How to Delegate to another Operator's Pool?

Staking & Delegation Operate a Stake Pool
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1

I’ve been successful delegating to my own F&F pool, now I want to try delegating to another operator’s pool. However, I’m getting confused as to the proper procedure.

Pre-requisites:

  1. I have a payment address and vrf to fund the fees and deposits. (e.g. pay.vkey)
  2. I have a base address that can participate in staking and it is funded with the amount I wish to delegate. (e.g. stake.base)
  3. I have registered the staking key certificate on the blockchain > 6 hours ago
    All three steps were executed without error.

Now, I need to make the delegation certificate and register it on the blockchain also:

Here is where I begin to have problems. The syntax to make the delegation certificate is:

cardano-cli shelley stake-address delegation-certificate
–stake-verification-key-file stake.vkey
–cold-verification-key-file pool.vkey
–out-file pool-delegation.cert

Questions:

  1. I obviously know my own cold vrf key. But, to delegate to another person’s pool, does this mean I need THEIR cold vrf key for THEIR pool?

  2. Are we expected to share our cold vrf keys with delegators? If so, is this just a temporary solution for delegating?

  3. To delegate to another operator’s pool, do we need to contact them on Telegram and request their cold key or can this key be queried using cardano-cli somehow?

2

see https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-tutorials/blob/master/pioneers-testnet/solutions/pioneers-exercise-4-solutions.md#exercises scroll down to point 5.)

you can pick the vrf from https://ff.adapools.org/ or https://ff.pooltool.io

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3

??? the vrf is not the same as the node.vkey, in all the docs the cold-key node.vkey is used, not the vrf.vkey. the vrf is for block signage

4

For example, in ff.pooltool.io one of the last columns is called PoolVRF. You are saying that this VRF is the key we should use for --cold-verification-key-file when building a delegation certificate to delegate to that pool? Is that correct? Then, if we copy that key, we have to insert it into a file with all the blah blah stuff identifying it as a Node operator’s key rather than a simpleVRF? Is that also correct?

5

The questions I posed remain unanswered. If you can provide comments please also write enough to make your explanations clear for a wider audience than experts. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to decipher the Oracle of Delphi. Thanks.

6

I was wrong in saying you can see and pick from the ff explorer pages.
Pool ids are not implemented yet.

You need the pool verification key rom the pool operator. It’s not a big secret.
Then insert this key in a template file you can pick from you own pool registration by replacing the character sequrnce after 5820…

Then use this file for your delegation-certificate

CLIO2 pool’s vkey is 4d9811f3cf3a067ff3f7cc2f769d3577d534ceaa64a9fd62d5d493613da3bce1

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