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.

PoolTool.io

ADApools.org

AdaStat.net

Pegasus App

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.

POOL:

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

Name: AHLNET #2 🇸🇪 RETIRED (epoch 215)
Ticker: NET
ID: 0001a00910e9e6ae309e0f216aa6669b9a711bc627c98cb66e8f11b0

FEES :

COST: 475 ₳ /epoch
MARGIN: 1.8 %

Guide .

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.

The first step is to install and open Daedalus / Yoroi and if this is the first time you are using these wallets step one is to create a wallet.

Then follow the below instructions for Daedalus and Yoroi. Once the delegation transaction goes through your ADA is delegated and you will start earning rewards in EPOCH+1. An epoch on MainNet is 5 days long so you will have to wait 10 days before rewards from delegation are distributed.

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

 

  1. Install and start Daedalus

  2. Create a wallet and send your funds to it if not done already.

  3. Choose delegation in the left pane and select the Stake pools tab.

  4. Type in AHL or AHLNET and my pool should show in the list.

  5. Click on my stake pool and you should get a popup window like the one to the right above.

  6. Click on “delegate to this pool” button and follow the instructions to enter your spending password etc.

  7. DONE!

Yoroi

In development, instruction apply to ITN network
To be updated once fully ready for mainnet

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

 

 

  1. Install and Open Yoroi in browser
    Yoroi can also be used through their mobile app, these instructions are for the browser extension but it’s just as easy to use the mobile app.

  2. Create a wallet and send funds to it if not done already.

  3. Choose “Delegation (Simple)” in the top right corner. 

  4. Enter AHL or AHLNET into the search field and hit search.

  5. Click on DELEGATE on my stake pool and you should get a popup window that will guide you through the last steps of the delegation process.

  6. DONE!

Contact .