in their stakepool's reliability, margins and costs, opportunities for airdrops. There are some tools to subscribe to stakepool changes via Telegram, but it is limited to very specific updates, not configurable to subscribe to only a certain kind of news or thresholds, nor does it allow to receive announcements from your SPO.
Another major issue is stake not moving from retired pools, because delegators do not regularly actively seek updates on their stakepools, leaving many millions of stake that does not generate rewards and can cause frustration for those delegators that miss out on their rewards, as well as other SPOs that are active in Cardano.
Our application HAZELnet already has many of the requirements and infrastructure in place to solve these problems and build foundations for future growth, as the SPO ecosystem matures.
For this proposal, we would add the following capabilities to our existing system:
- Ability for stakepool operators to verify their identity via CIP-0022
- Verified stakepool operators can send messages to anyone who is delegated to their pool
- Delegators can subscribe to basic stakepool parameter changes via the website (margin, total stake, own stake, pledge, min fee, pool retiring and more, if sensible)
- Both types of Messages will be delivered via Discord and at least one supported additional channel (examples include Tweets, Telegram messages or Facebook postings) - recipients can decide on which channels to get updates (for private message/notification-based applications)
- Stakepool operators can configure Discord channels to have automatic pool updates
- Privacy settings for delegators to accept/deny receiving notifications (custom messages, pool updates etc.)
- Public APIs for the SPOs to leverage to allow integrating with their own websites and partner projects
What we are NOT trying to solve with this solution
- Polling. There are various existing polling solutions both for on- and off-chain polls, some even integrated into HAZELnet already. We are not building such a solution in this proposal and instead want to make it easier to integrate with those existing solutions.
- We are not committing to integrating all major social networking/messaging apps, just a subset as polled from the community and building a foundation for additional integrations.
- We do not plan to build a Stakepool discovery platform at this time. Stakeboard was not funded previously and we believe discovery of stakepools is best done in-wallet, where delegation is completed.
Note: This project has some overlap with our proposal in the DAO category. This SPO proposal is a pure HAZELnet-based solution and adding of SPO verification, while the other proposal is a completely new protocol and standard. If both proposals get funded, the parts of the funding that overlap will be used towards building additional integrations or as bounty for other developers to build integrations.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The solution brings value to the ecosystem and stakepool operators by providing them with tooling to connect with a diverse set of delegators, with different preferences for receiving information about and interacting with their stakepools. Generally, stake moves slowly, which is in part due to the lack of information flow to delegators unless they actively seek out updates on non-common channels (like pool.pm, cexplorer.io).
It also creates more engagement between SPOs and their delegators, which will become relevant as we enter the age of governance on Cardano.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
The key metrics for success are the number of actively subscribed delegators (i.e. users that have verified delegated wallets and respond positively to the opt-in messages to receive updates about their pool)
The second main metric will be the number of stakepool operators that verify their identity to be able to communicate with their delegation team.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
The outputs of the development work will be immediately visible in the open-source repository for HAZELnet, as they reach a working status. In addition, our existing public dashboard can be enhanced to show if people start leveraging the feature without revealing any information about specific delegators or SPOs that do participate (to avoid influencing).
Our existing public dashboard: https://hazelpool.grafana.net/public-dashboards/37b024d96570451780c6354f70944b47