Cardano SPO Column: Wish Pool [WISH]

This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool that is donating to charities that are helping disadvantaged students to complete their education: Wish Pool [WISH].

The previous guest was a stake pool operated by Crypto Buff who has been working in the industry for some time and has his own YouTube channel.

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 Wish Pool [WISH]

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

First of all, thanks to Patryk for inviting us to this interview. We are a group with a strong background in server administration (Unix/Linux, Windows and even mid-range), project management, and various industries including the financial industry. You can say that we have a level of maturity as the team has between 20 to 30 years of industry experience.

I am the oldest in the team and I take care of day to day operations and marketing. We love dabbling in technology and learning new things so managing a Cardano stake pool was very interesting to us. We are fortunate to be based in Singapore where it is easy to find affordable, up to date hardware and high speed, secure infrastructure.

In our spare time, we like to do photography, film-making and charity work. That is why one of our goals is to give regular donations to educational charities.

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

Like a lot of people, we first heard of Cardano after watching Charles Hoskinson’s white board presentation explaining why Cardano is a 3rd generation crypto after Bitcoin and Ethereum. After watching other videos and reading about the roadmap, I was hooked.  

I especially liked the fact that Cardano had a mission of banking the unbanked. My thinking at the time was: “If I am ever going to invest in crypto, why not go with a coin that can do a lot of good while I earn money.” 

When the option to maintain a Stake Pool became available, I tried it out first in Testnet out of interest. I have a pretty strong Unix/Linux administration background and being an SPO was quite interesting to me. I progressed to Mainnet after meeting other SPOs who were struggling to mint their first blocks.

We decided to pool our resources together and delegate our spare ADA to a member of the group in a rotating queue to help them mint their first blocks. This was the beginning of F2LB and it is now an established community group helping pools mint their first blocks. We are still very active at F2LB guiding new SPOs and answering their questions.  

We have taken ourselves out of the delegation queue to give chances to others who really need the delegation. Nevertheless, we still continue delegating every epoch to the first Pool in the F2LB queue as we strongly believe that this is the right thing to do to keep Cardano truly decentralised.

What is the mission of your stake pool? Are delegator rewards affected when you donate to charities?

Before we even started Wish Pool, we were already helping out educational charities that support disadvantaged children to complete their higher education. We even helped to create documentary films to raise exposure for educational charities that we support.

We do this because we firmly believe that giving the gift of education to a worthy student can help him break the cycle of poverty within his family. Thus, when we created Wish Pool, we pledged part of our own profits towards helping educational charities. Note that we take this only from our own profits. Delegator rewards are not affected.

Our belief in the power of education is so strong that even during our first year when Wish Pool had no profit for months at a time, we still consistently donated to the charities that we support. Thus, if you delegate your ADA to Wish Pool, you will get 100% of your usual rewards while indirectly helping disadvantaged students to complete their education. In the long run, we are hoping that successful students are able to get their families out of poverty.

What are you most looking forward to with Cardano in the coming years? How can blockchain technology help the world?

I look forward to the day when Cardano has completed its development roadmap so it can realise its full potential. I look forward to the day when there is mass adoption. When people are safely using cryptocurrencies in their everyday lives from purchasing goods to seamless cross border money transfer.

For this to happen, I believe there should be a balance between regulation and innovation. I would prefer less oversight but recent scams have shown the dangers bad actors can inflict if left unchecked. The right amount of oversight would allow innovation to flourish while at the same time make people more confident to invest in cryptocurrencies.

As the market cap of Cardano grows, it would be less vulnerable to price manipulation and we would have a truly decentralised currency not managed by any single government.

Great contribution. Any additional comments? Where can people stay in touch?

One of the projects that we are maintaining is the Cardano SPOT Check. This is a helper site for Cardano Stake Pool Operators. It started as a site for SPOs to check their nodes to ensure that they are able to build blocks. Eventually the site has expanded to include tips and tricks for installing, maintaining and troubleshooting Cardano nodes.  

We could have kept all this knowledge to ourselves and kept a competitive advantage against other SPOs. However, we firmly believe in Cardano and in order for it to grow, the community should continue sharing knowledge and improving the ecosystem. United we stand, divided we fall. Check out Cardano SPOTCheck.

To learn more about us, please visit our website.

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