Operating a cryptocurrency pool is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I have a long history of crunching projects with BOINC and pre-BOINC with SETI. In addition to 25 years of development experience and dabbling in the development of other coins over the last few years, developing a pool for Gridcoin seemed like a good opportunity.
The Gridcoin community had already laid some groundwork with discussion and operation of two previous pools. That work as well as the great Gridcoin community helped me get started in the development of grcpool.com. This project is also different for me as I haven't contributed much in the open source area, and the community was looking for an open source solution for longevity. Although the code is open source, there is a lot of room for improvements in making it something more accessible and user-friendly. Not to mention I am making nearly daily changes to the UI, backend, or adding new features which delays some of the documentation.
The pool's growth hasn't come without any hurdles, and surely there will be some interesting ones yet to come. The biggest problem encountered was the 20,000 magnitude limit. This imposed limit causes Gridcoin to not issue rewards for work performed over a 20,000 magnitude. Although I categorize this as a good problem to have since it indicates growth, I wasn’t expecting it so quickly. The obvious solution was to create a second pool for new members with an additional website and move some members to the new pool. Since that didn’t sound like a best case scaling solution, I wanted to see how the site could scale with multiple Gridcoin and BOINC instances running and interfacing with the website. So far this method seems to be working well, and it looks like grcpool.com could continue scaling in this manner at least a few more times. Thanks to the volunteers who moved to pool 2 as now pool 1 is below a 20,000 magnitude, while pool 2’s magnitude is steadily increasing.
Another philosophy of the pool is I wanted it to be as transparent as possible. There is full disclosure on the site regarding fees, donations, calculations, and profit collected. My intention when developing the pool wasn't to make a profit, which is why there is only a low flat fee per payout. The pool exists to provide an avenue for new Gridcoin members to get involved more easily. As they become more proficient they can transition to solo mining, strengthening the network and the community.
Likely the largest obstacle for getting more BOINC adoption with Gridcoin is the team requirement. In order to earn GRC, you must be part of the Gridcoin team within BOINC. There is quite a bit of team competition and loyalty among BOINC teams, so switching to the Gridcoin team for many in the BOINC world is not even mentionable. Fortunately, there is work in progress to remove the team requirement within Gridcoin. Members of other BOINC teams have reached out to me about joining the pool without losing their team identity which has resulted in an interesting solution. With an open source, user-friendly pool, teams could feasibly create their own Gridcoin pool and retain their team identity. In order to support those teams who don’t wish to operate their own pools themselves I am planning on operating team pools under subdomains within the grcpool.com domain (usa.grcpool.com, uk.grcpool.com, etc...) These team pools will likely need to carry a small operating percentage fee rather than a flat rate given the increased amount of resources and time required. I will keep the team Gridcoin pool at a low flat rate to remain consistent with my initial philosophy of the pool’s purpose.
If you’d like additional information or are interested in engaging in a discussion, you can contact me on the teamgridcoin slack channel as 
Cheers,
Brian
