TL;DR Breakdown:
- Hoskinson has launched his own staking pool for Cardano dubbed “RATS Pool.”
- Overall, there are more than 1,800 active pools staking on the Cardano blockchain.
The founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, has announced his own staking pool for the Cardano (ADA) cryptocurrency. The ADA staking pool was dubbed “RATS pool,” in reference to the “King of Rats” status given to him by the CEO of Blockstream, Adam Back. At press time, the pool is running, and it’s open for all Cardano users to delegate their ADA cryptocurrency. It’s worth noting that the Cardano blockchain has been seeing lots of support and upgrades.
Hoskinson debuts RATS Pool
According to the explorer, RATS Pool is actually run by the founder of Cardano and Samuel Leathers, DevOps Engineer at Input Output (IOHK), one of the organizations behind Cardano. The pool has been opened for the delegation of ADA coins, and so far, there are 3.4 million live stakes on the RATS Pool but no active stake yet. The pool is currently running for four Cardano epochs.
Meanwhile, there are 1,826 active pools for Cardano staking. As per Cardano PoolTool, about 23.04 billion ADA has been staked on the network so far, which represents about 72 percent of the coin’s circulating supply. ADA has a circulating supply of over 31 billion, according to Coinmarketcap. With today’s price at $1.12, ADA has a market valuation of $34.8 billion to be ranked as the fourth-largest digital currency.
Major upcoming upgrade on Cardano
The announcement today comes a few days after IOKH announced that a major protocol change dubbed “Mary Upgrade” will go live on Cardano mainnet. According to the team, the successful deployment of the Mary protocol update to the mainnet would bring Cardano closer to the Goguen era.
“We shall shortly submit the updated proposal for the Mary update to mainnet, ready to take effect via a hard fork combinator event at the border of epoch 251 at 21:44:51 UTC on March 1, 2021” the IOKH team wrote.
