An interview by Patryk Karter on 23 Oct 2021
Thank you, Patryk and the Cryptonomist for taking the time and making this possible! You can find the original article on the Cryptonomist website. Below is a full copy/paste of this interview :
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This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool that rewards its delegators with World Mobile Tokens (WMT) alongside ADA, while also donating 50% of margin fees to Save The Children: ADA4Good [A4G].
This initiative is a point of reference for everything Cardano and every week or two we will invite a Stake Pool Operator (SPO) to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.
Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.
Cardano SPO, interview with ADA4Good [A4G]
Hi there, good to have you here. Please introduce yourself, where are you based and what is your background?
Thanks for having me Patryk! My name is Vahid and I am the pool operator of A4G Pool.
I was born in Iran, raised during rough times and left the country in 1988 as a teenager. That period made an unfading deep impression on me regarding children, poverty and war. This is also why I am supporting causes that help children in need.
I have been living in the Netherlands for more than 30 years now.
My background is in engineering, but I have only been using that in my private time, where I have built and hosted my own arbitrage and market making trading bots. Professionally, I have more than 25 years of Sales and Marketing experience.
Why Cardano? What has prompted you to get involved with this Proof of Stake blockchain?
It all started with the financial crisis of 2008. I was amazed how governments and central banks were printing money out of thin air to save banks that had created the problem to begin with. After understanding the concepts of our government’s monetary policy, and how they were lowering the value of average people’s money to enrich the people at the top through inflation, it was inevitable for me to start getting into Bitcoin.
As I started to understand the beauty of decentralization and how crypto was being sound money, without using middlemen (e.g. banks), I also started to see Bitcoin’s shortcomings. That is when I saw Charles Hoskinson’s TED Talk and after that his legendary whiteboard session. The first video inspired me to see how Cardano could change the lives of billions in places like Africa, while his whiteboard session gave a great solution to all problems Bitcoin and Ethereum were and are facing.
That was the moment I started investing in Cardano. As the project grew and I saw how fantastic the team and the community were, I kept investing more money and time into Cardano. And finally in November 2020, I was so hooked on Cardano, that I decided to set up a Cardano Stake Pool to help realize the Africa vision.
Besides the usual 4-5% ADA, your delegators also receive WMT tokens. Can you tell us what World Mobile is?
World Mobile is the first mobile/internet network to connect everyone, everywhere, while doing this in a decentralized fashion, employing blockchain technology.
There are nearly 4 billion people unconnected on our planet. This is because traditional mobile networks do not invest in hard to reach places. World Mobile relies on the people. By selling affordable network nodes that provide coverage via mesh networks, local business owners can connect themselves to others, creating their own smart villages and sharing the rewards.
The WMT tokens are a way to pay for transactions, but also a way to distribute ownership of the network. As the network grows so do transactions and with that, the value of the token.
My pool believes in the Cardano Africa Vision, in which the unbanked will be using Cardano’s decentralized financial systems and digital identity tools, to become banked. However, to do this they still need to be connected to the Cardano network to use it. This is where World Mobile comes in to bridge this gap. And this is why we invest in and support the project by creating awareness for it through distributing some of our own WMT tokens to our delegators.
Last but not least, we believe that we also need to help educate the children so they have a better chance of seizing the opportunities provided by these systems. That is why we donate to Save the Children.
You’re also the founder of the xSPO Alliance. What is it and how does it help the Cardano ecosystem?
When I started my journey as a Cardano Stake Pool Operator (SPO), I was delighted to see there were about 3000 SPOs securing the network; making Cardano arguably the most decentralized network out there. However, I also found out that the majority of the SPOs were very small and that most of them had a hard time keeping their head above water. All the smaller and starting SPOs seemed to have a lot of common challenges. These challenges were not addressed in the general groups that were available.
So I came up with the idea to start an alliance for only the smallest SPOs (with less than 1 million ADA staked) so we could help each other grow while also having some fun together.
Together with two other SPOs (Miguel from NEXUS Pool and Guy from ARARE Pool), we started a Telegram group which has now moved into a Discord group that currently holds more than 220 members.
We try to promote each other and create awareness within the community so that more delegators choose smaller pools that in the end will increase the diversity, creativity and decentralization of Cardano.
Your contribution is appreciated, any final words? Where can people find you?
People can find us on our Discord server; we will be there for a chat or anything Cardano.
For more information about our pool, our mission and our WMT token sharing program, just go to our website.
In essence, we are here to make an impact by improving the lives of children. We believe that the best way to do that is to educate them first and that is why we donate to Save the Children on a monthly basis.
For these children to grow up as powerful adults and seize the opportunities provided by Cardano, they also need to be connected. That is why we support both projects, Cardano and World Mobile. We therefore say that A4G is here to Educate, Connect and Empower.
Thanks a lot for hearing me out, Patryk! It was fun doing this.
If you have more questions about Cardano or Staking Cardano, simply join our Discord server and ask me anything!
Please leave your comments below and let me know what other subjects you would want me to cover without Jargon & within 199 words.
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