How do I stake?
Staking will be done on the incentivized testnet for a little while and then will be merged with the main net.
It is available for both Daedalus and Yoroi Wallets right now.
You can find more information here:
Update: Staking is now available on the mainnet:
Do I need to give people my private keys in order to stake?
NO!
Never tell anyone your private keys — ever.
Your private keys should only ever been known or used by you. They should only be used in order to recover your own lost wallet (through Daedalus, for example).
Once again, do not give them to anyone — ever.
Also, you do not need to SEND your ADA to someone in order for them to stake.
Delegating your stake should be essentially a few clicks on the Daedalus or Yoroi wallet. It looks like this on Daedalus as of 12-20-19:
After choosing the stake pool you want to delegate to (hopefully ours, Aloha Cardano), you will need to enter your spending password.
This is NOT your private keys. Once again, never give anyone your private keys.
Why should I stake with Aloha Cardano?
We believe there will be plenty of great stake pools that will be available. That said, we want to provide people with as many viable options as possible.
Aloha Cardano will try its best to maintain 100% uptime so as not to miss the opportunity to build blocks and receive block rewards. There will be more expensive solutions like cloud services and utilizing a multiple fail-safe system with multiple different systems and cloud services.
However, we want to keep costs reasonably low as well as be as decentralized as possible. For this reason, we are currently running on dedicated hardware with dedicated internet access in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You can go to https://iohk.io/ and look on the map for us. Cloud solutions will be considered if deemed necessary. (Update: this has changed for mainnet)
We charge ZERO FIXED FEES and only 4% fees (on rewards) on the incentivized testnet. This fee was chosen to be “reasonable” and is not planned to be changed when we migrate over to main net. We want to create a community on the testnet that will stick with us on the mainnet. For this reason, we keep lines of communications between our delegators as open as possible using Telegram and email.
Currently it is not possible to change the fixed fees or fee percentage on the incentivized testnet once a stakepool has been launched. These fees can not be changed without creation of a new stakepool (which isn’t free). Someday stake pools may be able to alter their fees without creating a new stakepool (and paying a creation fee) — but probably only DOWNWARD. For this reason, you can stake with confidence. There will be no “bait and switch” or on-the-fly changing of fees.
We would like Aloha Cardano to be as close as possible to a “set it and forget it” solution for both the testnet and mainnet.
Update for Mainnet:
In the current mainnet, right after the hard fork (7/29/20), there is now a minimum fixed fee of 340 ADA. This fixed fee is only assessed from rewards. If no block is minted, no fee is charged. This minimum fee comes off the block reward (~1000 ADA). In order to compensate for this fixed fee, we have lowered the % fee to 2%. We believe that such a fee schedule is fair. The remainder of 1000-340 = 660. 2% of 660 is 13 ADA. So the pool would make about 353 ADA per block, the the remainder of 647 ADA is then distributed amongst the delegates.
Aloha Cardano has changed its original pool configuration of “dedicated hardware only” to what is considered best practice. The core node (block producer node) is being run on dedicated hardware. However, we have 3 separate relay nodes being hosted using cloud providers.
What does saturation and saturation point mean?
Having stake above a certain point penalizes everyone in the pool.
Currently, the saturation point has been set as k=100. This caps rewards at 1% of the total stake. Currently, in a 10 billion ADA staked, 1% would be 100 million ADA. However, in actuality, the saturation point it closer to to 68 million or so based on cap on total rewards based on blocks produced. This is because not 100% of blocks are being produced, increasing the amount of reward per block. As such, 68 million is the actual saturation point.
TL;DR
You should delegate to pools below 68 million ADA. Ideally, you should delegate to smaller pools (such as ours), because the likelihood of them getting saturated too quickly is pretty low.
In the event Aloha Cardano was ever to become saturated, we would let our delegators know immediately.
Update: The current saturation point on the mainnet is not known as of yet until we have a better idea of how much ADA will be staked. This will be updated with new information when available.
What are you guys doing now?
We are running a stakepool on the incentivized testnet. It’s been slow going, but we’ve slowly gathered enough stake to make about 1 block an epoch on average. We will continue to do our best to serve our delegators. Please come to our Telegram channel if you have any questions:
If you’d like to see our progress you can go here:
Pooltool.io and search for ALOHA
Update for Mainnet:
We are now available on the mainnet:
