A Spotlight on Stake Pools: C3ETH

A stake pool operated by the Cardano Community Catalyst Eastern Town Hall (C3ETH) that champions the positive impacts of Cardano development

The Foundation’s “A Spotlight on Stake Pools” series reveals the individuals and teams behind the stake pool operators (SPOs) producing the new blocks of the Cardano network. It aims to showcase their unique motivations and missions within the broader community. As critical network participants in Cardano’s operational resilience, SPOs remain core to the network's robust decentralized infrastructure and, indeed, often develop, or contribute to open-source projects and solutions.

Our last installment featured the STAT stake pool operated by Dmytro Stashenko, the co-founder and lead developer of the AdaStat Cardano Explorer and its respective API. Notably, the implementation of SPO poll stats on the AdaStat platform has significantly aided Cardano community transparency and dialogue. Statshenko has further developed open-source plugins that support background functions on the Cardano blockchain.

The Cardano Community Catalyst Eastern Town Hall (C3ETH) is our next feature, a stake pool community that champions decentralization. Like other SPOs, C3ETH is a Cardano network stakeholder dedicated to maintaining and securing the network via staking, which enables participation in block mining. The rewards generated from this activity benefit both the community and individual delegators to the pool. The Eastern Town Hall team strives to sustain and grow grassroots Cardano communities in the eastern hemisphere. Their efforts encompass providing multi-language Cardano resources, hosting fortnightly Town Hall meetings, and sharing the positive impacts of Cardano blockchain development, particularly in relation to Project Catalyst.

Why did you become a stake pool operator?

With the aim of ensuring the sustained operation of Eastern Town Hall well into the future, our primary objective is to cater to non-English speaking communities in the Eastern Hemisphere while also acting as a vital link to the broader Cardano global community situated across various time zones. To maintain the operational integrity of Eastern Town Hall, we have set a bottom threshold, ensuring the provision of essential services such as group hosting, Zoom licenses, and other critical resources. This contingency plan becomes crucial in the event we are unable to secure further funding from Project Catalyst once the current proposals reach their conclusion.

Over the past two years, Eastern Town Hall has been a dedicated pillar of support for Cardano communities in the East. We have diligently assisted existing proposals, onboarded new members, conducted educational campaigns, and facilitated marketing initiatives. This ongoing commitment has been made possible by the unwavering dedication of Cardano enthusiasts from the Eastern Hemisphere. Together, as core team members, we have put our hand into establishing the C3ETH community pool, pooling our resources to sustain our operations at the minimum threshold while actively seeking additional funding through Project Catalyst. Our collective efforts are geared towards not only preserving our existing endeavors but also fostering the growth and development of Cardano communities in the East, ensuring that our shared vision continues to thrive.

What is the mission of your stake pool?

The mission of our stake pool comes in stages. The overall first stage would be to self-sustain from Catalyst the Eastern Town Hall operations, which seek to further decentralize Cardano through introducing, educating, and onboarding our three major communities—Indonesia, Japan, and Vietnam—onto Cardano.

The second stage, though, would branch according to the identified needs of the three major communities. These needs will differ for each country and depend on how the countries react to Cardano's development path. Specifically, for Indonesia, the second stage would be to create a new developer base for Cardano and onboard businesses onto Cardano.

The third stage would be to supplement Catalyst. We clearly identify that Catalyst and Cardano are yet to be truly decentralized in terms of developer base and governance influence, which contradicts the current and future market acceptance. We all know initial early adopters were in East Asia, it is only logical and financially correct to listen and comply with their needs. By setting up our own mini-Catalyst, we seek to invest in start-ups/early ideas specifically from Indonesia, Japan, and Vietnam.

Can you give us a brief history of your stake pool?

The C3ETH pool was established on this precise date: 16/11/2021 at 16:28:56. Initially, we did not produce any blocks despite the core team's effort to encourage our respective direct ada holder communities to delegate to the pool. This, however, can be highly attributed to the fact that, at the time, we had not yet determined the method to develop and differentiate our SPO, as it was—for the majority of us—a new endeavor. Despite all the challenges, there was a sense of pride we were starting our journey of contributing to Cardano with our team of already established SPOs.

To establish trust in our stake pool, we needed to first demonstrate that we could not only run and maintain the pool but also that our skills were equal to those of SPOs in our direct vicinity of East Asia. Amongst us, our members are themselves also prominent SPO operators, which acts as a source of learning and—unfortunately—"competition" to receive delegation because the communities we are reaching out to are similar. This starting point of identifying what our mission is became our sole focus to act on for the past two to three years.

During those years, we have directly assisted in funding 178 proposals across all three major communities of Indonesia, Japan, and Vietnam. We believe this is the highest achievement of any Town Hall. Moving forward, we seek to increase the quantity and quality. We seek to increase the number of developer-based proposals and all that derives from furthering our education efforts.

How did the Cardano Foundation delegation impact your stake pool operation?

The Foundation's delegation has impacted us significantly in terms of knowledge about the operations of a pool and the potential rewards it can yield. We were surprised to mint blocks with each passing epoch, it ignited a fire inside all of us to work even harder. At the time of writing, C3ETH has earned approximately 12,000 ada in rewards. Due to this, we have stepped up our gear in terms of better documentation of our current and future efforts for the larger community to learn from, increasing the reach of specific Cardano use cases, and increasing cross-collaboration to grow awareness of each collaborator’s effort. As we operate, as we reach our initial goals, we will push ourselves to further provide new benefits to Cardano.

Again, these rewards generated were truly unexpected for the majority of us and required the core team to hold special, numerous meetings on the usage of the funds. We wanted to appreciate and honor the trust the Foundation has given us. All this played a factor in funds usage which hopefully will make the Foundation and the larger Cardano community have this feeling of a proud parent. Our achievements are your achievements, for it all was sourced from the Foundation's delegation.

Did the Cardano Foundation delegation enable you to build or improve tools, projects, or open source repositories?

The primary use of rewards has been focused on community growth, education, and onboarding efforts of three countries: Indonesia, Japan, and Vietnam. Each community will receive equal funding.

Indonesia
Explore self-sustainability efforts through art projects

1. Cardano use case that reinterprets physical art into phygital art in collaboration with BlockTree, Sustainable ADA, NMKR, and an Indonesian artist.
2. The artwork is glass-based and made from recycled bottles. For BlockTree, it will mimic a tree, and for Sustainable ADA, it will mimic an insect.
3. BlockTree’s mission is sustainable forestry in Vietnam, while Sustainable ADA’s, through Rimba Ecolodge, is to protect their local ecosystem in Indonesia.
4. A proposal to NMKR allows a visual understanding of what we would like to achieve.

Expand Cardano and Cardano Foundation presence at Gadjah Mada University (UGM)

1. Allocating funds (if needed) to the unfunded Project Catalyst proposal of education on Cardano through Gimbalabs’ Plutus Project Based Learning (PPBL).
2. EMURGO through Cardano Spot has kickstarted this initiation.
3. UGM has a student exchange program with Tokyo Tech (Titech). Titech is IOG’s blockchain research partner.
4. The goal is for UGM to influence Titech to have “Making Asia a Blockchain Powerhouse” as the topic of their 2025/2026 program in collaboration with ASEAN.

Vietnam and Japan
Expand 2023 Cardano Summit activities

1. Expanding onboarding target.
2. Increasing Summit awareness.
3. Participant engagement through merchandise.

How would you summarize your contributions to the Cardano ecosystem?

The following are our onboarding key achievements:

Indonesia
Actively assisted and guided our community's active participation in Catalyst. A limited number of submitted proposals through all prospects, projects have a 100% completion rate, entailing further indirect contributions to the overall Cardano landscape. Metrics are:

1. From Fund 2 to Fund 9, a total of 23 proposals were submitted. All funded proposals have delivered on their intent and 19 proposals were not funded.
2. For Fund 10, a total of 7 proposals were submitted by the Indonesian community and three were funded.

Vietnam
Actively assisted and guided our community's active participation in Catalyst. Exponentially high number of submitted proposals. Projects have a 67% completion rate, with 33% still ongoing, entailing further indirect contributions to the overall Cardano landscape. Metrics are:

1. From Fund 2 to Fund 9, a total of 165 proposals were submitted. 36 proposals have delivered on their intent, 18 are still undergoing, and 111 proposals were not funded.
2. For Fund 10, a total of 109 proposals were submitted by the Vietnamese community, and 10 were funded.

Japan
Actively assisted and guided our community's active participation in Catalyst. A good number of submitted proposals. Projects have a 70% completion rate, with 30% ongoing, entailing further indirect contributions to the overall Cardano landscape. Metrics are:

1. From Fund 2 to Fund 9, a total of 145 proposals were submitted. 77 proposals have delivered on their intent, 30 are still undergoing, and 38 proposals were not funded
2. For Fund 10, a total of 45 proposals were submitted by the Japanese community.

Are you currently building something that you would like to share?

Indonesia
Beside the stated continuation of current efforts above, we are always and currently pushing our business projects or efforts. One such effort is through exploring collaboration with a small but highly locally connected art academy called Indonesia Design School (IDS) to create a course for NFT creation. They have already shown interest and willingness to invest in the creation of such a class and syllabus. Progress is halted because the intended target market—Kogi NFT—has chosen Tezos. Kogi, although currently small, is the program of a prominent publication in Indonesia called Kompas. Will revive this lead by folding in Mesh.js/NMKR after the initial impactful art project is moving along.

Japan
In preparation for the launch of CIP1694-DRep: Catalyst DRep, we will be creating a community and educational content related to it.

Vietnam
We will continue to focus on growing the developer talent pool within universities in Vietnam, equipping students with the necessary skills and experiences for a seamless transition into the workforce upon graduation. Additionally, students are encouraged to enroll in Cardano Academy courses to obtain certification upon completion. We consider this an advantageous addition to students' profiles when they graduate, enhancing their appeal to potential employers.

Follow C3ETH’s activities on X (formerly Twitter) @c3eth, visit the Eastern Town Hall YouTube channel, or join the C3ETH Telegram group to stay up-to-date.

The Cardano Foundation encourages all operators to submit the SPO notification form. Completing this form ensures that SPOs receive updates on the newest operator tools, upcoming delegation rounds, on-chain governance developments, and other pertinent information.