Overview
EDEN Cardano YouTube is a free tutorial channel that walks viewers through running a stake pool and learning the Haskell programming language. The videos are screen recordings, so you watch each command typed rather than reading about it afterwards. The operator runs the pool he teaches about and contributes code to the tools his videos use1.
The channel belongs to Damjan Ostrelic, who operates Garden Pool, a Cardano stake pool registered under the ticker EDEN, one of the servers that takes turns producing blocks for the network and shares the rewards with people who back it2. The videos fall into two strands: hands-on operations guides for people running Cardano infrastructure, and a twelve-part Haskell course produced under a funded Project Catalyst grant3. A later pair of guides covers setting up a validator node on Midnight, a privacy-focused partner chain of Cardano.
Key Features
- Start-to-finish stake pool setup. Guides cover building a pool with the Guild Operators toolkit, rotating the keys that sign blocks, hardening the server, and upgrading the node when the network changes4.
- A Haskell course with a written twin. The twelve-part video series works through the same curriculum as a published online book, so the material is there to read or to watch5.
- Instruction from a tool contributor. The operator belongs to the Cardano Community and Koios developer groups on GitHub and helps maintain the operator scripts and query service his own tutorials walk through1.
- Monitoring and data setup you can copy. Separate videos build a metrics dashboard for a running node, stand up a public query service, and mirror the chain into a database with a query layer on top, so an operator can watch pool health rather than guess at it4.
- Navigable video pages. Descriptions carry chapter timestamps6 and links to spreadsheets and specifications7, which turns an hour-long recording into something you can jump around in.
What to Expect
Expect long videos. Lengths range from a few minutes to over two hours, and they are working sessions rather than summaries: you see the terminal, the mistakes, and the fixes as they happen4. Timestamp indexes in the descriptions let you skip to the step you need instead of scrubbing through.
Two kinds of visitor are served. If you want to run a stake pool, the operations strand covers the whole path: building the pool, keeping the server safe, wiring up pool monitoring, and upgrading through network-wide changes. If you want to write Cardano smart contracts (small programs that run on the blockchain itself), the Haskell course starts at the basics of functions and types and builds toward the ideas Cardano's contract language rests on5.
The 44 videos were published between June 2020 and December 2025, with nothing new since, so the channel is a reference archive rather than a feed of new material4. Anyone who would rather read than watch can work through the written companion books alongside other developer learning platforms in the ecosystem.
