Better Late Than Never was one of the first 10 stakepools on Cardano Shelley Incentivized Testnet, over the duration of the ITN, we have demonstrated our technical capabilities, as well as provided support to other, less skilled stake-pool operators.
At 2ⁿᵈ Layer, we have thought deeply about joining Cardano Shelley mainnet with out own stake-pool, however after carefull analysis of the competitive landscape we choose different strategy… we’ve decided to partner with a local partner from the same city to maximize synergies, and reduce overall costs so we can focus on more beneficial activities for the ecosystem. This partner is Cardano Stake Pool with a ticker DOLCA.
As 2ⁿᵈ Layer, we support DOLCA operations with our own network of block relay nodes which have high degree of connectivity across most continents, thus helping facilitate better block propagation to other stake pools. In addition, we participate in technical architecture, testing and other relevant actvities to provide best-in-class service.
We strongly believe that this partnership will maximize value for both DOLCA, 2ⁿᵈ Layer and stakeholders alike. The benefit of freed-up capacity will enable us to focus on development of innovative solutions leveraging Cardano Blockchain capabilities, and focus on participation in Cardano governance.
While we don’t operate a Stake Pool ourselves, this close partnership will give us deep understanding of challenges that are part of stake-pool operations, thus giving us full visibility into the mindset of a pool operators and their procedures. We will in addition still participate in testnets, and testing of all new Cardano Node releases.
The main driver behind this change was the high level of competition and so called “race to the bottom” which would forced us to move focus from more productive contributions towards marketing which would effectively harm the overall Cardano ecosystem. Not to mention, that it would make us unable to provide the level of service we would like to provide without major financial loss on the operational costs side.
With the new freed up bandwidth, we can now focus on formalization and execution of our new project dCloud, about which you will hear more soon enough.
About DOLCA
Cardano Stake Pool DOLCA has also been operating from the early days of Cardano Shelley Incentivized Testnet, Tomáš, who is the main pool operator has over 10 years of experience from enterprise IT industry where he delivers services to many recognizable companies operating in Nordic region.
Apart from his work at the leading IT Services Management company, he also operates a regional Internet Service Provider, improving access to reliable high-speed Internet to vast amount people in rural areas around the city of Ostrava and Opava.
If you wish to support the work of 2ⁿᵈ Layer, please consider delegation to DOLCA pool and stay tuned for our dCloud Decentralized Cloud Platform proposal.
Currently DOLCA Stake Pool operates most of it’s infrastructure in the Cloud, but with this merger, this is soon to be changed, and the infrastructure will be hosted in 2ⁿᵈ Layer datacenters compliant with Tier III and Tier IV standards.