Announcement: The Ardana ISPO is here!

Ardana

Published in

Ardana Hub

5 min readJul 4, 2022

Update — 09/05/22: The article has been revised with updated details on the ISPO distribution.

Introduction

We are thrilled to announce that Ardana’s ISPO will take place today, July 4th, 2022, and will run all the way through to December 31st, 2022, with the ISPO officially ending on January 5th, 2023, at 21:45 UTC.

The DANA will be distributed among delegators from the liquidity mining portion. The distribution will take place via TosiDrop, the Cardano token dispensing service. Users will be able to claim their first distribution share on Drip Dropz during the next epoch on July 9th, 2022, at 21:45 UTC. The rewards that a delegator is owed will be made claimable at each epoch, so rewards accrued between two epochs aren’t claimable until the latter epoch concludes. If a delegator doesn’t claim their tokens before the next epoch, they will be added onto the next tranche of claimable ISPO rewards.

Any ISPO supporters who staked before March 31st will now enjoy big bonus multipliers, which will significantly boost their ISPO rewards. The total DANA for the ISPO will amount to 4 million DANA tokens (originally, it was 2.5 million DANA tokens), with a maximum cap of 69,444 DANA distributed during each epoch.

One of the primary purposes of the ISPO is to reward long-time supporters of the ASPA pools (the complete list of ASPA pools can be found here). Of course, there is no minimum staking requirement to avail of these rewards; it’s all based on loyalty to the pools.

Details on the early bonus staking multiplier were illustrated in this article. The following is a reminder of that same information.

What is the Early Bonus Staking Multiplier?

As of March 31st, 2022, 21:45 UTC until July 4th, 2022, 21:45 UTC (20 epochs in total), the longer participants delegate to an ASPA pool, the higher their bonus multiplier will be. The bonus multiplier is calculated for each amount that was added separately- that way, it’s impossible to manipulate the system by staking 1 ADA during the early rewards period (between March 31st and July 4th), and then increasing delegation to a larger amount after the ISPO begins.

Each bonus multiplier starts at 1x, which means no multiplier has been applied. The bonus multiplier is capped at 2x multiplier. This means participants can look forward to earning a 0.05x bonus multiplier for each epoch.

But how does this work in practice? Imagine the following scenario:

A participant decides to delegate on April 29th and remains delegated until the ISPO kicks off on July 4th. They will then have earned 14 epochs x 0.05x = 0.70x bonus multiplier. When the ISPO starts, they will earn DANA tokens with a generous multiplier of 1.70x. Remember, delegating before March 31st grants participants a 2x bonus multiplier.

The early staking bonus multipliers per epoch are set out in the table below. Participants must delegate before the “Snapshot Date” in the table if they wish to begin accumulating the corresponding .05x bonus multipliers. Unstaking at any time during the early rewards timeframe (or ISPO) will reset all bonus multipliers back to the baseline of 100% (1x) rewards.

The early rewards timeline/rolling snapshot schedule is as follows:

Standard Staking Multiplier

As the early staking bonus period comes to a close, the Ardana ISPO will officially begin! During this time, old and new stakers will continue to receive a standard staking multiplier bonus that will increase by 0.01x from July 4th, 2022, 21:45 UTC, until the last epoch of the year (and the end of the ISPO) on December 31st, 2022, 21:45 UTC.

Small Pool Multiplier

A small pool multiplier was applied to all pools with less than 5 million ADA staked within their pool to encourage decentralization. This was a single, one-time 0.1x multiplier applied to any new delegate that staked with any one of our smaller pools. However, the delegate must have remained in that pool to keep the multiplier. Once all pools within ASPA are above 5 million ADA stake, the bar would have been raised to 10 million ADA for new delegates who wished to join.

To reward existing ASPA delegators for their loyalty, the small pool multiplier was awarded to all existing delegators that had staked with an ASPA pool before March 31st at 21:45 UTC. Once again, existing ASPA stakers did not need to redelegate their ADA to a sub-5 million ADA ASPA stake pool to receive the small pool multiplier bonus.

This means that the maximum possible multiplier before the ISPO started with the small pool multiplier and the early staking bonus multiplier was 2.1x.

Conclusion

We are very pleased to announce that ISPO supporters who staked before March 31st can now earn big bonus rewards during the Ardana ISPO taking place starting today. Accrued DANA tokens can be claimed once an epoch has concluded on Tosi Drop.

ISPOs have been created especially to support new projects within the Cardano ecosystem. It encourages decentralization by providing fair incentives for smaller validators to participate. In addition, staking more ADA among multiple validators helps to improve network performance and security.

We are very pleased with our ongoing contribution to the Cardano network together with our ASPA partners. We look forward to all our ISPO supporters benefiting from attractive bonuses and significant rewards!

About Ardana

Ardana is Cardano’s stablecoin hub, bringing the necessary DeFi primitives needed to bootstrap & maintain any economy to Cardano. Ardana offers an on-chain asset-backed stablecoin and a decentralized stable-asset DEX. The stablecoin is verifiably backed by an excess of on-chain collateral and will enable borrowers to take leverage on their ADA or other supported assets. The DEX is a highly capital-efficient exchange enabling swaps with minimal slippage & fees while providing low-risk yield opportunities to liquidity providers.