Cardano SPO Column: GranADA_Staking_Pool [GRANA]

This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool striving to sustainably decentralize the Cardano ecosystem: GranADA_Staking_Pool [GRANA].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool that is a SundaeSwap Scooper and donates the pool’s profit to saving the lives of children.

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, interview with GranADA_Staking_Pool [GRANA]

Hello, glad to have you here. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?

We are 3 vegans from Venezuela who really like the Cardano ecosystem and who want to make a positive impact on the world. I actually take care of most of the work but my wife and my brother help me sometimes with social media and with marketing. I’m a software engineer and we are based in Zurich, Switzerland.

What’s your Cardano story? How did you get started in this space and why launch a stake pool?

After realizing how technologically obsolete, centralized, expensive and pollutant Bitcoin and Ethereum were, I decided to research more about other blockchains to change my portfolio. Here is when I came across Cardano for the first time. I loved the scientific approach, the mission-driven community and energy efficiency of this project. I started first as an investor and since I’m a software engineer, I decided that the next logical step would be to open a staking pool to contribute to the decentralization of the network. 

I realized that most pools use highly centralized data centers like AWS, DigitalOcean and Google Cloud. Therefore, I decided to launch a staking pool with a hybrid solution (private servers with a backup node on a small data center) and run it with renewable energy, of course!

GranADA is an active member of the Climate Neutral Cardano Group. Please tell us more about this group, its operation and its goal.

CNCG is an amazing group full of altruistic, generous and conscious SPOs. We are scientists, businessmen, engineers and artists from different nations and backgrounds with a common passion: protect our environment and the biodiversity of our planet from climate change. 

Our goal is to reduce and offset the carbon footprint of the Cardano ecosystem until reaching neutrality. We research and estimate the carbon footprint of Cardano with calculations and external auditing, we create awareness within the community on social media platforms and we donate more than 25% of our staking rewards to projects that offset carbon emissions by planting trees or protecting our oceans. We also create proposals on Catalyst and make strategic partnerships with several great projects to get closer to our goal. We have achieved quite a lot in the last 4 months but we still have quite a lot to do!

So besides choosing an eco-friendly blockchain like Cardano, what else can we do to reduce our carbon footprint and mitigate the risks of the environmental crisis?

Adopting a plant-based diet! It’s the easiest and yet most powerful thing that we can change to reduce our carbon footprint. Not just because we will stop financing one of the most polluting and wasteful industries but also because when we change a habit like our diet, we start to care more about what’s going on in the world. 

We also should know that we have governance power with our money and that we can vote with our wallets, just like on Catalyst! Politicians and big companies should also contribute, but we, as consumers, should consciously buy products that are sustainable because it is our money that keeps governments and these companies alive.

Thank you kindly for your time. Any final thoughts? Where can people stay in touch?

Scientists have warned us several times already. We just have 8 years until we reach the non-return point in climate change. We must take this crisis seriously and take action if we want to save the precious biodiversity of our planet and our own lives. Climate change won’t be a quick end for us. We will see food shortages due to violent rains, droughts, snow storms in the middle of the year, etc. Species will go extinct, we will have to go to war for resources like water and crops. 

It’s not about what will happen, but rather when. Shifting to a plant-based diet is a must, spending less than 10 hours on airplanes every year, actively demanding our politicians to fight for our climate and getting away from fossil fuels will buy us enough time to shift our economies. I’m convinced that we can do this! But we need to stop thinking that we won’t see this disaster and do our part right now!

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

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

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