This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool created by a group of Cubans who are pet and animal lovers and own a small dog shelter in Cuba: PetLoverStake [PET].
Last week’s guest was a stake pool co-owned by two good friends running on bare metal in London with additional relays around the world.
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 PetLoverStake [PET]
Hi, thanks for your time. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?
Thank you for the opportunity. PetLoverStake was created by a group of Cubans, based in SW Florida, US. We are pet and animal lovers, we own a small dog shelter in Cuba, which is a challenge because of the economic difficulties that country is going through: it’s complicated to get food and medicine for people, so what about pets?
Then, PET
pool was created with the initial goal of generating extra incomes to contribute to our shelter support. But now we have bigger dreams: we realised that with a functional pool we could help animals not only in Cuba but around the world.
Our servers are running in a datacenter in Germany. We started with the Block Producer and one Relay, looking forward to deploying more relays once the pool starts minting blocks according to our roadmap.
Our SPO is Leo, with a background as a System Engineer and software developer, he worked in Cuba’s Ministry of Science and Environment for several years before coming to the US. His experience with Linux servers was very useful, but he needed to refresh a lot of knowledge. As SPO in charge of the pool’s maintenance he is doing the main part of the technical work while other members are helping with the shelters, social media, design and other initiatives.
What’s the path that led you to Cardano and to become Stake Pool Operators (SPO)?
That’s the funny part: we heard about Cardano for the very first time just this year in February, when a friend told us about it and then the idea came up. Very curious about crypto, we started reading and discovering things and finally we fell in love with the possibilities and the potential of Cardano Blockchain.
PET pool supports Decentralisation in Cardano. This concept and Governance are the concepts we like the most. We all need to be free, in life, in personal decisions, in finances, in everything. As sons of an island-jail we know very well what FREEDOM means. That’s another reason that motivates us to build on Cardano. We are sure that the future will be built into Blockchain Technologies.
We found awesome support in the Single Pool (xSPO) Alliance, a lot of great SPOs there ready to advise and help newbies like us. We need to Thank George, Rich, Sean, Vahid… can’t name them all. It’s a bit complicated for us due to our bad English. Over time we also joined the Aldea DAO with all the Latin-American SPOs in there, another awesome group of people and it was very nice to learn about Cardano in Spanish too.
As a relatively new stake pool, how has your experience been thus far? Are you finding it challenging to attract new delegators? What is your strategy?
Our first 7 months have been plenty of intensive and continuous learning. Being an SPO is time demanding, especially when you need to share it with other jobs and family. It’s been challenging to begin our path inside the new concepts, but we are pretty sure we chose the best Blockchain and the one with the best and strongest community.
It’s very tough for small pools, you won’t get any profits until you start minting blocks, and for that you need to get enough stake. So our first goal is to attract delegators to PET. It requires a lot of work on social media: Twitter, Telegram, Facebook… you need to reach as many people as possible and share your mission.
Delegators like to get extra rewards when they stake their ADA so usually they choose pools with extra prizes and incentives. In PET we offer extra tokens and NFTs as rewards. We are partners with other Cardano projects like ADABudz and FabianGamerCoin so our delegators are able to get different tokens plus our native PETokens every epoch. We also organise raffles and contests in order to motivate delegators.
We mint our own NFT collections, planning to use the incomes to support animal causes. But we also use NFTs as giveaways, tickets, promotions and other initiatives to motivate delegators, plus our loved Cardano-PETs NFT project, dedicated to mint for free all our furry friends in the Community, making them all immutable in the Cardano Blockchain forever.
We started building our Discord not only for our delegators, but for all the PET-Lovers in the Cardano Community. It’s not only about crypto, it’s also about talking and sharing pics and videos of our furry friends.
Please tell us about your mission to support pets, wildlife and projects against animal abuse around the world. Why is it important to you?
We grew up watching how pets and animals in general were mistreated every day and getting sad news about species extinction because of human greedy practices. We always dreamed of having the resources to help, in PetLoverStake Team we share the love for wildlife and we are committed to protecting the environment. Humankind has done a lot of damage to our neighbourhood on Earth. And we found in the Cardano staking pool a way to generate the resources to help, allowing us to give our modest contribution.
We know it’s a long way: that it takes time to build a successful staking pool to generate enough income, now we are in the initial phase; joining forces and creating a committed community to support our plans. PET is just starting, it’s tough at the beginning as everything usually is, but we are ready to keep going.
Amazing. Any final words? Where can people get in touch?
We think it’s very important for the single SPOs to work as a Team: get stronger together, that’s the key. The common goal is to get delegators, sure, but there is no reason for rivalry between single SPOs. The more we share our work mutually in social media, retweeting each other’s and sharing our stuff, the more delegators will reach us back.
Each time a SPO shares some achievement or promotion, the others need to spread the word, especially in order to help the smaller pools. That is the way PET works, why be selfish? We already have enough competition with the Exchanges and big Multi Pool Operators. Small pools need to work together.
We can’t finish without giving a huge THANKS to all our loved PET-Delegators, for trusting on us from the very beginning and staking their ADA with us without even getting any rewards until our pool can start minting blocks. You all are another source of inspiration for us: let’s keep building, PET Lovers!
We are sharing daily stuff on Twitter. We also started building our own community in Discord, you don’t need to delegate in PET to be a member: in case you love pets and animals in general please feel free to join us. You also can find us in Telegram, Facebook and Instagram.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG.
The post Cardano SPO Column: PetLoverStake [PET] appeared first on The Cryptonomist.
