Staking Guide — Stake SOL (Solana) with the Phantom Wallet using a Hardware Wallet (Ledger Nano S & X)

Hello Phantom users and Solana community members,
We are happy to share with you a thorough staking guide that will help you delegate your precious SOL tokens and contribute to the security of Solana Network.

We created two different guides:
1. Staking by using a Software Wallet (Keyphrase & Password)
2. Staking with a Hardware Wallet (Ledger Nano S & X)

In this guide we will explicitly focus on staking SOL by using a Hardware Wallet (Ledger Nano S & X). If you are interested a Staking Guide using a Software Wallet (Keyphrase & Password), please check this guide.

Step 1. Install the Phantom Plugin

First you have to install the Phantom plugin. You can go to the Phantom plugin website and install it for your browser. Currently Phantom supports Chrome, Brave, Firefox and Edge.

Once the Phantom Wallet Extension has been installed, you can now open it and start using it.

Step 2. Access your wallet

With the current version of Phantom you first have to create a dummy SOL wallet. It has no other purpose but to allow you the access to Phantom by using a Ledger Nano S/X.

It is still recommend to treat the creation of this dummy account adequately, in case you might want to use this SOL account for future actions. Therefore, click on “Create New Wallet” and then save the recovery phrase in a safe place (preferably with a back-up). This recovery phrase can also be used for example to restore your wallet on the same device or on another device.

On the next step you will be asked to create a password to unlock your wallet and after that the process of creating the wallet is already at the end.

You can start using your wallet by opening the Phantom Wallet Extension. The keyboard shortcut for quickly opening the extension is: Option + Shift + P for Mac or Alt + Shift + P for Windows.

Once the Phantom wallet has opened, click on the Menu and then select “+ Add / Connect Wallet”.

Then select “Connect hardware wallet”, connect your Ledger device to your PC and open the Solana application on your Ledger device. If you haven’t installed the Solana application on your Ledger device yet, you can do so by using this official guide: https://docs.solana.com/de/wallet-guide/ledger-live.

Once you have connected your Ledger device to your PC and opened the Solana Application on it, click on “Continue” in the Phantom wallet.

Then select your Ledger device (in this example we used the Ledger Nano S) and afterwards press “Connect”.

If all the communication works well, you will receive a confirmation message confirming that the connection was successful. Then press “Continue”.

On the next screen select the derivation path that matches your wallet and select the right address you want to use. Once both have been selected, you can click on “Add Account”.

At the end of the process, you will get a confirmation that the account has been added. Click on “Done”.

Step 3. Funding and Staking

In order to proceed with the staking process you will first need some SOL on your address so a SOL deposit is necessary. The easiest way to fund your wallet from another address is to copy the address by clicking on your address on top of the Phantom Wallet Extension. Once you have copied the address, double check to make sure the right address has been copied. Then you can transfer from either another personal address or from an exchange to this copied address.
There are also other options available for depositing SOL on the address. You can check all of them by clicking on “Deposit”.

Once you have funded your address, you can start delegating your SOL tokens by clicking on the “Solana” account.

Then click on “Start earning SOL”.

On the next page you will see a list with Validators and you are also able to search for a certain Validator.
Here are a couple of reasons to stake with Chainode Tech:

• Active since Phase 1 & still active on both Solana Testnet & Mainnet
• Early SOL investor and supporter of the Solana Network
• Wormhole Guardian for cross-chain integration
• Open, transparent and reachable 24/7 (Telegram Chat & Twitter)
• Highly technical team with focus on decentralization
• Fair commission (5%)

If you like our mission and you want to support us you can search “Chainode” and after you find our Validator, then you can click on it.

On the next page you will be able to delegate your SOL tokens. In general, we recommend to keep a minimum of 0.05 SOL or better 0.1 SOL in your wallet in order to pay for diverse transaction fees. For this example we kept 0.1 SOL in our wallet for paying future tx fees.
Once you have entered the desired amount you want to delegate, you can click on “Stake”.

As a next step you will have to confirm the staking transaction by pressing the buttons on your Ledger device.

At the end, the SOL amount will be staked and the process will be confirmed.

This confirms that your delegation was successful and that the stake will activate in about 1–2 epochs. It depends when in the epoch you start your delegation but in general it should not take longer than 3 days for your stake to get activated.

If you want to check the stake of your staking account, you can do so by clicking on the Solana account.

Then you will see the associated staking accounts and their state. Since we recently delegated, the stake of this staking account is in “Activating” mode for 1–2 epochs (or about 3 days). After it being activated, happy & stress free rewards will be generated. The earned SOL rewards are automatically compounded so there is no need for further action in order to stake the earned SOL rewards as well, as these are automatically staked.
The SOL rewards are automatically distributed at the end of each epoch. Therefore, it will take at least 2 epoch until you will see some rewards on your staking account.

Once the staking account has activated and it shows the status “Active” you can click on it to check how many rewards it has earned.

Also, by clicking on the stake account, it is possible to take further actions (like Unstaking), in case you want to withdraw some of your rewards.
For this you can click on “Unstake”.

Then the unstaking process will be confirmed by pressing the buttons on the Ledger device.

Since in this case the stake hasn’t been activated yet, the stake will be automatically deactivated. In case the stake is already Active, it will also need 1–2 epochs (about 3 days) until it gets deactivated. As a result you will see that the stake account has the status “Inactive”. You can then click again on it and proceed with the withdrawing process.

Once a stake account is inactive and you want to access again the funds, you will have to withdraw them from the stake account to your main SOL account. For this click on “Withdraw Stake”.

In the next moments the SOL tokens will be transferred to your main SOL account and it will be confirmed as below.

You can then check and see that your previous stake account is not visible anymore.

At the same time, the SOL balance has been added to the other funds on the main SOL account and the total balance is displayed accordingly.

That’s it! You managed to successfully stake your SOL tokens and to learn the basics associated with the staking process!

In case you still have any questions related to the SOL staking process or staking in general, we are happy to welcome you in our awesome Telegram community. Happy Staking!

About Chainode Tech

Founded in early 2019, Chainode Tech is a Web 3.0 infrastructure and service provider based in Zug, Switzerland, focused on bootstrapping innovative Web 3.0 protocols, providing necessary infrastructure and tooling as well as offering staking and validator services on cutting-edge Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) protocols.

The team behind Chainode Tech is young, extremely motivated and experienced with background in Software & System Engineering, System & Integration Architecture, DevOps, Marketing, Business Growth and Capital Investments.

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