Say Hello To My Little Friend
Introducing Harpoon — a new way to delegate
Whales are notoriously hard to find. The open ocean provides them an expansive and often disorienting home. Not to mention, anyone who’s seen an episode of Whale Wars knows that out in those waters, it’s every person for themselves.
In many ways, the ocean is not much different from blockchains; both can initially be cold and scary places, rife with the turbulence from cyclic swells, protocol updates and even predators. The performance of block validators, or bakers in Tezos terms, often changes over time. The fact that anybody can become a baker also means that poor baking performance and neglecting to pay out rewards can easily be hidden behind the guise of low fees and empty claims. Without anybody to enforce accountability, you, the delegator, need to make sure that your funds are being handled correctly and that the social contract is upheld. Like the Japanese whalers, you need the big guns.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the big guns: Harpoon.
Harpoon is a staking dashboard that allows users to find high quality bakers to delegate to. Harpoon gives you the ability to explore the catalogue of bakers in the Tezos ecosystem and pick one with a proven track record by collecting baker performance data from the blockchain and presenting it with easy to understand visualizations.
Each baker is evaluated using an unbiased formula that takes into account various metrics — like number of blocks baked, missed and stolen — and then graded on a letter scale based on how they perform compared to the other bakers. We use Baking Bad’s API to source baker names, fees, and payout delays. This allows you to avoid selecting bakers that fail to meet expectations and gives you a bird’s eye view of where a particular baker stands in relation to the rest of the community.
Harpoon can also show you how much tez a baker has made from rewards each cycle and features a rewards calculator to allow you to audit a baker’s reward payouts should you choose to delegate to them.
Just plug in your address and fire away. Harpoon will do the hard work of determining if your baker has been distributing your rewards on time and in the correct amounts.
The decentralized nature of blockchains means that there’s no governing body making sure that bakers meet a certain standard. The responsibility of finding good bakers is thus passed on to individual users. A continuously changing chain and evolving list of bakers makes the task of choosing who to delegate to a difficult and time consuming endeavor. With Harpoon, however, you no longer have to go out into the open waters unprepared.
