High performance. Professional. Affordable.

Cardano Stakepool Incubator

PoolMan.io automates block production for Cardano SPOs.

Too many SPOs give up before their pool becomes profitable. We run the infrastructure that mints your blocks, at a price a small pool can carry, so you can reach break-even — and Cardano keeps its decentralisation.

Start a new poolLedger device required

We build the registration certificate. Your Ledger signs it. Cold key never leaves the Ledger · Live in about 15 minutes

Start a new pool

Migrate an existing pool

Claim your pool, upload two keys, and we take it from there. Same pool ID, ticker and delegators · No re-registration, no missed epoch

Migrate my pool

Launch a pool on Preview Testnet first

Do the whole thing on the Preview testnet — free, with real blocks and no real ADA.

Try on Preview first

What you actually get

One screen instead of a server

A stake pool has to mint its blocks on time, every epoch, from a node that never goes down. That is the part PoolMan takes over: servers, failover, monitoring and key rotation are ours to keep awake.

What is left for you is the dashboard below — switch block production on, see the slots you have been assigned, watch them mint, and keep an eye on KES and balance.

PMAN PoolMan Example Pool Producing epoch 1066

Block production

Enabled — active since epoch 1061

Stop BP

Active stake

1.01M ₳

Minted this epoch

5 / 7

KES expires in

87 days

Balance

640 ₳

My slots · minted

118974725#4531868

118975113#4531886

118976420#4531921

Future slots · scheduled

118977528in 2h 14m

118981004in 5h 02m

next epoch schedule at boundary

What it costs

Two ways to try it, both free

Start wherever you're comfortable. You only pay once your block producing node is active past your fourth epoch.

Preview testnet

Free to use

Real blocks, no real ADA. Same signup, same experience.

Mainnet trial

4 epochs free

Your real pool, our servers, nothing to pay yet.

After that

30–80 ADA

Per epoch, tiered on active stake. Prepaid in ADA.

See pricing →

Decentralisation

Does one operator running many pools centralise Cardano?

It's the first thing people ask, and it deserves a straight answer. Three reasons PoolMan isn't the thing you're worried about.

We're infrastructure, like any cloud

Consider PoolMan infrastructure in the same way that AWS and Google Cloud also host many stake pools on the Cardano network.

The power can be taken back instantly

While PoolMan controls the block production and could potentially act maliciously, an attack could very quickly be stopped by the SPO changing the KES-key.

200 small pools ≈ 3 saturated ones

PoolMan is primarily aimed at small SPOs, and even if PoolMan has 200 pools with 1 million ADA staked each, the network power of those pools is the same as just 3 fully saturated single pool operators.

We believe that PoolMan is a net benefit for Cardano's decentralization, as we make it possible for more pools to stay alive and compete.

Read the full argument, in detail

We expect to be asked about the seemingly centralizing effect of having a single entity run 100 pools for other people. While it might seem that way, there are very important nuances. PoolMan only ask for 3 files to be uploaded; the VRF-key that determines which slots are allocated to the pool, the KES-key and the OpCert that are used to sign the blocks. We can never take control of a pool and change parameters, touch the pledged ADA in any way, change rewards address or anything else. Your pool is safe. We can create blocks on your behalf, and that's it. The uploaded KES-key can instantly be made useless if the pool owner generates a new KES-key and creates a new block with that key.

The damaging effect of centralization of SPOs is the ability of a few people to collude in order to censor transactions and similar control of the blockchain. It's bad to have a single person control 5% of the stake in the system, as that power is very hard to take away. If PoolMan ever got compromised for any reason, and started acting maliciously, the power could very quickly be taken away by the SPOs in question, and in any case automatically disappear as the KES-keys expire (as they only last 3 months, before having to get renewed). That's a very important distinction to make between PoolMan.io and large multi pool operators.