On Wednesday (August 10), the operator of APEX Stake Pool announced that it had received a one million $ADA delegation from Input Output Global (“IOG”), the company responsible for Cardano’s research and development.

Here is what APEX says about itself:

APEX is a Stake Pool on the Cardano blockchain. Stake Pools are playing a very important role: they are creating (minting) the blocks which include the blockchain transactions. The mission of APEX Stake pool is to help and educate the Cardano community, to bring more people in the Cardano ecosystem, and to contribute to the development and decentralization of Cardano.

APEX also says that because of its contributions to the Cardano community, since October 2021, both IOG and Cardano Foundation have delegated $ADA tokens with them:

“Because of its mission and its activity in the community, APEX Cardano Stake Pool received in October 2021 both the IOG Delegation (3.3M ADA) and Cardano Foundation (CF) Delegation (14.8M ADA), and in January 2022 it received the Cardano Foundation Delegation again! This ensures high rewards for the APEX Stake Pool delegators.

“The second round of Cardano Foundation Delegation ended on Epoch 334. APEX Stake Pool was selected again from the stake pools that registered, but it was not selected during the random selection in the second step. APEX Stake pool received another Cardano Foundation Delegation (15.2M ADA) on epoch 350! During epoch 353, APEX was selected (together with other 5 Stake Pools) to be supported by IOG for 6 months with a 1M ADA delegation ‘based on the value they have created through documentation, Vasil testnet support, and community education, ultimately contributing to the overall health and growth of the ecosystem’.”

According to data by “Cardano PoolTool”, currently, APEX has the highest “active stake” among Cardano stake pools:

Source: Cardano PoolTool

On July 28, IOG’s Olga Hryniuk published an article (titled “Staking is the bedrock of Cardano”) on Essential Cardano that was written by Anthony Quinn, an editor in the IOG’s Marketing and Communications team.

Quinn wrote:

Each month, a few more Cardano stake pools are being created, so far bringing the total number of active pools to more than 3,000. At the start of 2021, there were about 2,000. The ada is staked from 1.2 million wallet addresses. In the process, the level of delegation has increased to almost 74% of all the ada in circulation. That’s some achievement, but it still leaves a quarter of all ada yet to be staked – does that matter?

The short answer is yes, for two reasons. First, staking is what secures the Cardano network, so the more ada staked the better. And second, on an individual level, ada holders who have not delegated their coins are missing out on the rewards that are distributed to stake pools for verifying transactions and producing blocks.

Per data by Cardano Blockchain Insights, as of August 10, 71.19% of ADA tokens in circulation was staked:

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Featured Image via Pixabay