This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool operated by a team who has been involved in the Cardano ecosystem since 2017: One Pool [ONE1].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool whose mission is to decentralize the Cardano network and support mental health charities.

This initiative is a point of reference for everything Cardano and every week or two we will invite a Stake Pool Operator (SPO) to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.

Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.

Cardano SPO Column, interview with One Pool [ONE1]

Hi, thanks for your time. Tell us something about your team, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?

First of all I want to thank you for the opportunity to introduce us to those members of our community who do not know us yet!

My name is José Iadicicco (Argentina) and I am the SPO of ADA One Pool [ONE1]. I have worked for more than 20 years in IT, in projects related to international telecommunication networks and power distribution systems. I am passionate about Cardano, Chess, Mathematics and Programming.

Kehua Yang (Taiwan), Community Manager, is a university professor in two of the most prestigious universities in Taiwan. She has 2 Master degrees, the first one in education and the second one in Mandarin Chinese. She has been involved in major wind farm deployment projects and national transportation infrastructure.

Memo (Australia), Web Design, Technical Support: Software Engineer. Memo is a key member of our team and has advanced programming skills with the latest software and development tools.

What’s the path that led you to Cardano and to become Stake Pool Operators (SPO)?

We started our journey inside Cardano in 2017, when we first saw Charles’ Whiteboard video, and since 2018 we started giving open and free talks to spread his vision and message, as we understood from our background from the first moment that this was the right way to face such a big challenge (our talks have been recorded on our YouTube channel which give proof that we are here from the first moment).

When the possibility of collaborating with the creation of pools arose, as experienced telecommunications network designers, the first thing we thought was that we did not want to create a pool in Cloud (despite being the easiest way), because to achieve true decentralization, we know the need for the network to be made up of real nodes distributed across the globe. 

With this understanding, we accepted the challenge of creating the first physical Cardano Pool in LATAM, a region where there was none previously. We successfully carried out the challenge since 2021, which is our great pride within the community, and subsequently we have collaborated in other important milestones such as the co-organization of the Cardano Summit 2021, the contribution of the ADA Solar project through Catalyst, for the decentralization of energy through Cardano, the organization of the first Cardano Hackathon together with the National Technological University, uniting Cardano with the academic community, as was the initial vision of Charles. We really feel a great joy to have been able to accompany Cardano from its beginnings.

For our readers who aren’t programmers, can you explain what Plutus is? What advantages does it bring? And please tell us more about the hackathon you are organizing.

Plutus is a programming language, designed by the company IOHK, for the development of Smart Contracts in a secure and reliable way. It has been created as a “sub language” within the Haskell programming language (its “parent” language). 

One of its main advantages is that due to its robust design and way of programming, it is the type of programming language used to program so-called “mission critical” systems, i.e. systems whose failure can produce catastrophes, such as those we usually see in developments made in the previous paradigm (Solidity, used by Ethereum), where it is very easy to commit serious design errors that can be exploited by malicious actors, exposing resources and destroying projects with great potential, as happened for example in the case of “The DAO” initially and many others later on. 

We know that one of the current objectives is the diffusion of the Smart Contracts programming paradigm under Plutus, that is why we have decided to carry out this Hackathon in conjunction with the National Technological University, where Haskell courses are taught, to spread this paradigm among the most important academic community in our region, making it reach greater visibility and raising awareness about the importance of securely programming smart contracts that in some cases guard the life savings of families. For us, this is mission critical.

Cardano is currently in its Basho Era which focuses on scalability. Can you explain what kind of improvements are being implemented? And what is the subsequent Voltaire Era focusing on?

It is important to understand that the challenge we are facing is one of the greatest humanity has ever faced: the creation of a decentralized, global, distributed platform is being developed in a SERIOUS way, with the capacity to process the demands of the entire planet.

Understanding this first, we can start analyzing the concrete improvements that are being made and that we hope, as a whole, will expand the capacity of the Cardano blockchain to support the global and massive use of it, in a fast, secure, and economically accessible way.

Some of the concrete improvements being made include: 

• improvements to the source code;
• changes in protocol parameters;
• changes in block sizes;
• increase in the size of memory allocated for contract execution;
• improvements in Plutus capabilities

It will now be possible to perform operations that allow taking and reusing resources, thus improving the cost and speed of operation.

Like any technological system, it is important that it has a way to be continuously updated and improved, so as not to become obsolete. This is what every company does with its products.

In a decentralized platform like Cardano, it is important to have a mechanism that allows the whole community to make decisions about these improvements. This is the era of Voltaire, the political consensus leg of decision making about the direction to take and the use of available resources. The initial experimental version of this is the Catalyst project, so we are already working on it!

Awesome. Any final thoughts? Where can people stay in touch?

Just to thank you for all the love and support given by the community, and to tell you that it is an honor, a privilege and a pleasure to share this journey with you!

We will continue to support as always what we consider the best and most serious blockchain project in everything we can until we reach the goals.

Feel free to contact us through any of our networks: Twitter, or Telegram @ADAONEPool.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG.