How to delagate, stake your ADA on ITN testnet?

AdaPointPool
6 min readDec 17, 2019

DEPRECATED

Shelley mainnet is LIVE. Therefore SEE THE MAINNET GUIDE instead of this one.

The time has finally come. You can now delegate your ADA in a custom “Incentivized test-net” wallet. The official wallet was released 16 December 2019.

Firstly you had to had ADA in Daedalus wallet or Daedalus paper wallet at 12:00 UTC on November 29, 2019. Note: Yoroi wallet for staking should be released December 17, 2019, but this walk-through is for Daedalus. Update: Yoroi wallet was released. See our article on “How to delegate, stake ADA with Yoroi wallet”.

Note: This is a test-net wallet! Anything you will do here will not reflect on Cardano main-net, the only exception being rewards will be transferred to the mainnet. Therefore keep your Daedalus recovery phrase words safe even if you are not using the wallet anymore or you won’t get the rewards.

Go to Cardano staking page [https://staking.cardano.org/en/delegation]. Scroll down and download the Daedalus wallet depending on you operation system.

Double click your downloaded file and install the program depending on your operating system.

On Windows you should get a desktop shortcut and a shortcut in the start menu. Open Daedalus Rewards v1.

Your wallet should start syncing. If Daedalus syncing is stuck and even after some restarts doesn’t work you should check our article on how to solve syncing issues.

The delegation, staking process is pretty intuitive and simple. We still have a walkthrough if you get lost or if something is not clear enough.

Restoring the Daedalus, Yoroi, Paper wallet (byron) wallet

  1. First you will get a “Restore a wallet” dialog. Here you can restore legacy Daedalus Wallet or legacy paper wallet created with Daedalus. For Yoroi you can wait a bit and delegate through Yoroi wallet or if you are in a hurry restore it here.

2. Next you have two options: “Create” or “Restore” wallet. Click “Restore” so will restore the wallet you have(or had before the snapshot) on the main-net Daedalus wallet.

Create or Restore screen

Next a dialog will open.

3a. First flow is for restoring the Daedalus wallet.

You can write down any name you want in the “Wallet name” field. Here I wrote “My old Daedalus wallet”.

Next you have to input your own 12-word Daedalus wallet recovery phrase. This are the words you wrote down when you created your first Daedalus wallet.

Note: If you have 15-word Daedalus wallet recovery phrase (new Rewards wallet format) you should select and input that recovery phrase.

Lastly enter a new password that will be used for “Incentivized test-net” wallet. It must be at least 10 characters long, 1 lowercase letter and 1 number.

Click “Restore wallet”.

Restore Dedalus wallet screen

3b. Second flow is for the paper wallet.

Restore paper wallet screen

You can write down any name you want in the “Wallet name” field. Here I wrote “My old Paper wallet”.

Next you have to input your own 27-word paper wallet recovery phrase. This are the words you wrote down when you created your first paper wallet.

Lastly enter a new password that will be used for “incentivized test-net” wallet. It must be at least 10 characters long, 1 lowercase letter and 1 number.

Click “Restore paper wallet”.

You should see you wallet with the same balance as the one on the main-net.

Delegation your ADA with Daedalus wallet

  1. After creating the wallet click middle icon in the left menu to go to “Delegation center”.
Delegation center screen

2. Click “Stake pools” button.

3. You will get a list of currently active pools. Here you must choose which pool you will delegate/stake your ADA.

Few things to note:

There is no danger to lose the funds, your funds will never leave your wallet. You are just telling the network that you are delegating your stake to the selected pool and not sanding any ADA.

There are some parameters to consider:

Cost per epoch: This is a fixed amount of ADA that the pool operator will get and will be substracted from all the rewards the pool creates.

Profit margin: Is a variable reward for the pool, percentage of reward sum that will go to the pool operator.

To play around with this parameters you can check the official rewards calculator [https://staking.cardano.org/en/calculator].

You can also check the website of any pool.

If you want to consider us; our pool is ADA Point Pool, ticker APP [https://adapointpool.com]. We don’t have any fixed fee, just 2% profit margin. Our mission is to try to help users to delegate their stake in a cost efficient way. Any ADA that we will get and not use for server maintenance purposes will be used for developing Yoroi wallet and some others custom Cardano tools.

Note: Currently you can only delegate to one pool, unless you create multiple wallets.

Next select the pool that you want to delegate to, click the box.

Stake pools screen

Click “Delegate to this pool”.

4. You should get a popup where you select the wallet.

Delegate wallet step 1 screen

5. You will go to next step where you just check that the pool is the same that you selected. Click “Continue”.

Delegate wallet step 2 screen

6. Here you need to input your spending password that you added when restoring the wallet. Click “Continue”.

Delegate wallet step 3 screen

7. You should see “Wallet delegated”.

Wallet delegated screen

Click “Close”.

8. Congratulations you have successfully delegated your ADA and should get the rewards. Click the delegation tab and click the “Rewards” to check your rewards.

Note 1: You should see your initial rewards updated after 2 epochs and then after each epoch.

Note: Rewards will be passed on to the main-net Daedalus wallet, so they are real rewards. Keep your Daedalus recovery phrase safe.

Rewards screen

Thank you for going through our tutorial. We will have more tutorials for Yoroi, Hardware wallets and main-net network in the future. Let us know if you find any mistakes in the instructions at adapointpool@gmail.com.

Happy staking,

AdaPointPool
https://adapointpool.com
adapointpool@gmail.com

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