Musings

52 posts in this category

Ouroboros Genesis is now the default on mainnet. It solves a specific problem: how does a node that knows nothing work out which chain is the real one?

Musings16 Sept 2026

What happens to your rewards if a pool goes offline?

You miss a share of one epoch's rewards and nothing else. Your ADA never moves, and the loss does not carry into the next epoch.

Musings13 Sept 2026

Can you stake your ADA and forget about it?

Yes, with a pool you can trust for years. We set a 1% margin and a 340 ADA fixed fee in 2020, have never charged more, and never will.

Musings7 Sept 2026

Why do some pools mint more blocks than others?

Mostly it comes down to stake and to luck, and rather less than people expect to how well the pool is actually run.

Musings1 Sept 2026

Can a stake pool take your ADA?

No, and the reason is worth understanding, because the mechanism is the whole point of Cardano's staking design.

Musings4 Aug 2026

The Lindy effect

More than half the stake pools ever registered on Cardano have stopped. Of the 2,464 that launched in staking's first year, 811 are still producing, which makes lifetime block count a record of survival rather than size.

Musings20 Jul 2026

Dijkstra, and the shortest path

van Rossem is in, and the next era on Cardano's roadmap is Dijkstra. A note on the man the era is named after, and why the naming is a better fit than it first looks.

Musings3 Jun 2026

The Long View

Buffett's line about fear and greed is really about temperament, not timing. The substance behind Cardano — Leios, Midnight, careful peer-reviewed engineering — hasn't changed, and ADAvault carries on as before.

Musings11 Aug 2025

Competition

We've been spending a bit of time reviewing the competitive landscape in cryptocurrencies lately with the help of Grok, and thought it might be interesting to...

Musings20 Aug 2024

Brand development

Do we need to communicate the goal of Cardano better to a wider audience. Perhaps. Certainly we would argue that chasing a self selecting crypto audience on X...

Musings21 Jan 2024

Growth Strategy

A great video update from Charles has just landed covering the Electric Capital developer report, which among other areas explores development ecosystems and...

Musings4 Oct 2023

Governance matters…

Charles summed this up perfectly a while back: "Cardano is leading the entire cryptocurrency industry in this. Bitcoin and Ethereum the other two big guys,...

Musings8 Jun 2023

SEC enforcement actions

You are likely aware of the recent enforcement actions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against Binance U.S. and Coinbase. These actions state...

Musings17 Feb 2023

Contingent Staking and Schelling Fences

There's been a lot of talk in recent days about a proposal for Contingent Staking (CS) which could be implemented on Cardano to enable SPO's to set conditions...

Musings27 Jan 2023

Cardano Native Tokens

A recent article by Emurgo reminded us that there is a massive strength that Cardano has that is somewhat unremarked on and under appreciated; Native Tokens....

Musings14 Nov 2022

Market turbulence

You will likely have seen news over the last few days on the collapse of FTX, the exchange led by Sam Bankman-Fried and the sister company Alameda which was...

Musings2 Nov 2022

Another look at network effects

A recent article in The Economist covering the current health status of some of the tech 'darlings' caught our eye: Over the past year, the firms that...

Musings25 Jul 2022

A metric that matters…

Transaction Bytes per Second (TBPS). This metric measures the total transaction data throughput on chain and it's been increasing consistently. We think this...

Musings4 Jun 2022

On chain metrics

A couple of interesting stats from the latest Kraken Intelligence report. First up is the on chain dominance which as expected shows a weakening of altcoins...

Musings15 May 2022

Why tokenomics matter

A busy week in the crypto markets, triggered by the collapse of the StableCoin Terra and the non stable reserve Luna, has led to some soul searching by...

Musings4 Apr 2022

Decentralisation and security matters

Charles spoke at the Binance Conference in Dubai a few weeks ago and touched on decentralisation. He got a fair reception all things considered (Binance have...

Musings25 Mar 2022

Cardano Performance Improvements

We thought it was worth an update on progress improving the speed at which Cardano processes smart contracts and transactions. As Cardano adoption has...

Musings17 Feb 2022

Transaction volume

So lets take a moment to examine this table from Messari. Spot the interesting and very important data point? Cardano has been in second place for Transaction...

Musings7 Feb 2022

Pipelining…why does it matter?

We talked in a recent blog post about Hydra which is one the core layer 2 scaling technologies which will be rolling out for Cardano this year. Another part of...

Musings1 Jan 2022

New Year 2022

2021 has been an unusual year by any standards, and we wanted to drop a quick note to wish all our delegators the best for 2022. A lot has happened in the...

Musings15 Nov 2021

Most active chains

Seems like $HOSKY has been increasing the transaction volume significantly of late? In all seriousness Cardano is now second only to Bitcoin, and while price...

Musings29 Oct 2021

What is Cardano about?

You may know that Charles and team are travelling up through Africa over the next 3 weeks visiting a plethora of countries to extend the deal already signed...

Musings3 Sept 2021

Can we have prosperity without growth?

An interesting article in the New Yorker caught our eye recently exploring how economic orthodoxy is being challenged. Specifically how the critique of...

Musings20 Aug 2021

Ignore the price

Every now and then we write about price. The last time was when ADA reached $0.60USD which seems a long time ago now. We don't write about price often for a...

Musings15 Aug 2021

The environmentally sound option

Cardano ADA remains the premium option if you are concerned about the environmental impact of investing in cryptocurrencies. Proof of stake is approximately a...

Musings1 Aug 2021

Amazon denied it but…

So you may have seen the news in the last week that Amazon were working to accept crypto currency payments, starting with Bitcoin. Accordingly to an insider...

Musings13 Jul 2021

A billion users

A recent article in City A.M. covering the Cardano aspiration for a billion users within 10 years caught our eye. A billion users, that's a big number right?...

Musings10 Jun 2021

Goguen and Alonzo?

The Cardano smart contract Era is almost upon us. And you may have noticed that the team behind the project have a fondness for naming phases of the project...

Musings3 Jun 2021

Thoughts on Markets

A recent YouTube update from Charles Hoskinson touches on markets and the ecosystem for cryptocurrencies, reminding us of some of the important aspects that...

Musings10 May 2021

What is IELE and why does it matter?

We are entering the next phase of money when it becomes programmable. This in a nutshell is the promise of Smart Contracts, and has the potential to be a major...

Musings16 Apr 2021

#1 in Daedalus

We were pleased to see ADV ranked at #1 in Daedalus when we checked at the beginning of Epoch 260. That's 2 pools in the top 20. There is some luck in it of...

Musings11 Apr 2021

Cardano Metrics E1-259

We've been messing around with Cardano-db-sync which puts the entire block chain into a Postgres SQL database instance, and means you can easily access via SQL...

Musings1 Apr 2021

d=0

So we have now passed the point where the decentralisation parameter "d" reaches zero. What does this mean? The d parameter sets the amount of blocks produced...

Musings20 Feb 2021

A Fistful of Dollars?

Like a lot of the crypto community we've been having some fun on Twitter today… And you know it's been a day to pause and reflect… before the work starts...

Musings20 Feb 2021

Increased transactions

You might have caught the news that Cardano is now second only to BTC in terms of transaction value. It's interesting to see how transaction volume has...

Musings6 Feb 2021

Leaving Shelley

We will soon be heading into the Goguen Era with Cardano. Lets take a moment to reflect on the Shelley Era with one of Percy Shelley's most famous poems? I met...

Musings6 Feb 2021

Market Cap

We are not big fans of dwelling overly on market cap and the price of ADA. Analysing charts is not a productive use of time, and there is no strong short term...

Musings25 Jan 2021

The 'Killer App'?

We are used to the idea of a 'Killer App', that one application that drives the adoption of a new technology. That one capability that just can't be replicated...

Musings11 Jan 2021

Metcalfe's Law

Cardano passed an important milestone in recent weeks. It wasn't the price of ADA, as welcome as the increase is for people who have held it since the peak in...

Musings7 Jan 2021

There's a lot more than meets the eye

We were reviewing the Polkadot design the other day and noted that they are using libp2p for the networking layer. It fits in with the project ethos, has...

Musings31 Dec 2020

Best wishes for 2021

It's been an eventful 2020 in so many ways; from the ongoing pressures of climate change, the COVID virus that has swept across the world, the U.S. Elections,...

Musings11 Dec 2020

The 'problem' with Altcoins

We've been spending some time lately looking through the Nakamoto Institute web site. You could perhaps say (unfairly?) it's the spiritual home of the "Bitcoin...

Musings18 Nov 2020

Innovation and Governance

Economist Robin Hanson writes on his blog Overcoming Bias about the impact of the Overton Window and the art of the possible in politics. The Overton window is...

Musings30 Oct 2020

Open Source Matters

Flicking through r/cardano and noticed this post which compares Cardano and ERC-20 (the Ethereum Standard for on-chain tokens). The comparison is interesting,...

Musings11 Oct 2020

Cardano Global Adoption

At ADAvault we use Cloudflare for DDoS protection and CDN caching. An interesting byproduct of this that we get data for use of the Daedalus wallet access on a...

Musings2 Oct 2020

PoS versus PoW

One of the significant benefits of Cardano is that it relies on Proof of Stake (PoS) to secure the chain rather than Proof of Work (PoW). Why is this a better...