❤️ I love the potential of Cardano. That’s why Upstream is still here, running our SPO infrastructure and maintaining our set of useful tools. 🤝 We invested early in bare metal infrastructure and ring-fenced roughly 10 years running costs when we had meaningful delegations from FEs like @Cardano_CF and @IOGroup and some beautiful community whales back in the early days. 🔁 We receive rewards, convert to fiat or increase our pledge if we can, and operate as a profitable UK limited company. The directors original investments paid back long ago and our runway is still long. 💸 When funding is available we organise events and host community summits with great historical success, keeping the community connected in person. Recently these avenues of funding have closed or become sparse with little desire for in person meet ups or the community summits. 💰 As a tiny pool today we generate about $100 a month in SPO rewards. And so we resell hosting and api access to a few clients needing data access and a managed service that they can request custom data structures to meet their needs. ~~~~~~~~~~ 💧Delegate to Upstream - managing our rewards, infrastructure and in person events is what we do best, your delegation enables us to do more 💪

GM #Cardano - you're in the news! Today we launch the Barça Fan Lab: fcbarcelona.com/en/club/news… We've spent the last two years working behind the scenes to bring one of the world's biggest brands to Cardano, and today we're live. Thank you to everyone at Barça Vision, Andamio, and UTXOS for bringing the project to life. This journey is just beginning, and we'll continue to tell the story of this project in the weeks to come. It's a story about a vision we share, the relationships we've built, our technical achievements, and where we're going next. For now, try it: lab.barcavision.fcbarcelona.…

Oh dear indeed, when a brand is left in the wrong hands 🤦‍♂️

The parameter committee has spent months/years debating on how to accurately gauge SPO sentiment about raising stakePoolTargetNum from 500->1000. As part of this, myself and another member of the parameter committee meticulously drafted all the arguments for and arguments against and linked them in separate documents so that voters could have a balanced view of both arguments. We linked these inside of a neutral-language Info Action body for SPOs to consider. Because Info Actions have no ratification threshold and stakePoolTargetNum isn't a parameter that SPOs vote on through governance, the parameter committee collectively agreed to use a specific threshold of explicit YES > explicit NO for this Info Action. This is already above and beyond what the protocol and the Constitution require and we went out of our way to give SPOs a voice on this. Unfortunately, a community member who is opposed to the parameter change hijacked our draft and the years of effort that went into it, changed the threshold to suit his desired outcome, and submitted it without consulting anybody. Even if the we can reasonably disagree about what the threshold should be for this vote (remember it is not required at all), taking other people's work, twisting it, and submitting in a manner to suit your own narrative is extremely disappointing to see. I'm very disheartened by this after having spent years of my own, uncompensated effort building to this point only to see a community member undermine it like this. If you want to see the real draft that the parameter committee put together, you can read it here. Also the case for and case against are linked as well, so you can see both sides of the discussion fairly. I can't speak on behalf of the others, but I will be interpreting the outcome of the vote based on the criteria that the parameter committee collectively agreed on, regardless of what this Info Action says. docs.google.com/document/d/1…

Dingo has crossed the Rubicon. @Star_Forge_Pool has forged a mainnet block with a Dingo block producer. ✅ Preview ✅ Preprod ✅ Musashi ✅ Prime Testnet ✅ Cardano Mainnet cexplorer.io/block/727b0a50d… Join the legion running Dingo. We're coming.

🤣 so true. I have no idea why you all are focusing this effort on the min pool fee, nothing else to do? It will change nothing for small SPOs, it shouldn’t exist but it does. It’s a distraction. And this is too little too late. If you want to help small pools then you must hurt the large pools, it’s simple, can’t have both - either way for the love of god, please stop using small pools to market this silly idea … all this argument on min pool cost has done for the past few months is tell everyone not to delegate to small pools … So cheers I guess 🍻✌️

Look what we just shipped 👀 Cardano token terminal built to last. Track token prices, market caps, volume, liquidity, trends and more. We’ve been here through the bull runs, the bear markets, and everything in between And we’re not going anywhere 🫡 cardanoscan.io/tokens

Cardano governance can now govern the dApps built on Cardano. We just proved something believed to be impossible. A dApp can tie a smart-contract upgrade or parameter change to a Cardano L1 governance proposal. If that proposal passes and is enacted, the smart contract can verify the result on-chain and unlock exactly what was approved. The authority can come from Cardano itself not a project admin key, multisig, or trusted oracle. This opens a new path to decentralized dApp governance: → smart-contract upgrades → changing dApp parameters → treasury actions → emergency controls Cardano governance can now become the authority behind how dApps evolve. I first presented this design at UPLCfest in “Pushing the Limits of UPLC: Everything is Possible” a keynote about achieving things in Cardano’s execution layer that were considered impossible. It's really satisfying to see this finally validated.

Are you following @TeragoneFactory yet? Funded from the #Cardano treasury to continue building #Mithril. Publishing development updates here on X 👀 That's transparency I imagine DReps would like to see more of following a treasury withdrawal approval 👇

We got this one wrong. We believed the sale could be a way for the community to support an attempt at bringing TapTools back. But we misread the moment, the sentiment, and how it would be received. Everyone who participated has been refunded in full. There’s no point in trying to spin it or force something that clearly didn’t resonate. You make decisions, sometimes you get them wrong, and the only thing you can do is own it, and learn from it. We still care deeply about TapTools and what we built over the years. That hasn’t changed. Live, learn, grow. Onward.

I think there’s a misunderstanding about what’s happening here, so I want to explain my side. I’m not the original founder of TapTools. I joined later as a social media intern, and for years I worked unpaid because I genuinely believe in TapTools and cared about the Cardano ecosystem. I was the one answering your DMs. I was doing support. I was shouting out other projects and trying to support the ecosystem. I was the one pushing TapTools and Cardano every single day on socials. I went far beyond what was ever expected of me as an intern because I believed in the mission. Eventually, the founders left. The developer who built TapTools from the ground up left. TapTools went offline. And when that happened, thousands of people reached out asking what they could do to help, how they could support us, and whether there was any way to turn TapTools back on. Now I’m the one trying to turn the ship around. I’m not a developer, and I don’t have the capital to rebuild something like TapTools alone. And when I say there are no promises attached, that’s intentional. I could easily promise utility, rewards, access, or whatever else people want to hear if the goal was simply to sell more. I won’t. Crypto has enough people making promises they can’t or won’t fulfill. I’m not going to promise something I can’t guarantee. What I can promise is that I’m going to give this everything I have and try to turn this ship around.

Delegate to Upstream💧 Healthy infrastructure, pro devops 💪😎 #CardanoPro Very useful tool @Hardfork_OT 👌

Make sure to join us today at 16h UTC for an update on the Cardano Draper Dragon Orion Fund, straight from the source! 2 long-time community members Esco and Pete are joining us to talk about their first week in the program. Don't miss this one, link to the Space below 👇

I’ve been running this Cardano stake pool for five years. Together, we’ve minted 619 blocks—but despite that success, the pool has mostly operated at a loss. Now I’m giving it one final push: 30 days to reach 1.5M ADA in active stake and produce blocks more consistently. 🧵

It’s hard to take this seriously … Cardano community don’t hold your breath! Buuuuut DO delegate to solid SPOs who are still here, without a break, running the network, connecting communities 💪 That’s right folks! Delegate to Upstream, we make useful tools too 😎

Voting decision update: I have voted NO on the "Reduce minPoolCost to 75 ada and increase Plutus Memory Limits (Part 2)" governance action as a DRep and as a SPO, because reducing minPoolCost even more makes no sense to me. Thats not sustainable for an SPO on any level. And even this small value is a threshold that puts small pools in a disadvantage. We need a minMargin parameter with a sustainable level first, before getting rid of minPoolCost at all. Evens the field for everybody, small and large pools. I would have voted YES on the Plutus Memory Limits, but not in this combination.

Maybe for some … Not at all for myself, it’s massively increased my capability to be curious and generally a rewarding experience as a developer and business owner

I brought 100 pi 5’s for my dev stack at the start during the Covid days … one of the best investments I’ve ever made

I'm creating a new skill that can be used with most LLMs to strip out the Anthropic watermark. I call it Anthropies (Anthropic Herpies). I've also included a legal argument about how watermarks and the co-authored by Claude can cause issues down the road github.com/CharlesHoskinson/…