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Cardano Blackboard Series #2: What is staking?

STAKING REQUIREMENTS

Server maintenance and devops/sysops experience will be a very big plus in running a stake pool effectively.

No minimum amount of ADA is required to start or run a stake pool.

Staking another coin on your computer will not affect staking in any way as long as you provide 100% uptime for your node.

Stake pools need to be online 24h/365d. Stake pools must provide near 100% uptime, this is the only requirement in running a stake pool.

There will not be a required minimum amount of one must stake in their own pool in order to run it , no minimum amount to start a pool

You don’t need a domain address to run a stake pool. Current storage requirements are 3-5 GB a year (in the future most likely 5-10 GB a year).

When you run a Daedalus wallet - you run a full node, and the protocol is the same as between pools since pools are just full-nodes.

There is no vetting and no checks in creating a stake pool. No one controls the creation of pools.

It is possible to be a pool operator with 0 personal , but you need to pay fees to create your pool and staking keys. This is made possible so that people can run their own pool without having much of a personal stake, to serve as service providers for people who have stake but don’t want to run their own nodes. Pool owner might stake 0 ADA and still successfully operate the pool. However the more of his/her personal coins the pool owner stakes - the more profitable his/her pool will become. Pool deactivates if “owner stake” is less than the pledged amount, but pool creator can pledge 0.

Regarding Operating System running the pool, currently available codebases are designed for Linux only.

MECHANICS

You will be able to delegate to a pool from Daedalus or Yoroi, no coding/technical experience is required.

Daedalus and Yoroi should support staking right away once Shelley starts. Your coins never leave your wallet and are never locked. Since your ADA is not locked once it is staked, when you spend your staked it is removed from the staking pool when the epoch ends. Your coins never leave your wallet when staking, you can move them at any time.

Staking is technically possible with wallet on an exchange but does not exist at the moment.

You can only stake on

Stake pools do not vote.

There will not be a way for a stake pool to select which users are allowed to stake with them and which aren’t. Pool operators have no control over who joins their pool.

There will be a feature that alerts users automatically through Daedalus and Yoroi if/when the stake pool you’re affiliated with goes offline or is no longer available. Daedalus and Yoroi will display some stats and overall historical pool performance score. Also both Daedalus and Yoroi will notify users if their selected pools change their parameters suddenly. So if your pool changes their costs or fees unexpectedly - you will be notified. Daedalus and Yoroi will show metrics for all pools and also will sort pools in UI so that close to being saturated pools will decrease. Also both Daedalus and Yoroi will notify users explicitly if their pool of choice is overflown.

A pool will be able to change its information, description, website, etc. Pools will also have short unique tickers and afaik, a pool won’t be able to change those. Every pool is identified by its unique blockchain ID, and it cannot be changed.

There are no maximum amount of users per stake pool, anyone can join. However there is a maximum amount of stake after which joining a pool will yield diminishing returns.

You will be able to delegate to a pool from a hardware wallet or a paper wallet.

There is no risks of losing your staking or joining a pool. The only thing at risk are your rewards, so you need to monitor how well your choice pool is doing, and re-delegate if necessary.

Pools don’t vote. Staking rights of a coin in no way intersect with the voting rights of a coin. There is no direct link between staking pools, balloting and the treasury. Staking pools don’t vote and have no voting rights. Staking rights of a coin are not related to the voting rights of a coin. A “stake pool” is not a "voting pool.” Stake pool cannot collect its rewards in a cold wallet. Pool operators can specify any staking key that will collect all the reward for the pool. It might be their own key or someone else’s and you can use any other wallet to create this key, and if they have a hardware wallet - they can use it to create the key in Daedalus or Yorori as well.

You can have multiple staking keys in one wallet.

Rewards distribution are completely automatic, pool operators don’t control anything apart of their own rewards.

All pools are open, visible, and transparent.

If no one joins a stake pool then its stake share stays equal to initial leaders stake.

Single base address cannot have multiple staking keys.

ECONOMICS

There will be a percentage taken from all rewards and sent into the treasury. For now- no one will be able to take any funds out of the treasury.

The Coins held by IOHK Emurgo and the Foundation will most probably be used for staking/as the part of staking pool.

Your reward is increased in proportion to the amount of you have in your pool.

The benefit of hosting is that you get a percentage of rewards from all delegates.

All pools follow the same in-protocol reward scheme. Pool creators determine “costs” in ADA, and “profit margin” in percentage.

If there aren’t much transactions - rewards will come from inflation exclusively.

The “treasury tax” is the tax on all rewards that goes to treasury every epoch and it is set at 20%…20% is quite moderate and standard. For Shelley - no one can withdraw from treasury.

The system already provides direct way for pool operators to earn margin on all delegate profits. It is impossible for operators to try and set up any additional charge.

Pool operators can specify static costs in ADA, and change it once per 5 days, if they want.

There will not be any coinburns.

GAME THEORY

There are NO fixed number of stake pools or stake pool operators in Cardano. No one controls it, and it’s technically impossible to control. Cardano is an open participation system.

It is possible to operate more than one stake pool.

Users decide whether to make a stake pool irrelevant by not delegating to it.

There’s no risk of your ADA getting lost by a pool. They might be hacked or bankrupt but your coins always stay in your wallet

You can run a ‘private’ pool just by setting fee margin to 100% - meaning that 100% of all rewards will go to you as pool operator and nothing will go to any delegates. Note that still anyone will be able to delegate to you if they want to - but they will not receive any rewards.

As long as pools follow the protocol - there’s no way to ‘tilt’ the system, and if they don’t follow the protocol and they are in minority - and will be ignored

The pledge is trustless, the rewards are trustful.

Exchanges will be able to utilize their users deposited ADA for delegation or even running their own pools to get rewards if they want and if they bother enough to set up the whole system. No exchanges so far have communicated an interest in providing this for .

Blockchain protocol cannot distinguish between what’s behind a pool or behing a wallet. You can operate your own pool, and use another wallet to stake in your own pool. All other nodes will see A pool and A wallet.

The pledged stake is not at risk if a pool is seen to be behaving maliciously,there is no slashings for now.

From a security point of view, apart from DDOS attacks, reward address cannot be changed just by hacking the pool, its specified in a chain transaction when you create or update the pool. So hackers potentially can steal your cold pool keys if you are not careful, and then post transactions for you, but that would be too obvious. Pool operators should also be ready to keep servers safe from hacking. Pool operators will mandatory manage 2 sets of keys: 1 cold and 1 hot. And only the hot key can be used to sign actual blocks. When you create a pool - you acquire your ‘Cold Pool Key’ - this is like the master key from the pool, you use this key to change any parameters, or to retire the pool. Then pool-software will provide a function to use this cold pool key (CPK) to produce a derived ‘Hot Pool Key’ (HPK). So when you run the pool, it needs an access to the HPK to sign actual blocks, but CPK can be cold, and can be on a hardware wallet. If you pool is hacked - attackers only can get the HPK, and all they can do is to sign fake blocks on your behalf, but they can’t actually change anything about the pool because you need the CPK for this. When pool operator suspects that the HPK might be compromised - all they need to do is to generate a new HPK, using the CPK, and the previous one will become invalid. Of course it cannot be forced for pool operators to treat CPK properly, but it is expected of them to understand the critical importance of it.

MARKETING

Users select a stake pool in Daedalus or Yoroi wallet by watching information about the wallet provided to the chain. External marketing is encouraged.

Simple statistics will be available in Daedalus and Yoroi. Explorers might provide more detailed information. Everyone has access to the data, since it’s all on the chain. User reviews will have to go on an external third party service.

You will be able to give your pools a visible name, and add description, or a URL link (in the wallet interface area) so that delegates can find information.

Original document

Courtesy of @vantuz-subhuman

Disclaimer: The FAQ page should be considered for “final” answers! Stake FAQ

Stake explainer