Choosing a stake pool and delegating your ada

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Choosing a stake pool and delegating your ada

(Written by @ElliotHill of the Cardano Foundation)

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When delegation and staking launched with the delivery of Shelley, we released a short ‘staking for beginners’ article to guide you through the process of delegating your ada to a stake pool. Now, a few epochs later, staking rewards are being paid out, and you should have a decent idea of the rewards percentage that you are receiving from your chosen stake pool.

However, delegation is a dynamic process. There is no need to delegate all of your ada to one stake pool forever and never explore other pools. At the same time, there are opportunities to delegate your ada to multiple stake pools from different Daedalus wallet addresses if you wish to experiment with pool allocation.

Here, we will explore some of the key concepts of delegating your stake, and discover the relationship between stake pool fees, staking rewards, and pool saturation. We will also discuss some of the trade-offs between delegating to one or multiple pools simultaneously.

What is the difference between staking and delegation?

Delegation and staking are two separate concepts. All ada holders have a right to participate in consensus on Cardano by running live nodes and staking ada to support the network. However, not all ada holders have the skills or desire to participate in the consensus mechanism actively.

As a regular ada holder who doesn’t run a stake pool, you will be taking part in stake delegation. Stake delegation is the process of allocating some or all of your ada holdings to one or more stake pools, who stake on your behalf. Therefore, you are not actually ‘staking’ in the real sense of the word, but rather delegating your right to stake.

Delegating stake pays rewards in ada, but there is no fixed reward. Instead, rewards are calculated according to several factors such as your amount of delegated ada tokens, the fees of your chosen stake pool, and network parameters. We will explore these concepts in detail below.

Slot leader elections

To understand how to choose a stake pool according to its size or desirability, we must first examine how slot leaders are chosen to validate blocks.

As we discovered in last week’s technical blog, in a proof of work (PoW) blockchain miners use hashing power to validate blocks. Therefore, the higher the hashing power a miner has, the greater the likelihood that they will be chosen to validate a new block.

In PoS systems, and more specifically Cardano, slot leader elections function more like a lottery. We can envisage each ada token as a ‘ticket’, and anyone participating in staking can ‘win’ the chance of becoming a slot leader—reaping block rewards paid in ada.

Stake pools that have a greater amount of ada delegated to them have a statistically higher chance of being elected as a slot leader and producing the next block, and therefore have a higher likelihood of reaping greater block rewards.

Naturally, this will usually result in more regular rewards for delegates, and potentially earn those delegating their stake to large pools more ada rewards. However, it’s not this simple in practice—let’s find out why below.

Small pools vs. large pools

As we discussed above, larger pools with more ada delegated to them are more likely to be chosen to validate new blocks. Therefore, if this were the only factor at play, it would logically follow that pools with more ada delegated to them will pay out greater rewards to delegates for an epoch.

However, there are many trade-offs to be made throughout the staking process. Each stake pool determines its fees, and it can be difficult to choose between a small stake pool which charges low pool fees, or a larger pool that charges greater fees.

Stake pools that become too large may encounter pool saturation, which is defined as the ‘K’ value, or saturation parameter. Pool saturation offers diminishing rewards to delegators once a pool has a sufficiently high amount of staked ada, preventing a small number of pools from exerting disproportionate influence over the protocol.

Pool saturation is designed to encourage delegators to explore different stake pools, rather than simply choosing the most popular pools. Exploring different stake pools will not only potentially yield maximum rewards, but it also helps keep the network sufficiently decentralized. So, you should ensure that the pool you are delegating to isn’t nearing its saturation point.

Similarly important are network parameters, such as transaction fees per epoch, daily stake pool running costs, and pool saturation. We will explore these concepts in more detail below.

What is pool desirability, and how is it measured?

We’ve examined pool saturation and running costs, but there is another important metric to consider—pool desirability. As there is a long list of available stake pools, pools are ranked according to how likely they are to produce more user rewards.

Desirability is decided by a combination of reliability, pool costs, profit margin, saturation, and the pledge amount. These concepts can be described as follows:

  • Reliability - Stake pools need to maintain 24/7 uptime to validate new blocks if it is chosen as a slot leader. Pools with the greatest uptime have the highest reliability.

  • Pool costs - Naturally, although much lower than PoW systems, stake pool operators have some costs associated with running a pool. These costs are declared in ada for each epoch.

  • Profit margin - As well as pool costs, which cover the stake pool operators outgoings and don’t necessarily represent profit, they may also charge a profit margin—an incentive pool operators take for maintaining and running the pool.

  • Pledge - The pledge represents the stake of the pool operator. While there is no minimum pledge, larger stake pool operator pledges result in greater rewards for every delegate in that pool. As a result, you should consider the pledge amount when choosing a pool.

As we can see, pool costs, the initial pledge, and profit margins, which are set entirely by stake pool operators, affect your rewards from delegation. If a stake pool changes its fees, they will take effect in the next epoch, and you will be notified of this change through your wallet.

It is worth noting that even though stake pool operators set pool fees, they are not responsible for paying out staking rewards. Instead, this is handled automatically by the protocol, so the stake pool operator themselves cannot disrupt reward distribution.

How can I delegate to multiple pools?

Currently, it is not possible to delegate to multiple pools from a single wallet address. However, it is possible to split your ada holdings over multiple addresses and delegate separately to different pools.

You may want to do this to compare rewards between stake pools, or altruistically to promote greater decentralization within the network or help a small pool grow.

Tactically choosing a stake pool

Hopefully, you should now see that choosing a pool to delegate to isn’t just a clear case of selecting the pools with the most ada delegated to them—as these may also have the highest pool costs and profit margin fees.

Instead, there are bound to be instances where choosing a pool with less ada delegated to it but with lower fees and a greater pledge is more profitable or a pool with lower fees that has been steadily increasing in desirability, and so forth.

We recommend comparing pools and their estimated pool rewards by using the Cardano staking calculator. You can learn more about stake pool desirability and how to choose a pool in this comprehensive video.

If you are still wondering how you can delegate your stake, read our step-by-step guide, or follow the simple infographic below!

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Read more articles in our Shelley blog series below:

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This is not true, the cost to run a stake pool with more delegaters vs less delegaters (big pool vs small pool) is not different… The people who read your article and see a small stake pool with the same fee as a large stake pool are going to think that the small stake pool is trying to take advantage because they are going to think it cost less to run a small stake pool (according to your article)… As a small stake pool operator, this is going to hurt our chances to get delegaters.

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Bigger pools don’t always charge a higher fee and smaller pools not always charge a lower fee. The fee they charge might be a temporary marketing strategy, a matter of choice, a strong belief in the future of Cardano, etcetera. The fee being charged varies much independent of pool size and currently resides between 0% and 100% (note: the pools that charge more than 20% most probably made a mistake during their pool registration). The fixed cost that every pool needs to charge and which is currently set at a minimum of 340 ada per epoch however will only slightly increase the total fee percentage of big pools (high number of stake carrying the cost), but increases the total fee percentage of a small pool a lot (low number of stake carrying the cost).

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Hi @anthony_stachowitz, thank you for your feedback! It is most valuable. This isn’t a literal scenario or a rule of stake pool fees between small and large pools, it is more to serve as an example that fees are dynamic, stake pool operator-controlled, and important for calculating rewards. This section was actually intended to encourage delegators to consider choosing a smaller stake pool, as it could yield comparable rewards to a larger pool and promote decentralization.

@ThaiTheo I agree, the fees which pool operators charge are subject to change, and the above sentence wasn’t designed to imply that small stake pool operators always charge lower pool fees or larger pools charge greater pool fees or vice versa.

I will think of some ways this can be reworded so the message here is clearer - thank you both! :slight_smile: It is great to hear people’s thoughts on these articles and we always encourage discussion.

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The pledge protects a stake pool against so called sibyl attacks (an attack where perpetrators try to present themselves as their target). A sybil attacker needs to pledge the same amount as their target for every false presentation of the stake pool and he needs many false presentations of a stake pool to succeed with the sibyl attack. Therefore stake pools with a low pledge amount are considered not to be safe for sibyl attacks, while stake pool with a large pledge amount are. The stake pools that pledges a large amount of ada, do so to protect the stake pool and the complete Cardano block-chain. There are large stake pools who only pledge 1000 ada and there are small stake pools who pledge 100,000+ ada to protect themselves against these sibyl attacks.

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Thank you.

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This is ambiguous, since the readers might think that splitting holdings into several addresses from the same wallet would do the trick. Currently, one would actually need different wallets, and not just different addresses. I took the liberty to correct that part in the FR translation that will be posted shortly.

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I think the same, but I didn’t modify the spanish translation to be accurate with the original content.

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There are few ways you can delegate your ADA to a Cardano stake pool and finding the right pool depends on your specific situation. This is a guide on how to stake your ADA through your wallet and also what to look for and what not to look for when choosing a pool.

Choosing the proper Stake Pool For You

Are you having trouble choosing the proper stake pool? If you ask around, you’ll quickly find that everybody gives you a unique answer. Ultimately, it depends on your situation and the way often you’d wish to re-evaluate your delegation.

I’ve narrowed it down to the following points and broken down what to look for.

Do you want to support community projects or charities – Many pools (like @AzureADA) are projects that benefit the Cardano community and need support from delegators. Remember, it’s through adoption that ADA has value. Others provide a portion of their earnings to charity so it’s worth knowing whom you’re delegating to and what their mission is.

Saturation – Does the pool have enough room to accommodate your delegation? If it pushes the ‘live stake’ near to 32 million ADA then it’ll soon be oversaturated and rewards will start to decline. This is something you would like to keep an eye on, the smaller the pool, the less often you need to see it.

Small pool volatility – Many small pools don’t have enough delegated stake to consistently produce blocks every epoch. As an example, a pool may be predicted to mint 1 block so any less than 100% luck would equate to 0 blocks and no rewards. The upside is that small pools can have higher degrees of luck, so a pool that’s predicted to mint 0.5 blocks but is assigned 2 slots will have the luck of 400%, and rewards are greatly increased which is why many find small pools more desirable. As a pool grows, this volatility is decreasing.

Lifetime ROA or ROS – This can be very misleading. People often say “look for a pool with 5% or 5.5% ROS” but a low ROS doesn’t mean a pool is performing poorly so you want further investigation. Small pools that aren’t consistently producing blocks can suffer under this metric. Also, any pool can suffer ‘bad luck’ too.

0% Pools – This can be very attractive to delegators; however, the difference in rewards is negligible when compared as rewards fluctuate every epoch due to the variable of ‘luck’, this difference more or less disappears. As an example, let’s take 2 pools with a similar amount of stake but one has a 0% variable fee and the other has 5%. If the 0% pool has 95% luck and the other has105%, the 5% pool is generating more rewards.

Multiple Pool Owners – This is one of the hot topics in the space. Do you want to support operators of multiple pools? Some argue that this is the success of having a powerful brand but to several, this is harmful to the network’s decentralization status and leave it vulnerable to Sybil attacks.

Block Produced Per Epoch – More blocks don’t mean extra money (necessarily), it’s down to the ‘luck’ variable. A pool that mints 30 blocks in an epoch may produce fewer rewards than the small pool that produced 5, so it’s all relative.

Our final advice is to decide on a pool you believe in. They’re all subject to a similar variable of ‘luck’ so essentially are all the same. Many operators give constant updates on the performance of the pool like @AzureAda and are very active on social media.

Get to understand your pool owner, staking with an operator just because you like them is a perfectly viable reason. It’s your money so the choice is yours.

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