29 Oct Delegate wisely and support the Symbol ecosystem
I started a node back in March of this year just after the Symbol launch. At the time the harvests were plenty, the XYM price was high and the competition was low. This made it more profitable for me to cut out the middleman who would otherwise have been taking a 25% node fee and I received 100% of my harvest. Unfortunately at the time (and for a long time afterwards until I switched to a better and cheaper provider) I was paying over €220 per month to host my node and before too long with increased competition and lower prices I wasn’t making enough from harvesting to break even. This was a minor annoyance but I enjoyed running my node, was not selling any XYM anyway and it was supporting the network so I was fine with it and I carried on.
I stood on the sidelines for a long time and wasn’t really actively involved in the Symbol community. This started to change back in April when I began to get interested in tracking node and harvesting stats and I made a few visualisations.
I started to tweet more and engage with the community and eventually, by complete accident I spoke to @OliverMuldoon as he was looking for someone to start a blog. I had never written one before so was a bit apprehensive but he assured me that I would just have to run the site and the posts would be provided by other community members (it didn’t quite work out that way! 😂). I went for it and the blog went live at the end of June 2021 with the help of @GeranKlim who designed and set up the original WordPress site. I am really glad that I got involved as I developed a passion for writing about Symbol and 138 posts later I am still here. I also feel for the first time that I can put my hand on my heart and say that I am giving back to the project which has directly benefited me in the best way that I can.
Building a new ethos and a new ecosystem
There are so many other people out there that are giving their all to support Symbol and make it a success. They don’t get paid for what they do and any income they get comes from attracting delegates to their nodes and from donations from generous people who appreciate their efforts. In my experience very few people want to donate their hard earned XYM to a project and to be fair I would think like this too unless I believed that the work that they did was truly exceptional. It is however an easier pill to swallow if you delegate your harvesting to a node which is run by a project that you believe in. You would be giving your node fee away anyway so why not give it to someone that gives back to you by providing a service?
I know it can be an attractive option to delegate to a node that provides some kind of kickback of fees but in most cases this node fee refund is negligible and the node owner who may or may not be providing something valuable to the community will still be pocketing up to 90% of the fees that they collect. It may be an unpopular opinion but I believe that the community should be showing their support for worthy projects by delegating to the owners’ node. This not only provides a small amount of income for the work that they do but, maybe more importantly, it also shows that people out there support them in their efforts. If in the future the project dies or the person running it gets lazy, or you find another site or tool that you prefer then you can switch your support and harvest on their node. This fosters competition which in turn motivates the node owner to work harder to maintain their community resource and ultimately ensures that they are providing even more value to grow the Symbol ecosystem. In the long run what is good for Symbol is good for the value of your XYM.
From what I can see this is also the system that the core devs and pirate crew believe in and are pushing for.
Don’t be lazy – do your research
It’s easy when you start harvesting just to delegate to the first node in the list in your Symbol wallet. I assume this happens a lot as there are so many nodes starting 0-0-0-0* vying to appear first in the dropdown menu. Please don’t just delegate to a random node, work out who you want to support, do some research and help someone that helps the community. I’m sure all of you with a balance of over 10,000 XYM receive a lot of spam transactions from shady node owners begging you to harvest on their node. It amazes me that when I look at their nodes they do actually recruit new harvesters this way. If people continue to harvest on these nodes then everyone will continue to get spammed by these messages, if they don’t attract delegates this way then the spammy nodes will die off – these guys are not in it to support Symbol, they are 100% about the money. No profit = no more spam.
Playing the long game
It’s easy to look at making a quick few bucks and getting a kickback but in my opinion this is short sighted. To motivate the developers, the artists, the writers, all those that are giving something back to Symbol I think it is essential to show some appreciation and to delegate to their nodes. In the long run this will keep them going which adds value to Symbol and grows the community further. There is a huge imbalance in the distribution of harvesters to nodes as you can see on Symbol Tools Symbol Node List (another excellent resource). We need to try to address this somehow and instill a new mindset which puts the overall good of Symbol first. I get that people want to eek out a couple more XYM for themselves by delegating to the kickback nodes but the node owners are often the ones that really profit from this, not the individual harvesters.
Thanks for reading
I was just thinking about this so thought I would put some of these thoughts down on the blog. I am sure that there was some more I wanted to say on the subject but it escapes me at the moment. Maybe I will update if I pick up this train of thought again in the future. This is just my opinion and I am sure that many of you will disagree. I am also not suggesting that everyone should be delegating to me, for those of you that do I am massively grateful – thank you so much! For others, choose your project based on what you believe in. I can tell you that the node owner who provides the service will be delighted to see a new delegate. For us it is a sign that our work is appreciated and that is a huge boost that keeps us going.
You can research nodes here and delegate to the projects that you appreciate the most.
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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