Cardano SPO Column: Earn Coin Pool [ECP]

This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool that is operated by two brothers from the US and they’re members of the xSPO Alliance: Earn Coin Pool [ECP].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool that supports education and diversity in the Cardano Community for the Portuguese speaking people.

This initiative is a point of reference for everything Cardano and every week or two we will invite a Stake Pool Operator (SPO) to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.

Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.

Cardano SPO Column, interview with Earn Coin Pool [ECP]

Hi, thanks for your time. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?

Earn Coin Pool is a family owned, single pool operator. It’s my brother and I (Rich) who run the pool. He is more the server security guy and I’m more the marketing guy with a background in web development and digital marketing. Although I do the day to day maintenance so I’m somewhat tech savvy as well. We are based in the US just outside of Chicago. We launched our pool on Mainnet in September 2021, so we are a few weeks away from turning 1 year old. 

We are Proud members of xSPO Alliance and Cardano Single Pool Alliance! Rich from ECP is the ambassador for the xSPO Alliance and we were recognized on July 28th by Input Output Global, Inc. (IOG) as a pool that contributes to the overall health and growth of the Cardano ecosystem. Finally our delegators choose our annual charity.

What’s the path that led you to Cardano and to become a Stake Pool Operator (SPO)?

I (Rich) was a long time fan of the idea of smart contracts and blockchain, then I went through some personal hardships that forced me to make a career change. Since I was such a fan of the idea of smart contracts and blockchain I started researching and I found, like so many others did, Charles’ whiteboard video and the rest was history.

Every once in a while IOG (Input Output Global) delegates their ADA to certain stake pools. Can you explain what it’s all about and how it helps you?

IOG has different rounds of delegation that are meant to recognize and help pools that make contributions to the overall health and growth of the Cardano ecosystem. ECP was picked for our contributions to receive a million ADA delegation for the next 6 months or so. This delegation is huge to small, single pools because it provides us with an opportunity to receive rewards almost each epoch. As such this will help us, as we can use these rewards to attract new delegators and increase our pledge. 

Programs like these are vital to small, single pools to help them grow. Unfortunately there is a negative feedback loop when new and small pools are not minting blocks as often as larger pools. This delegation and programs like it, help bootstrap pools to be able to compete with larger pools. We are very thankful that IOG and Cardano Foundation continue to do programs like these which help the overall decentralisation of the Cardano network.

You’re an Astarter Associate Pool. What is Astarter? And what does this mean for your stake pool?

Astarter is a DeFi infrastructure hub on Cardano with four core applications: Launchpad, DEX, Money Market & Tech Service Platform. They have a two stage ISPO and the second part introduces Merged Staking Protocol. Meaning that when you stake your Astarter AA tokens in their ecosystem and stake your ADA with an Associate or Partner pool you get extra AA tokens on top of your normal ADA rewards.

Earn Coin Pool is excited and thrilled to be selected as an Astarter Associate stake pool. Astarter has put together a unique and innovative ISPO with their phase 2 Merged Staking Protocol (MSP). We look forward to working with the Astarter team to create a great and unique opportunity for delegators to earn AA tokens through their MSP. To learn more visit here.

Great contribution. Any final thoughts? Where can people stay in touch?

We are passionate about the xSPO alliance, which is an alliance for extra small pools who start under one million ada delegated. We are an alliance that helps small and new pools with tech questions, marketing, and keeping up on information from the ecosystem or opportunities for stake pool operators. We also have guest speakers from the ecosystem like projects that are building on Cardano or people who work for IOG or CF. 

ECP with the help of other xSPO members, recently put out a new guide on how to rollback your node counter for SPOs when renewing their KES. This will be important for small pools who never minted a block or who don’t frequently mint blocks, once the Vasil hardfork is live on the mainnet. You can see our guide here. 

To get in touch, here’s our Website, our Discord and our Twitter.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG.