Share on Twitter

Introduction

It's been a wild week in Cardano, particularly as it swings with the turbulence of the market.

Still, plenty has been going on behind the scenes. In particular (and especially close to my heart) was the 1 Year Birthday celebration for the 10k Handle Club.

ADA Handle

What started as a crazy side-project idea between myself, Conrad, and Goose, has quickly become a vibrant community ranging from clubs like this one (centered around owners of the first 10,000 digits minted), to those who have created sub-communities around negative digits.

Its hard to believe that this started just over a year ago, and how much has happened since then. But time flies when you're having fun, right? If you haven't gotten yourself a Handle yet (think of it as an easy-to-use alias for your crypto wallet), head over to ADA Handle right now to mint.

Brand Adoption

There was a great thread by a friend of mine (@matthewjura) in which he described some recent consulting jobs he did with smaller brand names. In it he described how many were just jumping on the bandwagon of the last bull run, but that many didn't find any real use-case beyond that, especially with a lack of good UX around the technology.

This, of course, got me thinking about the broader picture of crypto adoption and the hurdles that we face as an industry looking for mainstream use.

The Cardano Dispatch

To keep things light this week and with the holidays upon us, we're just going to give an update on the BREW pool and what it means for members.

We're Now 4 Percent!

The most exciting part of this update is that The BREW pool (which is the primary method of membership to The Brew Club) is now operating at a 4% margin.

That's right! So, what's this mean for you?

It means more rewards on your staked ADA, and easier entry for many people to join and help grow The Brew Club into something more.

Originally, we operated the pool at a high margin of 20%. The idea here was to fund storytelling by letting members fund it through a passive subscription model (i.e. you were only giving up a portion of your rewards, rather than paying out of pocket to access). While this idea seemed good in theory, there were several shortcomings:

1. Users had no incentive to stake beyond the max 25,000 ADA.
2. At times of quiet (when The Brew Club paused production due to finances, talent acquisition, or any other reason), users still sacrificed an additional 16% of their rewards for no immediate gain.
3. Many ISOs (Initial Stake Offerings) set a limit for participating pools of 5% margin or lower.
4. Generally speaking, 20% is a hard margin to swallow when we're just getting started.

Because of that, we've lowered the margin to 4% as well as adjusted some incentives for members:

1. Discounts on minting are now moved to the Elite tier. Percentages are determined by where you sit within the range of 25k to 250k ADA staked, with the max amount unlocking a 100% discount and free minting of collectibles (minus fees).
2. You now have to be in the Elite tier to qualify for claiming the Lifetime Premium Pass after 1 Year of staking history. Don't worry, if you were staking before, you'll still be grandfathered into this perk, even if you're not in the Elite Tier.

Single Stake Pool Alliance

In addition to lowering our margin, we're also delighted to announce that we've joined the Single Pool Alliance! This doesn't necessarily affect our members, but it does reinforce our commitment to remain a single pool community and advance the decentralization of Cardano. In general, the promise we are making won't be tested until we reach saturation (around 64M ADA staked to BREW), but we believe we'll get there soon enough.

But, as we've described before, our desire is to choose alternative revenue models for The Brew Club aside from opening additional pools.

In most cases, this will be through products that we sell to both members and non-members, but it will also be through future increases to our pool margin if that is indeed the desire of the community. As a reminder, Elite Tier members will have governance voting rights in the future, and of which we anticipate pool margin will be at the top of discussions.