Musings 7 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.
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Musings 1 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.
Musings 4 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.
Musings 20 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.
Musings 3 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.
Musings 11 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...
Musings 20 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...
Musings 21 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...
Musings 4 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,...
Musings 8 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...
Musings 17 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...
Musings 27 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....
Musings 14 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...
Musings 2 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...
Musings 25 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...
Musings 4 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...
Musings 15 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...
Musings 4 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...
Musings 25 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...
Musings 17 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...
Musings 7 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...
Musings 1 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...
Musings 15 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...
Musings 29 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...
Musings 3 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...
Musings 20 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...
Musings 15 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...
Musings 1 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...
Musings 13 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?...
Musings 10 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...
Musings 3 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...
Musings 10 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...
Musings 16 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...
Musings 11 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...
Musings 1 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...
Musings 20 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...
Musings 20 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...
Musings 6 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...
Musings 6 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...
Musings 25 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...
Musings 11 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...
Musings 7 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...
Musings 31 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,...
Musings 11 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...
Musings 18 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...
Musings 30 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,...
Musings 11 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...
Musings 2 Oct 2020
PoS versus PoW (2/2)
In the first part of this post we examined how the properties of Bitcoin, which enabled it to bootstrap the cryptocurrency ecosystem in 2009, became a problem...
Musings 2 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...