Digital Fortress 🇺🇲

We have decided to vote "No" on the governance action "Should stakePoolTargetNum (k) be raised from 500 to 1000? (SPO poll)" Rationale: Raising k works by cutting rewards on pools above the proposed saturation point (about 39M ada, half of today's 78M), pushing their delegators to move, so that some of that stake might go to smaller pool entities. We will not vote in favor of disrupting delegation on sustainable independent pools that have successfully attracted stake, for the chance of a small increase in decentralization. Increasing k will negatively affect these independent pools that have grown above the proposed saturation point, and could disrupt their operations. Institutional and exchange pools, some of the largest pool entities on Cardano, have full control of the ada delegated to them, so they are effectively immune to losing stake if k increases. That leaves independent pools to take the loss. The trade-off is not worth it. We do not think k is an effective tool to increase decentralization. Decentralization should come from more users delegating from their own wallets to the pool they want, and from pools competing for that stake. The Nakamoto coefficient (NC) is the smallest number of pool entities that together control more than half of the stake. Figures published in support of raising k put the NC at about 12 before k was increased from 150 to 500 at epoch 234 (December 6, 2020), rising to a high of 54 at epoch 322 (February 19, 2022), then falling back to about 15 by epoch 630 (May 9, 2026). By these figures, the NC is only about 3 higher than it was before k more than tripled. If there was any effect, almost none of it lasted. The k parameter stayed at 500 while the NC dropped 72%, from a peak of 54 to about 15, so the answer is something other than k. The rise began near the start of a bull run, when new users were entering the network, and the peak came over a year after k changed. This suggests that the NC moved with other factors much more than with k. Those other factors, including more users, more ada staked from their own wallets, and a growing ecosystem, are where the effort to improve decentralization should go. Oversaturation Attacks Become Easier and More Damaging: Halving the saturation point would also make oversaturation attacks on independent pools far easier and more severe. A single attacker can oversaturate any pool near the saturation point just by delegating their ada to it, provoking real delegators to leave to avoid lost rewards. The attacker then moves on to the next pool and can repeat this indefinitely with the same ada. Raising k would put more pools near the saturation point. These attacks are relatively cheap and easy for a bad actor to carry out. The attacker only has to delegate, so they keep their ada and give up just part of their own rewards. The same amount of ada over the saturation point can also cut delegators' rewards almost twice as much at k=1000 as at k=500. On December 6, 2020, shortly after k was raised from 150 to 500, one wallet pushed the CFLOW pool about 20M ada over the saturation point, and within five days over 150 delegators with more than 26M ada had left before the wallet moved on to oversaturate other pools.

We have decided to vote "No" on the governance action "Reduce minPoolCost to 75 ada and increase Plutus Memory Limits (Part 2)" minPoolCost to 75 ada: Disagree Increase Plutus Memory Limits: Agree We do not support another cut to minPoolCost as a stopgap. Reserve funded block rewards were meant to help bootstrap the chain. These rewards are designed to shrink over time, with transaction fee revenue meant to replace them as the chain matures. That handoff is not happening at the scale it needs to because transaction fee revenue from chain activity has not grown enough to replace the shrinking reserve. Lowering the fixed fee floor as that reserve portion shrinks is just a temporary patch. The same kind of cut will have to be made again until minPoolCost is 0, unless on-chain activity increases enough that transaction fee revenue replaces the shrinking reserve. The purpose of the minPoolCost parameter is to set the minimum fixed fee high enough to cover the economic cost of running a pool. We don't believe a 75 ada fixed fee would reasonably cover those costs. We would rather leave minPoolCost at 170 ada until a parameter such as minPoolMargin is in place. Once in place, we can determine the viability of reducing minPoolCost or retiring the parameter completely.

We voted Yes for the Cardano van Rossem hard fork!

All Digital Fortress [DIGI] Cardano nodes are updated to node version 11.0.1 on mainnet in order to proceed past the PV11 boundary - van Rossem hard fork preparations are under way!

Digital Fortress is on the latest Cardano Node version and correct canonical chain, mitigating the mainnet fork situation on the nodes we control. Systems are looking good.

All Digital Fortress Cardano nodes across the mainnet, preview, pre-production, and Sanchonet networks have been updated to Cardano-node version 10.1.4.

Digital Fortress Cardano stake pools are ready for the Plomin Hard Fork decision deadline for January 24, 2025. All nodes were updated to version 10.1.3, and "Yes" votes for delegated Ada stake weight was cast in December 2024.

Digital Fortress voted Yes to activate the Plomin Hard Fork. The Plomin Hard Fork enables full CIP-1694 governance functionality, including DRep voting on all actions, treasury withdrawals, constitutional updates, and votes of no confidence, while also introducing new Plutus primitives for advanced cryptographic and logical operations.

All Digital Fortress Cardano main net servers are upgraded to Cardano-node 10.1.3 Ready for the #PlominHardFork

All Digital Fortress nodes are migrated to Cardano node 10.1.2. Ready for Chang 2 #Cardano 😎

Digital Fortress voted "Yes" on the Chang 2 Hard Fork initiation on the Preview testnet. SPOs must be on version 10.1.1+ for the hard fork to execute. Govtool proposal data and action ID at this link: preview.gov.tools/governance…

Running Midnight

We're thrilled to announce that Digital Fortress has never needed a "Tech Janitor" to run our pools! Our infrastructure is built in-house for our pools and other Cardano services, with love and lots of coffee ☕️. We promise we’re not just hitting "run" on someone else's scripts.

We have upgraded to Cardano node version 9.1.0. Once enough SPOs and exchanges upgrade to this version, the Chang Hard Fork will be initiated. #Cardano