After quite a bit of deliberation I decided to change the fees on OLEUM pool to the lowest possible as soon as the protocol allowed. Previously the fees were set at 1% Margin with the Min fee available of 340A per block.
New Fees 0% Margin 170A per Epoch
The reason for doing this is simple
fairness to delegators.
When the pool was set up my delegators , who I consider to be friends at this point were getting a share of the fees as follows. Block reward at that time were very high. 1700A per block for the first ever block in Epoch 217. 340A to the pool and 1400A shared between delegators. (1 block in the epoch). By Epoch 236 when all blocks were going to stakepools the block rewards were 1053A (1 block in that epoch) 340+1% 347A to the pool and 704A between delegators.
Block rewards are on an ever declining emission schedule and declined slowly throughout the next year so by block 299 the rewards were about 680 per block. Due to the fixed fee of 340 not being able to be changed this was split 340+1% to the pool 343A and 336 to delegators. An effective halving of rewards when there is 1 block per Epoch. Oftentimes there were more than one block so the split was much more in favour of delegators on average.
Delegator rewards history (1 block per epoch)
Epoch 217 1400A
Epoch 236 704A
Epoch 299 336A
Almost 2 years later…
Epoch 445 131
At this point fixed fee was still 340A. Margin was set at 1% which although negligible 1A by now was unecessary. The block rewards at this stage total 462 – the pool HAD to charge the 340 fee but not the 1%. So it was time for change. The protocol was changing to allow a lower minimum fee per epoch. So as soon as this was available it was implemented.
At the time of writing, midway through block 447 we are yet to be allocated a block under the new fee structure. However if we are in block 448 to 450 I estimate the following reward split between pool and delegators.
Epoch 445 (OLD FEES) Pool 341 Delegators 131
Epoch 448 (Lower fee) Pool 170 Delegators 291
I hope the change is welcomed. Delegator rewards will be increasing by 122% compared to previously. Current 2 Month ROI based on the old fee structure was 1.84% (Pooltool.io figure)so it should grow to much closer to 4%.