Cardano Foundation announces its delegation methodology

The Cardano Foundation’s delegation methodology

For stake pools to be eligible for delegation from the Cardano Foundation, they must fall within the following criteria (data sourced from a self-hosted passive node):

Hold between ₳25,000 and ₳2mn as a pledge,
Operated by a stakepool operator that only runs one pool (difficult to verify but best effort attempt),
Have a normal operating cost of less than 5% variable rate, and a fixed rate of around ₳340,
Does not have a high number of ada already staked (less than 5% saturation),
Have validated blocks successfully in the past,
Have not been delegated to by the Cardano Foundation in the last four rounds.

To randomly select stake pools to delegate to, the Cardano Foundation will use a third party randomizer to choose from eligible pools according to the criteria listed above. As and when Daedalus implements non-myopic rankings, we shall implement this approach to stake pool selection.

Going forward re-delegation shall occur approximately every three epochs. Should an epoch end on a weekend, re-delegation shall be completed the following week.

In total, the Cardano Foundation has multiple wallets from which we will delegate our ada assets. Our ada assets are equally distributed across our wallets. Single wallets will be used to delegate to one pool at a time.

The first 10 stake pools the Cardano Foundation re-delegated to are, in alphabetical order:

ADAU,
AGIO,
AZTEC,
BEAVR,
CASP,
COSD,
LOOT,
WAAUS,
ZETIC,
ZONE.

As we test and gain access to more secure custody solutions, we shall add more wallet addresses and delegate our stake to a wider number of stake pools. We will be communicating our updated delegation preferences every three epochs.