Guarantee Terms & Conditions

Making a Claim

  1. Join our mailing list and specify your staking address. This registers your stake address with us.
  2. If you believe we’ve missed a block, contact us and specify the relevant pool’s ticker, the missed epoch and block number, and your registered staking address.

Terms

  1. The guarantee applies to our pools, only when the relevant pool is less than 80% saturated. The guarantee does not apply to a pool when it is over 80% saturated. This incentivizes delegators to join or migrate to the less-saturated pools.
  2. You will be compensated for 100% of your missed rewards resulting from missed blocks (minus any transaction fees to send compensation).
  3. Missed blocks do not include “orphaned” blocks, or blocks lost due to “slot battles”, which are a normal and unavoidable part of the Cardano blockchain. We will only compensate you for missed blocks resulting from downtime of our network (besides government-controlled Internet shutdowns), or any fault of ours.
  4. Your stake address must be registered prior to any missed blocks.
  5. Payments will be made only in ADA to your registered stake address, and if it matches your email address in our records. There’s no exception as it prevents people from impersonating you.
  6. If there are multiple registrations for a single stake address, you agree to verify you as the owner by sending between 1-10 ADA from your address to another you own (an exact amount we specify).
  7. Your registered stake address must have been actively staking an amount of ADA equal to or greater than the amount staked at the time the block was missed, for the 10 complete epochs before the missed block.
  8. We reserve the right to change the terms at any time, although will honor the guarantee for blocks that were missed while the terms were unchanged. The date of the last change is on this page. It is the delegator’s responsibility to note updated terms.
  9. You agree and understand that we are not offering an investment opportunity. Staking is not the same as investing. We cannot and do not guarantee “returns” because they are not something we control, as they’re subject to the Cardano blockchain. Our guarantee pertains only to compensating delegators for blocks we miss.
  10. The guarantee will not apply if missed blocks occur due to a widespread Internet-shutdown (such as government-declared global emergency to implement an Internet kill-switch). If this happens, entire countries and regions will be shut off from the Internet, and we wouldn’t be able to even access servers (it’s a long-shot, and we have backup servers in different countries, but we’re just covering all bases).
  11. Claims for the guarantee must be made by delegators within 5 days of the end of the epoch with missed blocks. Claims made outside this deadline are not eligible.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Do many pools miss blocks?

Yes it’s common. The Internet and servers cannot be 100% reliable, so missed blocks are inevitable for every pool. But pool operators must minimize missed blocks with best practices.

Q. Does the guarantee apply to all your pools?

Yes, provided the pool is below the maximum saturation level as specified above.

Q. Why don’t other pools offer this guarantee?

Because it’s very financially risky if mistakes are made, or if there’s any server downtime. Mistakes happen for everyone in life. And we can’t control unforeseeable circumstances that affect server downtimes. At best, we can have multiple redundancies and backups, as we do. So we can confidently offer the guarantee. Ultimately, we pay the price for missed blocks that occur for whatever reason – not you.

Q. How much would you lose if a block is missed?

It depends on factors like pool saturation. But for each missed block, we’d lose about ₳700. It’s a strong incentive for us to maintain high uptime, although we’re already incentivized by our own stake.

Q. Is this guarantee sustainable for you in the long-term?

Yes, provided the price of ADA does not drop significantly.

Q. Won’t you achieve the same effect even without the guarantee, because you lose rewards too if you miss blocks?

Normally if a pool misses blocks, both you and the stake pool operator lose potential rewards. The difference with our guarantee is we miss a block, only we miss out. You lose nothing.

Q. Isn’t it impossible to have 100% uptime?

Yes, but we achieve 99.99% uptime which is as good as it gets. We’d only miss a block if the server had a momentary issue right when a block was scheduled. So the odds are very unlikely.