Does pool pledge amount impact odds of getting a block?

Question

Two scenarios:

Stakepool owner #1 pledges 10k, stakes 10k and total stake from others is 100k = 110k staked total

Stakepool owner #2 pledges 100k, stakes 10k and total stake from others is 100k = 110k staked total

Do they both have the same odds to generate a block, as long as the pledge amount is maintained -or- does Stakepool owner #2 have better odds because more is pledged?

---and can a stakepool owner pledge far more than they can personally stake knowing the pledge will be maintained by others?

Answer 1

A high pledge does not increase the chance for the stakepool to get a block, but it does give a higher reward for the stakepool with a larger pledge than the other one. A estimation of assigned blocks per epoch for a pool can be calculated like this:

[stakepool total stake]/[total stake] x 21600

The pledge can only be linked to the wallet address belonging to the stakepool, meaning that you cannot take others stake in your stakepool and put it up as pledge, if you tried this the pledge would not meet, and the stakepool would not be able to mint the blocks it get assigned, losing potential rewards all together.

PS - I do believe someone in the community has found out how to have multiple people pledging to a stakepool, but this is out of my scope.

Answer 2

In your scenario, each pool will have the same chances of getting block and should average to the same amount over time. The pledge amount affects the rewards; however, it is currently only a small amount. The plan from IOG is the update this later in the year to have more of an effect.

Pledge can only be applied from wallets that are registered as pledge wallets in the pool's registration certificate on-chain. There is nothing that requires pledge to only be from a single wallet or owned by a specific person. However, for a wallet to be included, it must sign the pool registration transaction and therefore can only be done by consenting parties. Often pool operators partner with investors or other community members to increase the amount of pledge in a pool. This will be essential as the parameters change and pledge has a higher effect on earned rewards.

Answer 3

See https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/understanding-pledging-and-rewards.html for a more detailed description of the effect/purpose of pledge.

A pool can be configured to have multiple owners, providing all owner accounts are delegating to the pool the combined total of their balances counts towards the pledge amount. Obviously this comes with certain risks/responsibilities/trust, since if you add some people you're not very familiar with as owners and set the configured pledge level sufficiently high you're relying on other people to make sure none of their transactions push the overall active pledge total below the level configured in the pool certificate. If that were to occur (and currently there are some warnings on a few sites like pooltool.io but nothing in major wallets like Yoroi or Daedalus to alert you to the fact that you've just caused pledge to be dishonoured), if an epoch boundary snapshot is taken the pool will not be receiving any rewards at all a few epochs later while the block production will still continue as per normal (proportional to the total active pool stake).