Sunsetting the ULTRA ISPO: Refunds, Pool Fees and What Comes Next
The ULTRA ISPO did not raise enough to fund Facility 2, so we are closing it, returning the pool to normal fees and refunding the ADA it earned to the delegators who earned it.
We are closing the ULTRA ISPO.
When we opened it on February 1, the idea was simple. Delegators would keep their ADA in their own wallets, the ULTRA pool would put its staking rewards toward Bitcoin miners, and the ULTRA token would carry a share of what those miners earned. Eight months in, the numbers do not support that plan, and we would rather say so plainly than let it drift.
The numbers
Since the ISPO began, the ULTRA pool has earned about 28,500 ADA in staking rewards, roughly $7,000 at today's prices. That is less than the cost of a single good ASIC miner.
Facility 2 is ready for us to scale into. It has more than 2 MW of power available, and filling even most of that capacity would take around $2 million in miners alone. The ISPO was never going to close that gap at this pace, so continuing it would mean asking delegators to give up their ADA rewards for an outcome we cannot deliver.
What happens now
The ISPO is over. No new ULTRA allocations are being earned.
Pool fees go back to normal. The ULTRA pool keeps running as a regular Cardano stake pool. We are moving its margin from 100% to a standard 3%. Pool changes take about two epochs, roughly ten days, to take effect on Cardano. From then on, delegators earn standard ADA staking rewards straight to their wallets, and every epoch until then is covered by the refund. If you are delegated to ULTRA, you do not need to do anything.
We are refunding the ADA rewards you gave up. Every delegator gets back the ADA staking rewards they would have received if the ISPO had never happened: each epoch's rewards on the pool's normal terms before the ISPO (a 340 ADA fixed fee per epoch and a 1.99% margin, the fees any delegator to ULTRA paid before), shared in proportion to the stake each wallet had delegated in that epoch. We worked this out from on-chain records for every epoch since the start. Refunds for delegators will be distributed directly via blockchain over the next 90 days, to the wallet that delegated. Cardano cannot send less than about 1 ADA in a single transaction, so refunds under 1 ADA are not sent.
The ULTRA token will not launch. With the ISPO closing, we are not issuing the ULTRA token, so ISPO allocations will not be distributed. The ADA refund returns what delegators gave up to earn them. RAD remains deprecated.
Nexus Miner rewards are not affected. Facility 1 keeps mining, and Nexus Miner holders keep claiming their BTC rewards from the dashboard as usual.
Facility 2
Facility 2 is not going anywhere. We still plan to fill it; we need a funding path that matches its scale. We are exploring options now and will share next steps here and on Discord once we have something concrete.
Thank you
To everyone who delegated to the ISPO: thank you. You backed a small US mining team with real hardware and real ambitions, and we do not take that lightly. Getting your ADA back to you accurately is our first priority.
Refunds for delegators will be distributed directly via blockchain over the next 90 days.