Stakeboard — Extended Development Update #1

5 min readNov 16, 2021

If you’re already familiar with Stakeboard, feel free to jump ahead to our “Development Update,” but since this is our first weekly update, and some of you may still have questions about what the platform will offer, here’s a brief summary of what Stakeboard is and what it will do:

Stakeboard, a quick introduction/overview

Stakeboard is a Social Staking platform designed with Decentralized Finance (Defi) in mind.

The platform will aggregate all Cardano stake pools in one place, where delegators can run targeted searches based not only on quantitative criteria, but also based on their values. So whether a delegate wants to support single pool operators, women in blockchain, Cardano devs, charitable causes, and/or other value propositions highlighted on the platform, they can narrow their search for the right stake pool for them in seconds.

Once delegates find a stake pool they think is a good fit, Stakeboard will provide them with an easy, intuitive staking interface, and even a messaging app to communicate with their prospective stake pool operators.

And for stake pool operators (SPOs) without a lot of time or money to spend on marketing their stake pool, Stakeboard will bring some equity to the Cardano staking landscape by giving every SPO a space to present their unique value propositions to the delegator community, along with tools to easily communicate. Stakeboard empowers delegators and stake pool operators by connecting them and unleashing the full potential of Proof of Stake, in combination with the eUTXO model:

In order for this to happen, we have individuated our three pillars:

Connect
Reward
Decentralize

By connecting Delegator to Stake Pool Operators, we bring trust in the staking ecosystem. This connection will hopefully contribute to a more diverse, inclusive and balanced network of Stake Pools. Verified Stake Pool Operators will be able to customize their profile page and attract delegators that match them in a number of ways (eg. geographic, mission, vision etc.)

A healthy balanced staking ecosystem will naturally promote decentralization and ensure Cardano’s blockchain security.

Staking is DeFi, and it is still at its infancy. With Stakeboard we also want to open the door and explore the infinite financial opportunities to grow wealth of both Delegators and Stake Pool Operators.

The past week was packed with events, among the most important ones we have one of our Lead Engineer participating in the series of Twitter Spaces hosted by Cardano Foundation Executive Officer Jeremy Firster, where Giovanni has discussed with other Open Source contributors about dandelion.link (Cardano APIs as community service), and the central role it has in feeding Stakeboard with on-chain data.

As you may be aware, we didn’t make the cut at the Fund6 of Catalyst. This didn’t knock us down, but on the contrary, it has motivated us to come back stronger with multiple smaller well defined proposals. This means the Cardano Community will sit at the steering wheel and decide through its votes which features will be implemented first on Stakeboard.

Stay tuned and you will soon know more about our future plans and Catalyst Proposals.

Time for the weekly development update!

UX Design

The team is extremely excited about the progress made on the UX side. After a few iterations, we finally converged on what it’s going to be Stakeboard logo. Our designer has in fact just finalized it and moved on to preparing style guides and mock-ups. Our brand identity has just been released and we are excited and hope you all are as well!

This week we have exciting updates on three different topics:

Alice
Stakeboard API and integrations
Stakeboard UI

Alice, the Staking Detective

As anticipated a few weeks ago, one of the features of the Stakeboard portfolio is a bot named Alice. Alice listens for Cardano Stake Pool updates directly from the blockchain, and publishes a summary on both Telegram and Twitter.

We are extremely pleased to officially launch Alice today!

Alice will initially focus on any stake pool updates like changes to: margin, costs, declared pledge, stake pool retirement as well as new stake pool being set up.

In the future we plan to integrate Alice directly on Stakeboard, so that users can be notified of pool updates directly in the messaging center. At that point, as with all the social platforms, users will be able to select which pools they want to follow, and receive updates only for such Stake Pools.

Stakeboard API and Integrations

Most of the work carried on the API was focused on expanding Alice capabilities. The most relevant tasks were:

Added Alice stake pool retirement notifications
Configure and integrate Alice with Twitter
User profile
Added management user profile and background image
Users can now set their website in their profile
Stake Pool result consistent-shuffling (in short, after searching for pool, results will be displayed in no particular order to avoid same results to appear first all the time. In order to do so a per user, consistent shuffling mechanism, has been implemented. A separate article on how we try to be as fair as possible and bias-free later)
Tech debt: Stake Pool events sorting and sourcing has been refactored to use block number as the pagination parameter rather than the initial, internal, db id.

Stakeboard UI

The UI has gone through quite some iterations of improvements based on user feedback as well as minor updates and patches.

The largest effort went into the development of the stake pool profile page. Operators that complete the stake pool verification process, can now set up a stake pool profile page where they can add details like stake pool mission and social media channels. This additional information can be used to perform more fine grained search in our enhanced searching page.

Last but not the least, the team is extremely excited to announce that it is now possible to delegate with Nami wallet directly from a stake pool profile page.

In summary tasks that have been competed are: