So you bought $ADA — now you need to stake it!

We just opened our own stakepool, UESP! To celebrate, we have decided to write a Medium article about how to get your $ADA off the exchanges, in to your own wallet and how to stake it!

More and more people are hearing about and becoming interested in cryptocurrency. Whether you came to Cardano because you saw Charles’ whiteboard presentation, you loved the mission of banking the unbanked, or you happened to see it is low in price currently, you now are the proud owner $ADA. Congratulations on joining the amazing #CardanoCommunity.

But, now what do you do with your $ADA? Please do not leave or stake it on the exchanges, as this leads to centralization of the blockchain. Why would centralization be bad? In brief, when a network is centralized, you must put your faith in the entities that control it and, should the centralized network go down, your transactions cannot go through and the whole blockchain will not work. Decentralization is the way.

We, the hodlers of $ADA, have the responsibility to keep the blockchain decentralized. How is this done? You remove it from the exchanges to your own wallet and stake it with a private stake pool operator.

There is literally no downside to staking your $ADA. It will never leave your wallet, you can always spend it, and the keys are always yours (this is sometimes termed non-custodial staking). Not ONLY does delegating support decentralization, but it also earns you, the $ADA delegator, passive income of $ADA at a rate of just under 5% annually. What’s not to like?

Let’s walk through how to do this.

First, you remove your $ADA from the exchange you purchased it from to a trusted wallet. Wallets that many in our community prefer include Daedalus (you need a fairly good desktop computer to run this one!), Nami, Adalite, and Yoroi (however, there are even more wallets than we have listed here!). You will need to visit one of these websites and follow their prompts to download the necessary software to begin the process of creating your own wallet. Each website contains fairly detailed information for how to proceed with them.

When you make your wallet, you will be prompted to create a seed phrase and a spending password (you must enter this password whenever you want to spend/send any $ADA). Make sure to write the seed phrase and spending password down and store it somewhere very secure — do not ever store it online! Read all kinds of advice about how to store your seed phrase here.

Pro-tip: You should never need to give your seed phrase to anyone. NEVER. Never ever.

Once you’ve created your wallet, you will need to find your “receiving address” in your wallet.

An example of what the receiving address will look like in Nami wallet

Copy this address, and head back to the exchange where you purchased your $ADA.

— Please note: most exchanges have a waiting period before you can move your $ADA of around 5 days. —

Most exchanges will have a place that will say something like Send/Receive (coinbase.com) or Withdraw (pro.coinbase.com). Click on this and enter your receiving address where it is indicated and tell it how much $ADA you would like to send (likely you will want to click “send all” or “max” here).

Pro tip: Always double check your receiving address to make sure it’s correct before sending your cryptocurrency. If you mistype or mis-paste the address, you will lose your $ADA!

Once you’ve clicked and authenticated that you want to send your $ADA to your brand new wallet, you may have a nail-biting few minutes (to sometimes even hours depending on the network!) while you wait for it to arrive in your wallet. Be comforted that even seasoned crypto investors can feel this way!

Then, provided you entered your receiving address correctly, your $ADA arrives safely in your wallet. How do you stake it?

Each wallet is different, but we will strike to make videos and/or provide images to walk you through the process below.

Nami

Nami wallet is simple once you understand how to delegate. Nami delegation cannot be done through the app, but rather through pool.pm.

For this example, we will use our own stake pool, which benefits both it’s delegators and our pool with $ADA rewards (and in the future, $EARTH token).

1. First step: visit pool.pm
2. Select your stake pool (click here).
3. Once there, look at the upper right hand side of the page.
4. Click “JOIN”.
5. This will autodirect you to Nami to sign with your spending password.
6. Sign.
7. Done!

Yoroi

Delegating to a stakepool with Yoroi is much different than with Nami.

1. First open your Yoroi app
2. Open your wallet.
3. Click the “Delegation list” tab.
4. Search for the stakepool to which you want to delegate (may we suggest UESP?)
5. Click on the delegate button for the UESP (or the stakepool you searched for)
6. Click delegate again. Wait…..
7. Sign the transaction with your spending password.
8. Done!

We will soon be adding videos for the above wallets, as well as the written instructions for Adalite and Daedulus wallets. But, as you see above, the process is relatively painless for most wallets!

Welcome to our stakepool U.Earthlings! Thank you to our wonderful Unbounded.Earth community for your continued support and enthusiasm!

Disclaimer: This article should be viewed for educational purposes only and not as financial advice. As always, we recommend to do your own research (dyor).