The start of ADA North Pool
Ada North Pool (ticker: ANP) was at this time run privately by Eystein Hansen. A video shows the epoch turnover from epoch 0 to epoch 1. At the time the testnet where using Jormungandr an implementation of the Oroborus protocol Cardano uses in Rust that was later replaced with the official cardano-node version. Before this in November 2019 the pool was part of a private testnet where we gathered data for the developers on memory and disk requirements and such. Some of the early activities of the pool was with Kiva lending being part of the Cardano Community Kiva lending team (Eystein still is one of the Capteins of the Kiva Cardano Community lending team). In March 2023 the pool also created the Inter Stake Pool Peering Agreement together with other community pools. A peering agreement that to this day is still operational to have a secure backbone of relays between pools. At the same time the pool contributed to folding@home efforts on Covid19. In mid 2020 the pool started using docker swarm clusters for redundancy. Also in that year the pool mentored two scandinavian pool operators - among them Ola Ahlman who went on to become one of the backend developers for Koios as well as a great contributor to the Cardano ecosystem in general and joined the Friends and Family testnets in May 11 2020. The pool also ran a security competition with 2500 Ada in prices and focused on becoming more professional and secure. In September 2020 the pool presented at the Cardano Virtual Summit and has been an active participant in the summits every year since. In 2021 the pool donated 25000 NOK to a local Child autism center. The pool also released a progress report for 2020-2021.
NBX acquisition and the future
In November 2021 the pool was acquired by Norwegian Block Exchange (NBX) and I joined NBX as Head of Staking operations. At the time the pool was the largest staking pool in Norway as well as the most northernmost staking pool in Cardano. To this day this still remains true. In December 2021 NBX donated the whole months income (33300 NOK) to Haukeland hospital as part of a larger Norwegian cryptocurrency charity efffort. By February 2022 I had joined NBX full time and we launched a staking service on the 20th of October 2022. We also added time synchronization servers to the staking pool and held a digital breakfast meeting to introduce Cardano staking to the larger Norwegian cryptocurrency community. At this point multiple informational videos about Cardano research papers was also published such as on Mithril and to this day the staking pool is one of the first signers of Mithril signed snapshots for synchronizing the blockchain. More services like this will be announced and it is safe to say that the pool is actively involved in all important infrastructure projects on Cardano. The pool operator is also heavily involved in Cardano governance such as voting events or attending the conferences and hosting committees and workshops on governance, and is sitting on the Civics committee of Intersect. The pool continues to thrive both in wallet delegation and in delegations from the NBX platform. One year after its launch in October 2023 the pool already had 1 million delegated from the platform and has seen steady growth since being launched in October 2022. You can read more about our staking here. We could have written a lot more on the activity of the pool for 2023 as it was a hectic yeah, however it is just as important to look ahead into 2024 that will be an exiting year with among other things the Midnight sidechain, and the implementation of CIP 1694 governance the staking pool has contributed too.
