[NOTE: For a more detailed submission (with graphics) please refer to the attached pdf file.]

Thesis

Competition based on costs and fees, if taken to its logical end, will ultimately push the entire ecosystem into a handful of operators running the entire network on a handful of locations offering competitive rates. To combat this eventuality, we need to let SPOs have avenues to offer differentiated services to their stakeholders.

Our goal is to make Cardano an economically vibrant ecosystem, fully capable of supporting SPOs as small businesses. We plan to achieve this by creating a safe platform for SPOs and stakeholders to interact and provide their value-added services.

The Cardano community has a diverse group of SPOs with varying talents, which could be tapped into by the act of staking with pools that offer those talents. This additional layer of services will keep Cardano's playing field fair and diversified both geographically and technically, as it removes the need for SPOs to compete on cost and fees alone.

Funding PoolTool is a win-win-win solution for the entire Cardano ecosystem as enables:

• SPOs build economically sustainable businesses on top of Cardano.This could be any range of product or services from research to dApps.
• Pools to create pool consortiums, which would allow their respective stakeholders access a basket of goods/services offered by the members of these consortiums. This idea is much like what we see with airline miles in the real-world businesses.
• Delegators to support pools and projects they care most about directly.
• Cardano ecosystem tap into additional sources of funding organically and reduce the need for treasury funds.

How Would It Work?

Currently, the Cardano ecosystem works in a one-way direction. Stakeholders have plenty of avenues to evaluate, select and interact with SPOs. There is plenty of information about stake pools, but stake pool operators have close to zero visibility about their delegators beyond the addresses and amounts.

The existing avenues to interact with stakeholders are fragmented (Telegram, twitter, stake pool websites) and none of them give SPOs confidence that those who interact with them are in fact delegators.

PoolTool will change this. By creating an avenue for a two-way communication between SPOs and verified stakeholders, we will make it easy for both groups to create positive feedback loops that will create additional value for the ecosystem.

Our platform will provide tools for SPOs to:

• drive various marketing promotions targeted to their stakeholders
• provide additional services exclusively to their stakeholders
• communicate with verified stakeholders through interactive chats
• gauge stakeholder value by reviewing an array of stakeholder metrics such as stakeholder loyalty score, which would act like a credit score and allow SPOs to tailor their subscription services to different tiers of stakeholders.

PoolTool is already used by SPOs to "claim" their pools. With this project, we plan to offer a way for stakeholders to verify themselves, without revealing their identity, as delegators for specific pools. Doing so would allow them to access a special dashboard where they would be able to interact and access pool services.

You can find additional details in the attached pdf file.