How to Stake – ECO Pool

How to Stake with ECO Pool

Delegating your ADA to ECO Pool, or any other Cardano stake pool, is safe and easy. Your funds will always stay accessible in your wallet and you can spend or transfer your ADA any time without affecting the staking rewards you have already earned. You can also undelegate from the current stake pool or change your delegation to a different stake pool at any time.

Choosing your ADA Wallet

Staking is supported by the 2 official wallets for the Cardano ecosystem: Daedalus and Yoroi Wallet. Daedalus is a full node wallet, which means it will download the whole blockchain to your PC/Mac to independently verify the transaction history of the blockchain. Installing Daedalus for the first time and syncing the blockachain will take a few hours since there is quite a few GB of data to download. Your PC needs about 15 GB of free drive space for the installation.

A faster way to get you ADA wallet set up is using the light wallet Yoroi. It is an extension for your web browser and will connect to dedicated EMURGO servers to verify transactions. This means it does not need to download the whole blockchain. There is also a Yoroi Wallet for mobile. Both wallets , Daedalus and Yoroi, are safe and easy to use.

Make sure that you always download your ADA wallet from the official websites daedaluswallet.io or yoroi-wallet.com

Create a new ADA Wallet

Once you have installed Daedalus or Yoroi wallet, you can create a new ADA wallet. The instructions when creating a new wallet will guide you through the process.

The slideshow below shows the process of creating an ADA wallet using Yoroi for the Chrome browser. Creating a new wallet in Daedalus or Yoroi for mobile is very similar. Once your ADA wallet is created, you can transfer your funds from an exchange to your ADA wallet.

Step 1/10: Click ‘Create wallet’ to create a new wallet.

Step 2/10: Choose ‘Cardano (ADA)’ as a currency for your wallet.

Step 3/10: Choose ‘Create wallet’ to create a wallet for everyday use.

Step 4/10: Choose a name for your wallet and a password as a ‘spending password’. The spending password is required every time you want to send funds.

Step 5/10: The next step is very important in the process of creating your ADA wallet.

Step 6/10: Write down your recovery phrase carefully and keep it safe in multiple locations if possible.

Step 7/10: Before you can move on, you have to confirm that you have written down the recovery phrase correctly.

Step 8/10: You are your own bank. Keep your recovery phrase safe.

Step 9/10: Once your ADA wallet is created you can transfer your funds from an exchange to your ADA wallet. Go to the ‘Receive’ tab to find your wallet address.

Step 10/10: This is where you can find your wallet address. That’s where you want to send your ADA to from the exchange. There can be multiple wallet addresses that are all linked to the same wallet.

Delegate to ECO Pool

Once your ADA is in your wallet, you are ready to delegate your stake to a Cardano stake pool and earn stake rewards. Your funds will always stay in your wallet while you are delegated to a stake pool. Your ADA is not ‘locked’ while you are delegated and you can send and receive ADA without effecting the rewards you have already earned. Find more details about when your stake will become active below in the section ‘Delegation Cycle’.

How to delegate to ECO Pool:

Select the ‘Delegation List’ tab of your wallet
Search in the list of stake pools for ECO!
‘Delegate’ will delegate your ADA wallet to ECO Pool. Thanks for your support!

When do I get my first rewards?

When you first start delegating to a Cardano stake pool, it will take some time until your stake becomes active and you receive your first staking rewards. The diagram below shows the Cardano Delegation Cycle. The delegation and rewards system is separated into epochs. Each epoch is 5 days long. This means rewards are automatically paid out every 5 days.

Let’s assume you have started delegating to a stake pool in Epoch 0. There is a snapshot at the end of Epoch 0, which determines the amount of ADA you have in your wallet at that point in time. That amount of stake becomes active in Epoch 2. The rewards you have earned in Epoch 2 are calculated in Epoch 3, and the rewards for Epoch 2 are paid out in Epoch 4. Since one epoch is 5 days long, it takes 15-20 days until you receive your first rewards (depending when in Epoch 0 you started delegating). From then on, as long as your wallet is delegated to a stake pool, you will receive rewards every 5 days.

Redelegating to a different stake pool will not make you lose any rewards. If you change delegation you will still be paid rewards from the previous stake pool for another 3 epochs until the rewards from the new stake pool start getting paid out.

What return can I expect on my stake?

The Cardano protocol automatically calculates and pays out rewards to delegators every 5 days. The return you can expect are between 4%-5% annually. The long term rewards are very similar for small, medium or large stake pools, as long as the stake pool produces blocks regularly.

There is a luck factor which determines how many blocks a stake pool gets allocated each epoch. This luck factor can vary much more for smaller pools compared to large stake pools. This means small stake pools can make a lot more blocks than estimated in one epoch, and then fewer blocks in another epoch. However, the overall long term rewards are the same compared to a large stake pool.