Important note: If you are already an existing fun voter as of the time of this post, don’t panic — you may still choose to opt out of these changes if you wish by contacting ‘fun’ on the official Ark Ecosystem Slack or Discord servers. By doing so, you will continue to receive your share of the forging rewards at the 90% rate. However, I urge you to please read the article fully before deciding on this course of action.
I know, I know, I know.
I have on two separate occasions (here and here) explained my desire for delegate fun to remain a 90% paying public pool. However, as outlined in those articles, the economics do not allow for the situation to remain as-is. Unfortunately no benevolent large wallets offered to donate their share, so as an absolute last resort, and with a heavy heart, I am left with no choice but to reduce the payout share of delegate fun until the market situation improves.
Why the need to drop?
Prior to this change, fun raised 21.1 Ark per day to cover costs. Due to the ongoing bear market, this amounted to less than $15/day. Despite best intentions, it is just not feasible to pay the bills associated with delegacy on $15 per day. Servers have to be paid for, nodes must be maintained, and, being a gaming delegate, there are labour costs for the coding and maintenance of game development, in addition to licensing charges for the products and assets used in the games.
Furthermore, you may have read about recent outages of the Ark network. This affected fun in two distinct ways:
Firstly, as with all other delegates, fun could not forge as much Ark during the downtime. This meant that fewer rewards were generated and so the delegates raised substantially less money during this time, while our costs remained the same.
Secondly, along with delegates biz_classic, biz_private, del and pierce, fun played an instrumental role in repairing the network during that outage. We each spent a total of over 70 hours across multiple days, foregoing virtually all sleep, to help to restore the Ark network. This involved thorough investigations, writing patches, deploying a hard fork, rolling back the blockchain and replaying transactions to ensure no funds were lost. It was a herculean effort by the aforementioned delegates and it was not the first time that we had to come together to fix the network, going above and beyond what is normally expected of delegates. In fact, one Ark team member joked that we had become their emergency response team. However, it is simply not viable to carry out all of this work on $15/day or less. To that end, the community came together to donate what amounted to almost 6000 Ark to each of the above delegates following the outage, and we are all eternally grateful to each and every person who donated, but it’s unsustainable to rely on community donations as a payment model.
In addition, fun has been providing technical assistance to upcoming delegates as well as existing delegates; two such examples this week are cams_yellow_jacket and arkmoon.
What alternatives were considered?
As outlined from the start, my first choice of action was to call on any benevolent large wallets to donate their rewards. No dice.
Following the most recent outage, the delegate group involved in restoring the network launched a new delegate proposal (PANIC Team). This would have provided us all with a sustainable revenue stream to carry on fixing the network (in both Ark Node v1 and Ark Core v2) and, from a personal perspective, this additional funding would have enabled fun to stay as a 90% reward sharing pool. Unfortunately, as of the time of this article’s publication, the new delegate proposal has not gathered enough traction to reach a forging position and the current situation is untenable.
Ark Labs very generously agreed to sponsor delegate fun’s existing games, Match 3 and Bold Ninja. I am extremely grateful to them for doing so. Long term, however, it is unsustainable and infeasible to rely on sponsorship from third parties or donations from entities such as the Ark Community Fund to pay for game development, which is a core aspect of delegate fun’s proposal and part of its wider appeal to bring new users to Ark in an enjoyable way.
So what will happen?
With great reluctance, fun will be reducing its reward sharing rate from 90% to 70% from 29th October 2018. I have been a critic of such reductions but I have exhausted all other avenues and this is now the last remaining option. Please be reassured that I will continue to monitor the market sentiment and will increase the payout rates again as soon as conditions allow.
Several other delegates reduced their sharing rates some weeks ago. I held off for as long as possible in the hope for an alternative solution. The most common rate seems to be 75% amongst those delegates, however, please keep in mind that a further 5% of fun’s forging rewards are used to pay game prizes to boost Ark outreach, hence the rationale to reduce to 70% to cover this.
The daily minimum threshold to receive a payout will also be lowered from 3 Ark to 1 Ark. Weekly payments will continue every Monday for all voters regardless of balance to guarantee at least one payout per week for all.
I’m an existing voter
If you’re an existing voter, thank you. I am grateful for the trust you placed in me when you chose me as your delegate. I also understand that one of the reasons you probably voted for fun was because of the competitive 90% payout rate. I hope you will understand the reasons for lowering the share, and I hope you will be happy for this to happen under the circumstances. However, if you would like to opt out, please reach out to me on Slack or Discord (username ‘fun’) with your Ark address and you will be grandfathered into the existing 90% payout rate going forward.
Please note this only applies to existing fun voters at the time of this article’s publication.
In conclusion
I hope you appreciate the additional value that delegate fun brings to the Ark Ecosystem. It remains the only delegate where its voters can win up to an extra 21 Ark per day, completely free of charge, and aims to promote Ark outreach by encouraging new users to learn about Ark and join in through the medium of casual gaming. I have also been providing network support and technical assistance to the Ark network and other delegates on demand.
I really didn’t want to make this reduction, but I feel it is necessary to take this step due to the current market conditions, and I am hopeful that you will continue to support delegate fun in the Ark Ecosystem going forward.
