Staking Cardano ($ADA) 101

My Nguyen
4 min readJul 8, 2021
Sourced — The Independent

Earning passive income via staking your crypto has become extremely popular, especially during times like right now where everything is chilling and BTC is acting almost like a stable coin with very little movement.

In the last few months, I have been staking my ADA through Binance with a 2-month locked-in period, with an APY of 7.79% which is very high compared to the standard 5–5.5% through other staking providers.

Lately, I have been experiencing slight issues with Binance (a story for another day) so I have been researching different options to stake my ADA. My friend suggested that I should use Yoroi.

About Yoroi

Yoroi is a light wallet for Cardano. It’s simple, fast and secure. Yoroi is an Emurgo product, engineered by IOHK. And it follows best practices for software in the industry including a comprehensive security audit. Daedalus and Yoroi are complements to what they try to achieve. Yoroi looks to be a day to day wallet for a Cardano user — sourced from Yoroi-wallet.com

IOHK is the team behind the foundation of Cardano so we know this wallet can be trusted.

There is 2 wallets available for use, Daedalus and Yoroi wallet.

Daedalus is a full node wallet. This means that unlike light wallets (e.g.Yoroi, Adalite etc.) Daedalus downloads a full copy of the Cardano blockchain and independently validates every transaction in its history. That way you get maximum security and completely trustless operation, without centrally hosted 3rd party servers — sourced from daedaluswallet.io

This post will be focused on the steps in staking your ADA using the Yoroi wallet.

  1. You can download the Chrome extension, or the Yoroi mobile app to get set up.

https://yoroi-wallet.com

Select the compatible OS system and download Yoroi.

2. Create your wallet, give it a name and write down the 15-word recovery seed phrases. Make sure you hang on to this, if you lost your phone and break your computer, you will never be able to recover the wallet without the recovery phrases.

3. Send ADA into your wallet from an exchange, ledger wallet or wherever it is stored. Go to the “Receive” tab below and copy the address or scan the QR code.

To be safe, test send a small amount like 5 ADA, you will have to pay the fees but better be safe than sorry right :). Send and receive ADA will be on the Cardano network, at the moment the gas fee is 1 ADA for these transactions; and it will take approximately 5 minutes for the ADA to be visible in your Yoroi wallet.

4. Choose a Staking Pool to delegate your ADA so you can start earning your passive ADA income.

Go to the Delegation List, to see a full list of delegators

Choose a Pool that has high ROA and low cost.

ROA (based on the result in the last 30 days)— Return of ADA annualised — pick the highest possible

Share/pool size — select a lower pool size as that determines the saturation level, less saturation = more rewards. I would pick somewhere in between so both the rewards and fees are shared out.

Cost — the fixed % requested by each of the operators ( think of it as tax, the lower this % are, is the better) + 340. The 340 you see here is 340 ADA spread equally as a fee to all the delegators in the pool. ( no you don't have to pay this 340 ADA by yourself)

Average cost — over cost to delegate to the chosen operator

Pledge — # of ADA this staking pool has

Blocks — number of blocks that had been successfully selected

Once you have selected a Staking Pool, select Delegate and you should see the following:

You will incur a small fee for this transaction, choose Delegate and you are done.

Happy Passive Income! :)

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My Nguyen

9–5pm pays my bills, 6–12am are where my hobbies and fun comes out to play, I like to read/listen to books