CTSI Community
Interview with a pool manager: Omnistake
How to successfully run staking as a service and… a brand new CTSI staking bot as a bonus.
As the first to use our tech, Cartesi Pool Managers are pioneers, Heroes who make up the Cartesi community and who keep our network decentralized and robust. Interested in what being a pool manager entails or simply want to take a peek behind the scenes of staking pool management? We interviewed Bogdan and Emanuel of Omnistake, a team of two, who manage a pool on Noether’s Delegated Staking, asking them why they chose Cartesi and what to keep an eye on when running a pool.
Working as Software Engineers at Twitter in 2015, Bogdan and Emanuel at that time were also both venturing into the crypto space — so no surprise when they immediately hit it off. After leaving Twitter, both built up impressive resumes, working in major tech companies from Facebook, Apple, and Robinhood. Gradually spending more and more of their free time in the blockchain space and angel investing, it was at the beginning of this year that they founded their company, Blocktech Ventures Inc. A VC firm with a focus on frontier tech and blockchain, and one of their first projects, a professional blockchain staking service called Omnistake. They’re also involved with projects covering A.I., Machine Learning, Metaverse, and Fintech.
Let’s start with: how did you discover Cartesi?
“We were seeking a solution to the issues of scalability Ethereum was facing. Aware of other Layer 2 protocols like Polygon or Fantom, we wanted to expand our horizons even further, asking, “What if we can support software of any type on the blockchain?” Exploring options like Dfinity and being infrastructure providers, we found that although it had its own programmable language, it didn’t support Java or C++, which is a huge barrier for mainstream developers looking to enter blockchain. Cartesi is the only project running a Linux machine, so it was clear for us both: Cartesi has big potential.
Since Omnistake provides staking as a service mainly for blockchain projects we believe in, we made Cartesi our first supported protocol on our platform. We want to expand as much as possible. We started as node providers but we can do more. Our aim as a VC is to help companies more. We need more stakers in the world. As investors, we want to provide staking services and so we try the tech first.”
What other factors do you take into account when selecting a project for your staking as a service?
In general, we focus on technology but it’s also crucial to seek out the human aspect of any project we’re interested in. At the end of the day, the people are it. We therefore look at the team and people first. We’re avoiding short pump and dumps, instead, we’re looking for ethical teams that are there to build and open to collaboration. Secondly, we look at the roadmap the team works towards: does the project reach its goals on time? With Cartesi, this was always the case. Thirdly, we look at how well the community is treated. We started working with the Cartesi team on Discord and found the team was very active. We liked how Cartesi was open to communicate and to collaborate.”
At some point, you even acted as a satellite team of Cartesi.
“Indeed. We had people asking to stake CTSI with us so we decided to try to build a staking delegation system ourselves. Joining the Cartesi Discord community, we connected with Cartesi Head of Engineering, Danilo, and started working on Cartesi Nodes, PoS, and smart contracts. We’ve even organized a fun internal hack-a-thon with a focus on Cartesi staking delegation. We hired an Airbnb, brought a whiteboard and markers, food delivery and worked on this PoS delegation smart contract and came up with a design. Cartesi was very cooperative in sharing their thoughts. We were like a satellite team from Cartesi’s core developers.
How is Omnistake different from other pools on Noether’s Delegated Staking? What makes people stake with you?
We’re still figuring that out. When you’re running a pool, there are four things you really need to consider.
- Fees — naturally people seek out the best deals. Special promotions or low fees help to maximize users’ rewards and bring more people to your pool.
- Reliability — Omnistake’s node has never been down over the past year. No one sees it when you’re down but some nodes are misconfigured. Some pools take up to 10 days to mine a block while having a similar total number of assets staked, which means their node is probably down or poorly configured. We are able to distribute staking rewards once or twice per day and so users stay. We are still small for now but consistent.
- Size — you need enough nodes to mine blocks. Although Omnistake is one of the top pools on Cartesi’s Explorer, since we’re not able to deploy as many tokens as other pool owners, we don’t come out top in terms of portfolio size. When, for example, Binance is running a node, not a pool, you can have a hard time competing.
- Decentralization — One downside of PoS Delegation systems is that they reward the biggest whale in the pool. Omnistake hit the sweet spot — we are big enough to provide rewards, but not so big that Cartesi becomes centralized.
Of those factors, Omnistake is focused on reliability. When people start staking with Cartesi, it’s hard to know how reliable a pool is. It’s good that the Cartesi team is working on this.
But wait, there’s more. It seems that you provide an extra service: a staking bot for CTSI!
That’s correct! We’re running a beta version of a Telegram bot that provides more information than what users can typically get from the Cartesi explorer. On Cartesi’s explorer you can see what the pool earns in rewards, we are providing users with the ability to see rewards earned on an individual basis. With the Telegram bot, users receive this information straight to their phone, alongside useful push notifications every time a block is mined and a reward is distributed
Currently, the bot is ready to launch, although we’re still recruiting more beta testers. Feedback about your portfolio and being able to have easy access to real-time information such as records and summaries has great potential uses in tax reports and accounting. Cartesi, being the blockchain OS, provides just the right ecosystem for the community to start building and providing useful tools for each other!
Apart from launching this great bot, what’s the future for Omnistake?
We’re planning to run ads to attract more users to our pool as well as creating onboarding articles welcoming and teaching newcomers how to stake as a beginner. For us, it’s still early days. I think we’re the only pool that doesn’t charge any fees right now. We take the burden for all of our delegators. Allowing users to keep the entire reward as an incentive, we’re hoping to attract more delegators to our pool. We’re thinking of keeping this fee-less structure until next year. Right now, we’re focusing on fine-tuning our bot, giving an exclusive taste to Omnistake users first.
Click here to try out Omnistake’s bot: t.me/omnistake_ctsi_bot
Interested in staking your CTSI? Learn more about how to start staking in a pool with our step-by-step instructions or even how to set up a pool of your own with our Pool Management guide.
About Omnistake
Omnistake is a staking as a service product launched in 2021 by Blocktech Ventures, a Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm. Omnistake is focused on technical excellence and service reliability using the latest scaling, monitoring, and reliability best practices. Omnistake is constantly focused on adding supported staking services, keeping a high bar for selecting only the tokens that add the most value to the blockchain ecosystem.
About Cartesi: Home to what’s next
Cartesi is the first OS on the blockchain, and their Layer-2 solution integrates Linux and standard programming environments to blockchain. This allows developers to code scalable smart contracts with rich software tools, libraries, and services they are used to.
Cartesi bridges the gap between mainstream software and blockchain, welcoming millions of new startups and their developers to blockchain by bringing Linux to blockchain applications. Cartesi combines a groundbreaking virtual machine, optimistic rollups, and side-chains to revolutionize the way developers create blockchain applications.
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