ALPS is a Cardano stake pool that donates to alpine clubs, mountain rescue, environmental and animal welfare organizations.
About
The Alpine Stake Pool (ticker: ALPS) is a stake pool that tries to be as reliable, secure and profitable as possible while supporting a good purpose. That is why we donate to alpine clubs and to organizations that support the environment and animal welfare. As a first step in the right direction, all our servers are located in data centres that run on 100% renewable energy.
About the operator
The Alpine Stake Pool is run and maintained by Lukas Kamleitner, a professional software engineer currently working as a software developer for Expertis Gruppe. Supporting the environment, and the mountains in particular, was an obvious choice, as I spend most of my spare time outside, mountaineering and climbing.
Stake pool
Look the pool up on the explorers, or delegate from any wallet by searching for the ticker ALPS.
Relays
Relays keep the network healthy and hide the block-producing node from the rest of it. Our block producer talks only to the relays below and to one additional, secret relay, so it is never exposed to other nodes and much harder to attack. Two relays give the redundancy to update or maintain one while the other keeps talking to the producer – even if a relay crashes, minted blocks still reach the network.
Tech stack per server
Organizations
We donate a fixed amount of 600 € a year. Every month a random number generator picks one of the organizations below, which then receives 50 €.
Donations
Each donation is backed by a receipt – open a row to see it. The lists come straight from the alpinestakepool-files repository on GitHub, so every entry is public and every change is on record.
FAQ
How delegation on Cardano works, what it costs and what it pays.
Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain: the right to produce the next block is handed out in proportion to the stake behind each pool. Delegation lets you put the ₳ in your wallet behind a pool without running one yourself. You register a stake key once, name a pool, and from then on your ₳ counts towards that pool's stake and earns a share of the rewards it produces.
Nothing moves. Your ₳ stays in your wallet; the delegation is only a certificate on the blockchain that says which pool your stake supports. You can change the pool at any time.
Cardano runs in epochs of five days, and a new delegation takes a few of them to work through the system. If you delegate during epoch N, a snapshot at the start of epoch N+1 records your stake. It becomes active in epoch N+2, when the pool can produce blocks with it. The rewards for that epoch are calculated during epoch N+3 and paid out at the start of epoch N+4.
So the first rewards arrive 15 to 20 days after delegating. After that they come every five days, for as long as you stay delegated. Switching pools leaves no gap: the old pool's rewards keep coming while the new delegation works through the same timeline.
An epoch is Cardano's unit of time: 432 000 slots of one second each, exactly five days. Everything about staking is settled per epoch – the stake snapshot, the block schedule, the reward calculation and the payout.
Explorers show the current epoch and how much of it has passed. A pool's luck compares the blocks it produced in an epoch with the number its stake would statistically expect; over many epochs it evens out to 100 %.
Two small amounts, once. Registering your stake key costs a deposit of 2 ₳, which the protocol holds and returns in full if you ever deregister the key. The transaction that registers and delegates costs the usual network fee of roughly 0.2 ₳. Moving to another pool later is a normal transaction and costs only that fee again.
Nothing is ever paid to the pool from your wallet. The pool's cost and margin (see below) are deducted from the rewards before they are distributed, never from your balance.
The protocol sets none. You need enough ₳ to cover the 2 ₳ deposit and the transaction fee, and some wallets ask for a balance of 5 or 10 ₳ before they offer delegation.
Rewards are proportional to stake, so a small delegation earns a small but real share – there is no threshold below which you get nothing.
Safe, and never locked. Delegation does not transfer your ₳ anywhere: the coins stay in your wallet, under your keys, and the pool cannot touch them. There is no lock-up period, no unbonding time and no penalty on Cardano. You can send, spend or withdraw at any moment; whatever is in the wallet at the next snapshot is simply what earns rewards next.
No. Rewards are paid into your wallet's reward account every epoch and count as stake from the next snapshot on, so they compound by themselves. Wallets show them as part of your balance. Moving them to a spendable address is a normal transaction – wallets call it withdrawing rewards – and only needed when you want to spend them.
A wallet has one stake key, and a stake key delegates to exactly one pool. To split your stake, create a second account and delegate it separately – most wallets support several accounts under one seed phrase.
Every epoch, the rewards a pool has earned are split in three steps before anything reaches the delegators, according to the parameters the pool has registered on the blockchain:
An example with round numbers: a pool with 10M ₳ of active stake mints 10 blocks in an epoch and earns 10 000 ₳. A fixed cost of 340 ₳ is taken first. A margin of 2.5 % of the remaining 9 660 ₳ is 241.5 ₳. The remaining 9 418.5 ₳ go to the delegators, so 1 000 ₳ of stake earns about 0.94 ₳ that epoch.
How much the fixed cost weighs depends on the size of the pool: on a large pool it is spread over a lot of stake, on a tiny pool it can eat most of a single block's reward.
Cardano wants stake spread across many pools, so a pool's rewards stop growing once it holds more than its share of all stake – the saturation point, currently one five-hundredth of the delegated ₳, about 78M ₳. Stake above that point earns proportionally less for everyone in the pool, which is why delegators drift away from oversaturated pools.
The rate is set by the protocol, not by the pool. Each epoch's reward pot comes from the transaction fees and a fixed share of the reserve, and is shared across all stake in proportion. Across the network that currently works out at around 2 to 3 % a year, drifting slowly downwards as the reserve empties. Any pool that produces its expected blocks pays about the same; what differs is its cost and margin, and luck in a single epoch.
For a projection with your own amount, use the official staking calculator.
