SundaeSwap Stake Pool Operator Voting Guide and Details!

Given the excitement around our upcoming vote, we wanted to write a short article explaining how it works, both for the end user, and technical details for the curious.

The purpose of allowing the community to vote on the Stake Pool Operators (“SPOs”) that will participate in the SundaeSwap Initial Stake Pool Offering is to help meet our goal of letting our community choose which SPOs they prefer. Selecting the best SPOs is also very important because they will also run the initial set of Scoopers on the DEX (see here for more information on Scoopers). SPOs are very important because they will serve as the inaugural power-house of the SundaeSwap DEX responsible for selecting, batching, and submitting transactions to fulfil the end-users orders.

Over time, the SundaeSwap DEX’s governance structure will likely adopt a more detailed selection process, and approve additional Scoopers to help the DEX scale to meet market demand. But for now, this vote is just about selecting the initial SPOs.

If you are an interested community member, you can participate in the SPO voting by going to iso.sundaeswap.finance.

From here, you can search for your favorite pools and decide who to vote for. You can select up to TWO SPOs and will rank them as your first and second choices. You select your top two SPOs by searching for them or by selecting them from the drop down menu. Place them in your order of preference.

From there, you can click “Vote”. Next, to have your vote counted, you must send yourself some of your own ADA so that your vote can be registered on the Cardano blockchain. You vote by recording your vote in an ADA transaction that you submit, which is why you need to send some small amount of ADA to yourself.

We will have instructions that allow users with any ADA wallet to participate. If you have the Nami wallet, we will use their dApp connector feature. If you have any other wallet, you will be told a very specific amount of ada (such as 2.123456) and asked to send that amount to yourself. This amount encodes your first and second choice for SPOs. Any such transactions from Epoch 302 to Epoch 303 will be considered a vote in the election, contributing a number of votes equal to the ADA at the transacting stake address as of Epoch 302. Epoch 302 starts on November 11th, at 21:45 UTC (Cardano slot 4100676), and ends on November 16th, at 21:45 UTC (Cardano slot 45532676). In this way, anyone will be able to read the state of the blockchain and independently conclude the same election results.If you wish to change your vote, all you have to do is repeat this process. Only your latest vote will count.

If you’re interested in viewing a video guide of how to vote, please check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nYsz4QYcZM

Some Tech Details

Given that the only wallet right now to support integration with a dApp is Nami, and given the wide array of users who may be excluded by that, we felt obligated to search for solutions that were more inclusive than embedding the vote in the metadata. Thus, we encode your ranked choice votes in the fractional component of the ADA that you send yourself. While a little clunky, this allows users of all wallets to participate.

All Stake Pool Operators will be assigned a number between 0 and 999. Then, the first three digits of the fractional component of Ada sent to yourself will encode your first stake pool, and the second 3 digits will encode the second stake pool.

We then use the same infrastructure powering the scoopers to monitor the blockchain and create a rollup of the vote totals. This relies on the incredibly useful Ogmios project.

Once we have the totals for each pool for primary and secondary vote, we can begin eliminating the pools with the fewest votes and distributing their votes to the secondary choice of anyone who voted for them. We repeat in this way until we have 40 pools left, which will form the 30 pools for the ISO, plus a waiting list of 10 pools.

Closing Thoughts

While we were thrilled to see so many apply, there were some pools that were filtered out in the initial round. We felt that it would not be fair to those that applied if we did not make our decision process public. With that said, here were the criteria we used to measure who was not eligible for voting.

You were disqualified if you:

• Checked “No” to running a scooper
• Did not prove your identity
• If we could not verify you were who operated the pool (e.g. did you link a twitter account with no connection to the pool)
• If you provided a fake address
• If the stake pool you applied under did not exist/a pool you did not own
• If you stated “No/Unsure” to the question about complying with the laws and regulations for running a stake pool in your country

As far as we know, this is the first Cardano on-chain governance event outside of Catalyst. We’re incredibly excited and privileged to bring the SundaeSwap protocol into the world in this way, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride.

~SundaeSwap Labs