Recovering staked ADA

Hi all. I played around setting up a stake pool back a few years ago and let it lapse far out of date and it hasn’t run since 2022.
Before I dive back into things blindly, what do I need to do in order to decommission and retrieve my staked ADA? Can I start it and let it re-sync and then go through the old decommission steps, or do i need to go through all of the upgrades to bring it current?
Current version is either 1.30 or 1.31.

In order to run the pool again, you would have to update a few versions (but should be possible to just go directly to 10.1.4).

But you don’t have to run it to just deregister it and get your deposit back (a few epochs later): Just build the transaction, sign and submit it. Same for the transaction(s) then withdrawing that deposit and sending everything to your destination of choice.

What you do need are the .skey files for your pool’s cold key (to do the deregistration), for the payment key where your pledge resides, and for the stake key where your rewards and the deposit arrive.

Most if not all guides assume that there is a node running, though. Some of the cardano-cli commands only work with a connection to a running node (getting the protocol parameters and the UTxOs).

But you can look up UTxOs, e.g., on cardanoscan.io and guess the transaction fee (0.20 ADA should be enough for such simple transactions if you don’t mind maybe paying 0.0x ADA more than is strictly necessary) instead of calculating the fee (which is where cardano-cli needs the protocol parameters).

Alternative would be a) get a node running (doesn’t have to be your pool setup, any node suffices) and do it according to, e.g., CoinCashew guide or b) learn how to build these transactions with one of the libraries that use remote APIs.

Wallet app wouldn’t work for two reasons: I don’t know any that implement pool management (the deregistration). And I don’t know any (up to now) that let you import .skey files (assuming you didn’t use keys derived from a seed phrase when setting up the node).

Thanks for the thorough reply. I’ve tried doing a few updates and it has been a bit of a slog. haven’t been able to get straight to 10.1.4 unfortunately. Having an issue with dependencies it seems. I’ll try setting up a new node and doing it that way. I do still have all of the keys thankfully.

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You know that if you just use the binary releases from https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-node/releases, you shouldn’t have any dependency problems, don’t you?

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