If you have followed Charles Hoskinson's blockchain Cardano last year, and had some ADA in your Cardano Daedalus wallet on Nov 29, 2019, it's now time to start earning a passive income by staking your ADA to so called "Cardano Staking Pools".
Staking is the new mining. Instead of investing electricity for solving computational problems, you stake your coins to a pool, that enables the pool to create new blocks and validating transactions on the blockchain. What's great is, that staking your coins does not block you from spending them! So you can stake and spend at the same time :)
Staking is part of Cardano's "Shelly" release, which will will enable the Cardano blockchain to become truly decentralized (much more than Ethereum), and I think it's expected to launch sometime in Q1/Q2 2020.
Currently, you can already earn real ADA in the "Incentivized Testnet" like so:
Download the Daedalus wallet (which is different one than the mainnet wallet)
Open Daedalus and let it connect to the Incentivized Shelly testnet. If that fails, try again after some minutes (it's a testnet, and some things still break, which is normal)
Restore your Balance wallet from the Cardano Mainnet (which will be a copy of all your ADA, that you had in Daedalus wallet on mainnet on 29.11.2019)
Create a Testnet spending wallet and transfer all funds from Step 5
Now go to the Staking tab and select one Stake Pool (there are already over 600 available!), that you will delegate your coins to. For this tutorial we choose AdaLove.network with the ticker "ALOVE", because we just liked their website. It's good to know, that for decentralization, the Cardano Ouroborus protocol, which works behind the scenes, gives less rewards to big staking pools, so stakers are incentivized to delegate their ADA to as much different Staking pools as possible, smart! So it's maybe a good idea, to also choose a smaller one.
Follow the instructions in Daedalus wallet on how to stake or unstake.
Note that one's you stake your ADA, you will need to wait until the next Cardano epoch starts (up to 2 days or so), in order for the staking to become effective.
You can check your Staking rewards directly in Daedalus.
If you're unhappy with the staking result, just change your ADA staking contribution to an other pool.
After the Incentivized Testnet is over, you will be able to restore all ADA you've earned during the testing phase back in the Mainnet.
We think that the Cardano blockchain is one of the best Staking opportunities there are in 2020. Happy Staking!
