The last block shows just how Cardano is growing, on average we would usually see 1-10 transactions per block minted. The last block had a staggering 99 transactions in it (10x the norm). See https://adapools.org/blocks/a19b85e8265972e6f056c787dbde60b65d49c73cfe427a5e13ef1ad670d3a802

We have successfully upgraded all our nodes to version 1.30.1. Please see https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node/releases for more details. For the technical people, change logs include

• Correctly translate time for Plutus (from protocol version 6 onwards). (#2451)
• Adding changes to the libsodium bindings. Those include a functional fix that makes it safe to call the function that generates a public key from a private key concurrently. We only use those functions in the CLI, in a non-concurrent manner, but they are exposed in cardano-api. This fix ensures that custom code written against cardano-api behaves as expected when run in multiple threads. Furthermore, there are performance improvements that should have a positive impact on sync times. (#236)

To all our supporters and to those part of the @Cardano family, we’re giving away 340 ADA to celebrate our 100th block to a random address from one of our existing delegators pool or any new delegators with over ADA 5000 staked. Thank you for all your support. More details to follow on the celebration. 93 blocks have been minted so far!!

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Epoch 281 was the best of times (11 blocks minted) and Epoch 288 was the worst of times (0 blocks minted). The above quote sums it up. Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose, but on average with ADA you always win 😉

Plebpool has invested in some new hardware! We have upgraded our platform to some brand new physical Intel NUC 10 servers (12 cores, 64Gb Mem, 1TB harddrive). At the same time we have upgraded to the latest release of 1.29.0 of the cardano node. Onward and upwards!

Cardano is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that uses the Ouroboros consensus algorithm, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros_(protocol). Unlike Proof-of-Work blockchains (e.g Bitcoin) we know prior which pools will be given which slots to mine (“or rather confirm transactions”) for the network before the next epoch takes place. So why don’t pools publish this information? At first I thought delegators would love to know their potential earnings in advance so to speak, which is great!. However, there are 2 things to take under consideration. 1-> Because a pool is allocated a slot, doesn’t mean they will mint it. The pool may be offline and or too slow to process the slot and return in time the requirements to the network (or even loose it in a slot battle). and 2-> (and probably more importantly) if the known time and date a pool is set to mint a block it becomes a target for a potential timed attack. So we may look to paste this information but not include the time details in the future? 😉

Statistically we should find 3~4 blocks per epoch, now it can happen that we find zero blocks in an epoch but we can also find more. Its a distribution which over time (all epoch’s) should return ~5%. So us finding 11 blocks statistically is less than 0.05%. What are the chances!! lol. Anyway well done to all our delegators. https://adapools.org/pool/51120922fb9d7c0ecbb20378950da7880cb6dd9d3c9e06e17bff6aca

below is Epoch 283 # of expected blocks 🙂

Never in our wildest dreams did we ever imagine we would be able to say we minted 50 blocks! Well done to all the plebeians. Onward and upward for plebpool.com ->

Dictionary:

plebeian/plɪˈbiːən/Learn to pronounce noun plural noun: plebeians

1. (in ancient Rome) a commoner.
   • “the feeling was shared by plebeians, gentry, and clergy”

It may just seem like numbers in the title but its truly changing lives. We continue to increase our pledge at plebpool.com and we now stand at over 20K ADA staked by us (https://adapools.org/pool/51120922fb9d7c0ecbb20378950da7880cb6dd9d3c9e06e17bff6aca). We also have a grand total of 720 ADA donated to https://www.lifechangersa.org/. Please also consider supporting them directly or through our pool which in turn supports them 🙂 Thanks everyone!

Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would be here, but we are and we are very proud to announce another milestone for plebpool.com -> 3.5M ADA staked with our pool. Thanks to all the delegators. We will continue to provide the best service and support our local benefactors here in South Africa 🙂