How to delegate, stake your ADA on Shelley with Ledger Nano S/X?

6 min readAug 1, 2020

The time has come! You can now delegate your ADA. The official Daedalus wallet was released 29 July 2020, but here we are going to look at how you can delegate your stake with Ledger Nano S/X hardware wallet.

Delegation is a process of delegating ADA to a staking pool. Staking pools actually make the Cardano network as they produce “transactions” (blocks). If someone that holds ADA does not have a technical skill or desire to run a staking pool, they can still get the rewards proportionally based on the amount of ADA delegated to a staking pool.

This tutorial uses https://adalite.io wallet. It is developed by Vacuumlabs which was contracted to develop the official Cardano Ledger/Trezor app.

Note 1: Daedalus already supports ledger delegation, our guide on that is in the making. After you have your funds on the hardware wallet you can use different clients interchangeably, so if you follow the guide for Adalite here you will see the same state in Daedalus and Yoroi.

Note 2: Check our Yoroi hardware wallet tutorial. You can also follow this tutorial as delegating with https://adalite.io is really simple and even if delegated there you can then still open your wallet in Yoroi.

Note 3: Trezor device is also supported. You can follow this guide for now and ignore the Ledger specific parts.

Warning: Use this tutorial at your own risk. It comes with no guarantees.

Ledger live (Nano S)

Plug your ledger and input your password.
Click manager and upgrade your Firmware to version 1.6.0 or higher.
Re-install Cardano ADA app, install version 2.0.3 or higher.

ADA Lite

Note: If you are having problems please try to use Chrome or Firefox browser.

Go to https://adalite.com.
Click “Continue to AdaLite”

3. Click “Hardware Wallet”.

Make sure you have your Ledger Nano S/X connected, unlocked and you are in the Ledger Nano Cardano APP.

4. Click “Ledger Nano S/X”

5. You should see the loading screen.

It will ask you to export the public key on the Ledger device. Confirm the export. You will have to confirm it twice.

Note: If the screen doesn’t go away try to disconnect and reconnect your Ledger device then try this step again. Also be sure that you upgraded the Ledger firmware and Cardano APP as mentioned in the beginning of this tutorial.

6. After confirmation you should see your wallet with your current ADA balance. As this is an old (Byron) wallet you can’t directly stake with it. Therefore you must convert the balance. Click “Convert to stakable”.

7. Check everything is in order. Click “Confirm Transaction”.

You should see the transaction on the Ledger Nano S/X. Check the address and confirm the transaction on the device.

8. CONGRATULATIONS you now have a stake-able wallet/address that supports delegations and a bunch of other cool features.

ADA Lite — Staking, Delegation

Few things to note first:

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

The cost of delegating to a pool is about ~2 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://testnets.cardano.org/en/cardano/tools/staking-calculator/].

If you want to consider us; our pool is ADA Point Pool, ticker APP [https://adapointpool.com]. APP fee is just 2%. We will try to help Cardano users. 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 per wallet.
(Warning — Advanced users) Therefore if you want to delegate to multiple pools you have to create more wallets either with new ledger words or attaching secret PIN.

See Delegate Stake section. For now you have to manually input the ID of the staking pool. See https://adapools.io or https://pooltool.io for all the pools.

Next type in or copy/paste the ID of the pool under Delegate stake. You should see the correct staking pool information. Click “Delegate”.

Example ID (ADA Point Pool):

1cb5d0e006c33ace982a527d4140bc086f99f7d35c27c5ab29600a74

2. Next screen will show a short review. Click “Confirm Transaction”.

After this you will see the delegation information on the Ledger Nano S/X device. See pool ID is correct on the device and confirm the transaction.

3. At the left/bottom of the page you should now see your current delegation information.

CONGRATULATIONS. You have now delegated your ADA to a staking pool. You will now earn a steady ADA rewards for each EPOCH (5 days) if your staking pool is operational.

Note: Cardano decentralization will be gradually increased as the time passes. Currently community pools create 24% blocks, but split all the rewards.

We would also like to thank Vacuumlabs for writing the awesome adalite.io site and Cardano Ledger Nano S/X software. Consider staking with their pool.

FAQ

When will I get my first rewards?
It takes remainder of the current epoch + 3 epochs till you get your first rewards. So after this initial delay you will get the rewards every epoch. In short after initial delay of 15–20 days (1 epoch is 5 days).
Do I need to keep my Ada Lite wallet open if I am staking?
No. You can close the wallet/shut down your computer and you are still staking and getting rewards.
What happens if my computer breaks or I delete the Yoroi extension?
Your funds are safe. When you need to access your funds just follow the tutorial from the beginning and you will restore your balance. Staking awards are not affected by this events. If you staked before you will get the rewards.
Is my ADA safe on a hardware wallet?
Check your hardware wallet manufacturer best practices. In general you have to have safe backup for the passphrase/words with which you did your hardware wallet was initialized.
Which exchanges and third parties support Shelley?
You can check the full list here.
How do I transfer ADA to Ledger on adalite.io?
See tutorial on how to use a hardware wallet on adalite.io.
adalite.io FAQ
Be sure to have a quick look at adalite.io FAQ to see if there is anything of interest.