AHLNET

St₳ke Pool

AHLNET is a stake pool for the Cardano community that lets you earn passive income
for the ADA you hold while strengthening the network and making it decentralized

To get the latest information, pool statistics and be able to ask questions please join my Telegram group. 
See Contact section for all possible ways to follow the progress of AHLNET st₳ke pool.

About .

Avatar My name is Ola, and I'm the operator of AHLNET st₳ke pool. The servers running the pool and I are located in Sweden. I have over 15 years of experience in IT management and deploying mission critical servers in an air traffic control center. This is my second passion in life and I spend a lot of my free time working on various private and open source projects coding mainly in Java and other high-level languages.

My main passion is to be able to travel and often to remote and far away places. It's great to experience the local traditions and their way of life.​ When you travel, you also become aware of the social, economic and ecological problems around the world. Something that enriches your life and way of thinking.

Goal

To help spread the word of Cardano and what it is trying to accomplish. 

By running a stake pool I can help strengthen the network and make it as decentralized as possible. By delegating your ADA you can also help grow the ecosystem and at the same time earn rewards for it. Delegating can be compared to bitcoin mining in some way but without the wasteful power usage that a proof-of-work system like bitcoin requires. A proof-of-stake system like Cardano eliminates this issue without compromising on security. 

Getting your ADA delegated is as easy as a click of a button in the Cardano wallets Daedalus and Yoroi.
See Guide section on this page for how to delegate your ADA.

For more information on Cardano and their goals see the Cardano Foundation website at cardanofoundation.org

Software

The Cardano software is built with different modules to cater to the needs of different end-users. But at the core, all modules rely on the cardano-node software. This is what the stake pools run to make the blocks, the backend of the wallets, and all other software that want to connect to the Cardano blockchain. The code is based on Haskell, a high-assurance functional programming language providing formal verification and reliable software.

To better manage and to keep track of pool data, uptime, problems, etc you need to add additional software into the mix.

The cardano-node software runs best on Linux and this is also the preferred OS for servers in general. To keep resources low and stability high it’s also run in headless-mode, ie without a graphical interface. All interaction with the cardano-node software is done through the cardano-cli application. This software is used by pool operators to create wallets, send funds, delegate, create stake pools, and much more that is needed to manage their stake pool.

Using cardano-cli directly is a complicated process, because of this I have been one of the major contributors to the tool called CNTools now used by many pool operators to manage their pool. It’s a Guild Operators collaboration and more information can be found through this website:
CNTools @ Guild Operators

In addition to this tool, I’m running Zabbix for IT infrastructure monitoring. It’s a very powerful tool to monitor the health of the system and to automatically take action and alert me if anything is wrong with the pool/servers. A push notification goes to the phone that triggers, if severe enough, an alarm that will fire any hour of the day. 

​With this setup, I’m confident the pool will have very close to 100% uptime.

Hardware

Cardano nodes/stake pools are run on every type of hardware from VPS in the cloud to small energy-efficient ROCK Pi’s in the bedroom.

My take on it is that to make it as decentralized as possible running it on local server-grade hardware if you have the skills and means to do it, is the best solution.

This is is what drives AHLNET, high-availability infrastructure run on powerful bare metal servers in Sweden with UPS backup for power outages. This way you are not putting all eggs in the basket of the VPS providers and even though small energy-efficient hobby equipment is fun I don’t believe it will deliver the stability that is required for a professional cryptocurrency system.

A failover server is put in place that will take over either automatically based on monitoring or manually in need. This failover server is located in a different location in Sweden to make sure that even if there should be a massive power outage or isp issue on the main server location the pool will keep on making the blocks.

In addition to the failover server, three relay nodes are deployed in different locations used to spread blocks created by the pool/core node to the rest of the Cardano network.

Core Node

AMD 3900X 12C/24T
128GB DDR4 
1TB NVMe storage in RAID1
OPNSense router
Proxmox VPS/CT ​

Pool Health .

A lot of experience has been gathered during the different TestNet phases and especially during the Incentivized TestNet that ran between December 2019 and June 2020.

With failover setup in place, redundant hardware and advanced monitoring solutions pool uptime should be close to 100%.

To compare AHLNET against other stake pools there are many community projects created. Websites/Apps containing all metrics needed for delegates to make informed decisions when choosing a stake pool to place their ADA in. I'm happy to help you decipher what to look for when making this decision.

Contact me by email or join my Telegram group and ask your questions.

Below are a couple of good websites/apps to check out.

Pool & Fees .

The first thing to understand is that you can never loose ADA by delegating. The fees mention are extracted from the rewards to cover the cost of running the stake pool.

Most of the rewards are distributed among the delegates based on ADA delegated to the pool. This is done by the protocol and completely out of the hands of the pool operator.

See delegation flowchart below to understand how the fees affect the annualized returns.

POOL:

Name: AHLNET #1 🇸🇪
Ticker: AHL
ID: 0001a003afb844ce6d9409fc49e049db654a78dc77f1151cb6cd548f

FEE :

FIXED COST: 340 ₳ /epoch (minimum)
VARIABLE COST: 3.6 %

POOL:

Name: AHLNET #2 🇸🇪
Ticker: AHL
ID: 0001a007008ad930089e1be2de42ef058ac18ce761e8dd2651740b7a

FEE :

FIXED COST: 340 ₳ /epoch (minimum)
VARIABLE COST: 1.875 % (bootstrap bonus until 30% saturated, then returned to 3.6%)

ROS :

Return On Stake(ROS), also referred to as Return On ADA(ROA), is a measure of a % return in a year on your investment from delegation.

How do pool fees affect ROS? :

Very little in the end. Other factors like protocol parameters, luck in slot election, pool uptime, etc will play a bigger part. Over time, most pools if run correctly should converge to yield the same % return within a ~0.5% margin.

To show the impact of fee margin, it is best explained with an example using fictive but somewhat accurate numbers. The example assumes all numbers are equal for an epoch except margin.
Pool A: 340A fixed fee, 2% margin, 20M in active stake.
Pool B: 340A fixed fee, 4% margin, 20M in active stake.
Both pools are elected the same amount of blocks and produce them all. 15000 Ada are given as rewards for this epoch to each pool. Given this scenario, we can calculate the impact of the doubled margin Pool B has compared to Pool A.
Pool A: 15000A rewards - 340A fixed fee - 2% margin = 14367A to be distributed to delegators and a ROS of 5.38%
Pool B: 15000A rewards - 340A fixed fee - 4% margin = 14074A to be distributed to delegators and a ROS of 5.27%

Many factors play a role in the % return that can be expected from a pool and margin is one of these. But as can be seen from the above example, this is one of the least important ones.

DELEGATE .

Everyone that holds ADA can participate and delegate as long as these ADA are held in a compatible wallet with staking ability. The two most used Cardano wallets are Daedalus and Yoroi.

Your first rewards after the delegation to AHL pool has gone through will be payed out after 15-20 days depending on when in the epoch delegation took place. See the delegation flowchart below for a detailed step-by-step walkthrough of what happens at the different stages.

A common misconception is that rewards are lost when switching delegation from one stake pool to another. Until the switch of delegation to the new pool goes through your ADA will be staked with the previous pool you staked with resulting in no gap in rewards.

Delegation Flow & Reward Calculation

Daedalus

Daedalus is a full-node wallet which means that it downloads, stores and validates the full copy of the blockchain. It can operate in a trustless manner and it does not rely on centrally hosted servers.

Download from the official website:
https://daedaluswallet.io

 

  • Install and start Daedalus

  • Create or restore a wallet and send your funds to it to delegate.

  • Choose delegation (1) in the left pane and select the Stake pools tab (2).

  • Type in AHL or AHLNET in the search box and my pool tile should show.

  • Click on my stake pool and a popup window appear.

  • Click on “Delegate to this pool” button (3) and follow the instructions to complete the delegation.

  • DONE!

Yoroi

Yoroi is a light wallet, which means it does not download the full copy of the blockchain. It connects to trusted servers which have the full copy of the blockchain.

Download from the official website:
https://yoroi-wallet.com

 

 

  • Install and open Yoroi browser extension for Chrome or FireFox.

  • Create or restore a wallet containing the funds you want to delegate.

  • Choose Delegation List (1) in the top pane according to image.

  • Type in AHL or AHLNET (2) and my pool should show in the list.

  • Click on Delegate button (3) and follow the instructions to complete the delegation.

  • DONE!

Contact .