About
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September 2018
Our Humble Beginnings
EcoTez began life as a solo baker running on an old PC that had been bought second hand many years before. This was a seriously old PC but it was more than powerful enough to run the Tezos blockchain, and as it turned out also keep our office warm.
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November 2019
Going Green
With the recent release of the Raspberry Pi 4 and Ubuntu 19.10 for the Pi it seemed as good a time as any to decommision the old PC and put something consuming a whole lot less power in place.
We hooked a Samsung SSD drive up to the Pi. Installed Ubuntu 19.10 on there, built the source code into a series of working tezos clients, plugged in a Ledger Nano S and off we went!
Subsequent changes were made over time such as putting it all in a pretty Argon case with an NVME drive - but it's still a Pi4. -
February 2021
A Baker Is Born
Since we had quite a few Tezos rolls sitting around it seemed like a good idea to use them and provide a public baker on the Tezos network. We announced our presence to the team at baking-bad.org who kindly added us to the list of bakers.
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January 2024
Pi5
The tezos Mumbai update brought in 15s block times and sadly the little Pi4 with a Nano ledger S attached just couldn't keep up. We brought the Intel NUC understudy into play and while it made things better it still wasn't perfect and the notifier was constantly bonging away announcing that endorsements were being missed. It was annoying so we attached a Nano S Plus ledger and all was running perfectly again. We tried bringing the Pi4 back online with the Nano S plus but it still wasn't perfect so we ran with the NUC for a while.
We all got very excited when the Pi5 was announced with a lot more processing power so of course we pre-ordered one. It was a happy day in Ecotez towers when we built tezos on the Pi5 and hooked up the Nano S plus and all ran perfectly. So we're now back to running on a Pi5 and everything is running reliably. The Paris upgrade coming in the next couple of moths is going to move to a 10s block time but hopefully the mighty Pi5 can cope with this. Time will tell.
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September 2024
Staking v Delegating
A lot has changed in the tezos world in the last few months. We now have 10s block times, which is cool, and a new method of controlling the number of tezos tokens generated using a thing called Adaptive Inflation has been introduced. It's all a bit complicated but people are now encouraged to stake their tokens with a bakery rather than delegate their tokens. The benefit of staking is that it should make the blockchain more resilient and should also remove a deflationary pressure which should in theory lead to price increase [ in theory!!! ]. Another good thing about staking is that rewards are paid directly by the protocol rather than by a baker. This means that bakers can't just stop paying their stakers and run off with all the rewards until the staker goes elsewhere.
People can still delegate, if they choose, but the delegation rewards have been slashed by the protocol recently to try to encourage people to move over to staking so delegators now earn less money. It's a pretty simple process to move to staking and instructions can be found in the EcoTez telegram channel
The result of all this is that the fees charged by EcoTez are changing. The staking fees remain at 10% but delegator fees are now 40%. There are plenty of bakeries out there charging less than us so feel free to delegate elsewhere. But we very much recommend switching to the staking model...with EcoTez of course.
