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ATFF
Austrian volunteer firefighters
Cardano stake pool

Welcome to the Cardano stake pool that supports volunteer fire departments worldwide -
organized and run by firefighters, supporting firefighters.

Ticker ATFF

Pool ID fdb8e1e7f181f23d31f09bb4547370ef104688b37b3e7f4fdb222f4f

More detailed information and statistics about ATFF @:

ADApools.org
PoolTool.io
Cardanoscan.io
pool.pm
AdaStat.net
Pool.vet

Mission statement

The ATFFpool team is dedicated to running a reliable, mission-driven stake pool to support Cardano's mission and to support volunteer fire departments all over the world by donating part of our rewards, and by providing information and education about Cardano, cryptocurrencies, and safety to raise the knowledge of the general public about cryptocurrencies in general and about Cardano in particular.

Donations and Incentives for Delegates

The margin fee is set to 0%, so all of the rewards go to our delegators (you!) and 20% of the fixed fee will be donated either to charitable organizations or to volunteer fire departments directly (20% of the minimum of 340 ADA is 68 ADA, and we will donate that for every epoch we mint blocks). Please check out the organizations below and make a donation too!

 

Our stake pool is up and running since April 5, 2021, and we produced our first block in epoch 280 with a total active stake of around 174k ADA. We received the first pool reward as expected in epoch 282 and decided to make the first donation of 94.76 USD to Africa Fire Mission (proof). AFM donates gear and provides training and education to fire departments in developing communities in Africa.

 

We produced our second block in epoch 286, and although we donated the same amount of ADA as last time (68 ADA), due to the appreciation of the ADA exchange rate (at 2.85 USD at the time of donation), our second donation is a whopping 193.80 USD (171.93 €)! This month's donation goes to the Fallen First Responder Home Program of the Tunnel To Towers Foundation (proof). T2TF's goal is to ensure stability and security for families of first responders who had to face sudden, tragic loss.

 

We donated 136 ADA (301.35 USD or 267.07 €) to the Phoenix Society of Burn Victims (proof) on October 19th for the blocks minted in epochs 288 and 290. PSBV is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people affected by a burn injury.

 

136 ADA (165.79 USD or 146.80 €) went to @fire - Internationaler Katastrophenschutz Deutschland e.V. on December 20th for the blocks minted in epochs 299 and 303 (proof). @fire is a non-profit aid agency of firefighters, paramedics and other first responders who help internationally in emergency cases such as earthquakes or wildfires.

 

Our latest donation went to Aid For Ukraine (Twitter @_AidForUkraine). Although this is not directly related to firefighting, we wanted to show our support for our neighbours and to help them to fight off the Russian invasion. We produced blocks in epochs 317, 319, 320, 323, 324 and 326, so 408 ADA have been donated on March 17th (proof). Slava Ukraini!

 

 

The frequency of further donations will depend on how often we get blocks and how large the amounts we accumulate are in the end, but donations will be made at least monthly. We will encourage the receivers to accept the donation in ADA and help them with setting up a wallet, transfer the donation to their wallet and help them to start staking. Of course we will donate in cash if that is preferred.

 

Reward Programs: Earn some $PIGY tokens and $THANK coins by staking with ATFF!

We also offer $PIGY tokens and $THANK coins as a reward to our delegators. These tokens have been introduced on the Cardano blockchain and are issued at pigytoken.com and thankcoin.io to stake pool operators so they have some form of reward they can give to loyal delegators. We sent the first batch of $PIGY tokens to our delegators in epoch 283 (screenshot from Yoroi), but future rewards will only be sent to delegators who contact us. Why is that so? When sending tokens, you automatically also send out 1.5 ADA, and it is required for a delegator to send us 1.5 ADA upfront, so we can send them their $PIGY tokens plus the 1.5 ADA back. We reward our delegators for every epoch they stake in our pool, the more ADA and the longer you delegate to ATFF, the more $PIGY tokens you will get (payout scheme).

Our Values

ATFF_icon_reliability
Reliability

Our servers are well managed to guarantee at least 99% uptime and consistent staking rewards.

ATFF_icon_safety
Safety

When you are your own bank, safety is key. We use best safety practices and help others by educating them about it.

ATFF_icon_altruism
Altruism

We help where we can, support projects like Cardano and donate to make the world a better place.

ATFF_icon_integrity
Integrity

We act in the best interest of our delegators and communicate our fee structure openly.

ATFF_icon_teamwork
Teamwork

Together we are strong. We support our peers where we can and build our strengths together.

ATFF_icon_sustainability
Sustainability

Forget the race for hashing power, we use the resources of our world sparingly.

Our Hardware

Dedicated bare-metal servers made from repurposed desktop PCs that live a second life serving a greater good, powered with 100% green energy from renewable sources:

Core node:

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3530 @ 2.80GHz,
24 GB DDR3 RAM,
Seagate Ironwolf 1TB HDD

Relay node 1:

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3530 @ 2.80GHz,
24 GB DDR3 RAM,
Seagate Ironwolf 1TB HDD

Relay node 2:

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3530 @ 3.20GHz,
16 GB DDR3 RAM,
Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD

How to Stake

Install a wallet software - either Daedalus or Yoroi, generate a new wallet, receive ADA and stake with ATFFpool

install a wallet software
generate a new wallet
receive ADA
stake with ATFFpool
 

Alliances we are a member of

Mission Driven Pools

MDP is an alliance of mission-based Cardano stake pool operators. Members have to donate a significant part of their rewards to charities to be part of the collective.

Bare Metal

The Cardano Bare Metal Alliance is an alliance of pool operators who run their servers using at least one bare metal server to increase the resiliency of the Cardano blockchain network by being physically spread out all over the globe.

First 2 Lifetime Block

In this community of small pools we help each other to produce their first block by collectively delegating some of our ADA to one particular pool of the community.

Single Pool Alliance

The Single Pool Alliance, SPA, has positioned itself as a potential solution that promotes true and diverse decentralization.

Frequently Asked Questions

Well, if you are not in control of your private keys, somebody else has control over them. Exchanges are relatively secure but there were many hacks in the past (here is a current one), and they are attractive targets compared to the average ADA holder.

On top of that, if you stake with the large crypto exchanges, you are not really helping decentralization. Have a look here, the BNP pools are Binance's pools: pooltool.io/analysis. Binance currently operates 62 pools and around 12% of all ADA is delegated to their pools (adapools.org).

Well, since there is basically no risk associated with staking and since the costs are low (transaction fee of ~0.17 ADA to sign up for staking, and a 2 ADA deposit that you get back when you unstake eventually), the answer is a clear yes. Of course, with smaller amounts it may take a long time until you get these initial costs back, but if you are planning to hold for longer, it is always better to stake than not to.

A total of 45 billion ADA exist and around 32 billion ADA (~71%) are currently in circulation. The remaining ~29% are in the reserves, which are addresses on the Cardano blockchain that are self-managed by the Ouroboros algorithm. 0.3% of the amounts in the reserves are used for reward payout every epoch, so the total rewards are becoming smaller over time. However, rewards are also funded by the transaction fees and while the transaction fees now do not sustain reward payout yet, this will be different as Cardano is adopted and used more and more. For more info have a look at Cardano's monetary policy at cardano.org.

 

If you, like us, believe in Cardano's mission, you probably also believe that ADA's price will increase over time, so the best advice is probably to hold it for a long time and not to spend it. However, there are more and more options and ways to pay with ADA for services (in addition to exchanging it on a cryptocurrency exchange like Kraken, Binance, Coinbase, Bitpanda, and others), and you can find many options here: https://cryptwerk.com/pay-with/ada/ and https://acceptedhere.io/catalog/currency/cardano/

There are several reasons. First of all, Yoroi and Daedalus are native wallets, wallets that are officially supported. They are updated quickly so if the Cardano team develops new features, they are usually available for native wallet apps first. Then, Cardano has integrated governance, which means that its users can vote on proposals to improve or change Cardano, and this is only possible with native wallets. For more information on voting, please have a look at this blog post by IOHK on project Catalyst, and check out the Cardano improvement proposals (CIPs) at Ideascale. And finally, there are some wallets that don't give you many other options to delegate your ADA to stake pools like ours, but only with their own pools.

Staking and reward payout is handeled by the protocol itself, with no interference by someone, so staking and reward payout is bullet proof. However, there are some other risks that are noteworthy:

  • If a pool operator does a poor job and misses blocks they were assigned to produce, the pool and its delegators receive no or smaller rewards. This can be because the servers are not up to date, were down or had expired KES keys, among other reasons. If the pool is oversaturated, rewards are diminished as well. I am well aware of my responsibilities here and promise to deliver a flawless pool perfomance.
  • Your ADA never leave your wallet when staking, so if there is a security issue with the pool you delegated with, your ADA are still secure. However, you could also be hacked and someone can try and get access to your wallet, you have to follow safe practices also as a delegator. To be fair, this actually hasn't to do with whether staking is secure or not.
  • If you lose access to your wallet (because your computer or phone breaks down or because you lost your spending password) AND lose your wallet seed phrase, your ADA is locked up forever. This is however also not a risk due to staking itself.

Yoroi and Daedalus currently do not offer to split the amounts in a certain wallet to delegate parts to different pools yet, but you could generate a second wallet and delegate the content of one wallet to one pool, and the content of the other to a different pool.

In principle, all the larger exchanges can be recommended, but it doesn't hurt to do some research upfront, because the fees are different. If you don't care about trading but want to get some and hold for a longer time, I would choose an exchange with low fees. There are several steps, you have to make a transfer of fiat money to the exchange first, and I'd have a look what the cheapest options are there. I use € for example and most exchanges offer SEPA transfer of fiat with zero fees, and signing up to be able to use SEPA definitely makes sense. Most important is though whether an exchange allows the transfer of ADA to a private wallet, and some exchanges don't offer that yet.

Then, on some exchanges there might be a difference in the fee depending on the order type you use. There is a maker fee for limit orders that is usually lower, and a taker fee for market orders that is usually higher. A (post) limit order is usually cheaper than a market order for that reason, but the differences are small: On Kraken, the maker fees start at 0.16% and the taker fees start at 0.26% for example (source).

Then, there is usually also a fee for withdrawing from an exchange, in the case of Kraken the fee for withdrawing ADA and transferring it to your wallet is 0.6 ADA.

I use Kraken because I like their trading platform, but Binance works well too and is cheaper, but I heard of issues with not being able to withdraw ADA for a few days after purchase or around the epoch boundaries, that might not be an issue for you though. I also once tried buying ADA via Bitpanda and they have comparatively high fees, and it turned out that I couldn't transfer ADA to my wallet (but as I have been told, this should be possible now), so I had to exchange it to a different coin, transfer that to Kraken, exchange it for ADA and then transfer the ADA to my Yoroi wallet. As you can imagine, the fees accumulate in such a case, so please be smarter...

Our Team

The stake pool is privately operated by me, Ewald Auer, with support from other members of FF Obervogau (special thanks to Stefan, Martin and Thomas) and other friends and family down south in always warm, always sunny southern Styria, Austria.
I was born in 1980 in Upper Austria, I'm married and father of a 3 year old soon-to-be firefighter, have a degree in microbiology and work for a pharmaceutical company in Grambach. I joined FF Obervogau in 2014, where I am currently a board member and an active part of the emergency dive team.