It's been a crazy few days in the wild west of the Cardano Incentivized Testnet!
The network has had its share of ups and downs with pools across the boards having to put in plenty of hours and clever scripting to keep their pools in sync in order to turn leader slots into blocks. This has brought out both the best and worst in pool operators.
Long story short, some pool operators have chosen to run multiple instances of the same stakepool - that is, running multiple nodes USING A SINGLE STAKEPOOL ID. This means that if one of their nodes drops out of sync another node can continue the job. This wouldn't be such an issue if the additional nodes they were running were passive nodes (aka not carrying their official stakepool id). This however has led to a significant increase in adversarial forks the effect of which has been to make the network even less stable.
The testnet is the ideal environment for pushing the boundaries of the code. However, the above actions are purely self-serving and not in the best interests of the network. IMHO, these actions show a very short-term view of how to go about building a reputable stakepool for the LONG TERM.
I won't name names of which pools are operating in this manner. However I have chosen not to operate KIWIPOOL like this as it is counterproductive to the smooth running of the network.
KIWIPOOL has managed to stay well ahead of the vast majority of pools in terms of ROI. We have been sitting at around 14% ROI overall. The last couple of epochs we have been allocated less blocks than previous epochs - this is expected and shows the 'law of averages' at work. We have good allocations for the current epoch and will be working hard to stay in sync to create some blocks for us all.
Happy staking!