Hi,
I haven’t opened my wallet for sometime now (over three years) and just upgraded Daedalus Mainnet. I noticed my Shelley wallet is taking rather long syncing with the blockchain. It’s been over 15 hours and went from 66.17% to now 67.89%. At this rate, it’s going to take almost a month to sync. Is this normal? Thanks in advance.
You can restore your keys with your seedphrase in a litewallet like Typhon or Eternl. This way you dont have to sync the whole blockchain.
you can use a litewallet.
If you’re afraid of theft, you can also use a paper wallet.
Syncing Daedalus can take several days, but a month would really be a bit much.
Don’t know what the bottleneck is with you. Could be network bandwidth, CPU, RAM, …
Less than 32 GiB of RAM are probably not sufficient anymore and the chain will take 200 GiB of disk space when fully synchronised.
As others have said: Daedalus is most probably not the right choice for most end users anymore. There is hardly any advantage in running a full node wallet app. You can manage the same wallet by just importing/restoring it into one of the light wallet apps: https://cardano.org/what-is-ada/#wallets
For security, hardware wallets are the solution not only for Cardano, but for all of crypto. Ledger and Trezor are widely supported by almost all Cardano wallet apps, Keystone also already has some of the more important ones supporting it.
Thanks! And in terms of staking, does my hard wallet automatically stake by just having ADA in it? Do the rewards earned come in additional ADA coins?
No, staking is never automatic. You have to choose a stake pool and actively delegate to it.
Yes, if you did that, staking rewards are in ADA and come automatically each epoch, each five days. They arrive on your stake address and contribute to your stake immediately.
In order to spend them, they have to be withdrawn from the stake address to an ordinary base address, to a UTxO. Some wallet apps do this automatically during other transactions, some have an explicit button to do it (which costs additional transaction fees, so it really only makes sense to do it rarely, only when needed).
This is all exactly the same for software seed phrase wallets and hardware wallets. The only difference is that the seed phrase, the private keys are only known to the hardware and nowhere else. Instead of deriving private keys and signing by itself, a wallet app has to ask the hardware wallet to sign transactions.