I have a question about staking. I know that it is not implemented yet so there might not be answers to everything but I am still missing some generic knowledge. Are there any risks tied to the process?
For example, what if I pick some staking pool that turns out to be untrustworthy - could I potentially lose my delegated ADA because of that?
What’s the motivation for delegating less than 100% of your holdings if staking is risk-free? I am not talking about the coins that some people keep on exchanges for day-to-day trading but all the coins lying in your wallet (for example, Daedalus). Are the delegated coins locked for some minimum amount of time or will I be able to stop delegating and transfer immediately (in that case, why not delegate all of them all the time to increase provisions)?
Your staked coins do not leave your personal possession, you only delegate a path to them and it is never required to give your private keys to stake pools.
There is no risk to losing your coins through the staking process. There will be a separate address to represent your stake which is different than the spending address.
With the current scheme, you can stake all your coins and still be able to spend. The motivation for delegating less than 100% of coins has been alleviated by the game theory and research that has shown the ability to both stake and spend without locking up the coins.
In this video below Lars Brunjes explains much of what would answer your questions. The biggest difference since this video came out is that in the video Lars describes 100 stake pools, but now the general idea is that there will be over 1,000 stake pools not limited by the technology.
Just to be absolutely clear, by “locked” most people mean “can’t be spent or moved”, in that sense delegated coins are not locked. But if you mean “can’t be accessed by the pool operator (or anyone else)” then yes that’s true, just as with coins in any wallet – because the ADA stays in your wallet.
I have been searching the forum to understand how the rewards mechanism will work if delegated ADA is not locked for the duration of an epoch.
Does this mean the rewards calculation is based on a snap shot of the stake distribution at the exact last moment of an epoch?
If I delegate at the beginning of an epoch, but then sell my ADA before the end of that epoch, who collects the reward for that epoch? Is it me, or is it the person who bought my ADA?
When I sell the ADA is there a mechanism that will notify the buyer that the purchased ADA is currently staked?
I will confess that I did not watch the entirety of the linked video. I have seen more recent presentations by Lars and read more recent papers and was hoping someone could point me directly to something that answers this specific question.
No, you cannot lose your coins. You simply delegate your ADA from your wallet to the staking pool like bRing. Your ADA never actually leaves your wallet so you don’t have to worry about losing your coins.
You cannot lose money when staking Crypto . Staking is the principle of: providing liquidity to a platform in return for rewards (interest/yield). helping out the blockchain of the stakes Crypto by being a (master)node in the network.
is correct, but that is not really specific to staking. If someone tricks you into signing a transaction, there is always a risk to lose your assets.
With Cardano’s staking, the ADA never leave your wallet/account. If it is done as intended, there is no risk other than not getting rewards.
But as with all other actions in crypto, scammers could just (contrary to the truth) claim that you have to sign a transaction sending them all your assets in order to stake.
