Retrieve funds sent to stake pool address

Hi All,

I am following the set up staking pool guide : https://www.coincashew.com/coins/overview-ada/guide-how-to-build-a-haskell-stakepool-node#7-setup-payment-and-staking-keys
On creating my stake pool I sent funds to the address from

cat payment.addr

from this I then could not get this command to run as it said params.json not found (It is still an error )

keyDeposit=$(cat $NODE_HOME/params.json | jq -r ‘.keyDeposit’)

echo keyDeposit: $keyDeposit

from here I re did this step

cardano-cli shelley address key-gen
–verification-key-file payment.vkey
–signing-key-file payment.skey

and this one

cardano-cli shelley stake-address key-gen
–verification-key-file stake.vkey
–signing-key-file stake.skey

WHich caused the address I originally sent the funds to to change.

How can I retrieve this firstly and secondly How can i get past the step

keyDeposit=$(cat $NODE_HOME/params.json | jq -r ‘.keyDeposit’)

echo keyDeposit: $keyDeposit

Thanks

For your first question, it appears you have overwritten the private key to your address. I am afraid your funds are now lost. I would like someone else to chime in, but unless you are able to search the disk using a special tool to help find the overwritten file on disk (longshot btw), I don’t see any other solution. Hopefully someone smarter than myself might know of a solution.

Regarding the params.json missing, you will need to first generate the file:

cardano-cli shelley query protocol-parameters
–mainnet
–out-file params.json

Sorry about your missing funds.

1 Like

I was afraid of such, It wasn’t a massive amount but it was some. I thought there may be a way the stake pool had its own keys and it was somehow linked to that.

I didn’t think i missed a step so I had no idea, Will try it out.

Thanks a lot for your reply! Stay Safe

please do the following after you’re created new keys. run the following command:
chmod 400 xxx.skey xxx.vkey
to protect your keys for beeing overwritten by accident!

best regards, martin

3 Likes

Thanks for this Martin!

This may have been exactly what happened to us. 50k Ada sitting there, and we backed up all our keys, except our payment.vkey and payment.skey.

Trying to find if there is ANYWAY to at least keep the 50k staked for our pledge. Or without the original payment key we are SOL.

Any assist would be appreciated, and if we find anything we’ll be back here to share.

Hello Stag,

Do you still by chance have your stake stake.vkey and stake.skey corresponding to your payment keys/address?

You can pledge your pool if you still have these.

Your friend, FROG

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ADAFrog,

We are uncertain if we overwrote the the corresponding stake.vkey and stake.skey as we were retracing our steps to reconfigure the node but it is worth trying your idea.

Is there a resource for the process to pledging your pool?

Gratefully, StagDigital

Here is the documentation for registering a stake pool. You can use a separate payment.addr to pay for the transaction:

https://docs.cardano.org/projects/cardano-node/en/latest/stake-pool-operations/register_stakepool.html

Also, you can register an additional pledge addresses by adding another entry for --pool-owner-stake-verification-key-file:

–cold-verification-key-file cold.vkey
–vrf-verification-key-file vrf.vkey \

–pool-pledge
–pool-cost
–pool-margin
–pool-reward-account-verification-key-file stake.vkey
–pool-owner-stake-verification-key-file stake.vkey
–pool-owner-stake-verification-key-file stake2.vkey
–mainnet
–pool-relay-ipv4
–pool-relay-port
–metadata-url https://git.io/JJWdJ
–metadata-hash
–out-file pool-registration.cert

1 Like

Hi ADAfrog
Your post gives me hope for a similar issue i’m having
Would be most appreciative for any assistance if possible Deleted Stakepool priv folder. How to recover stakepool

Hi Jordan - sure and my pleasure

1 Like

Hi Spitso,

Were you able to recover your stakepool pledge?

not yet, still working through it
i feel the actual keys i recovered, weren’t actually the correct ones as generating a payment.addr from them, was different to the address i transfer funds too
luckily it was only 1K. But ive taken it as a good learning experience …also as a warning to be vigilant with “deleting” keys from hot servers, as file recovery works quite well

1 Like

Interesting, how did you recover those keys? We want to recover our overwritten stake keys.

Soo far my advice would be stop using that machine immediately (the more you use it, the more the risk of overwriting the desired file permanently)
Best option is to pull the HDD and connect it to a PC via HDD to USB cable… or you can leave it in the original PC just at a higher risk
Install photorec -> sudo apt-get install testdisk
run photorec -> sudo photorec
Run through the prompts. make sure when you select your save destination, it is a completely different HDD or else you risk overwriting the data permanently. To save time, you probably can also only choose to save only txt files. As this is what the program picks the key files up as, it could be different on other peoples computers soo you also can search for all default file types if you want to be thorough
This could take from hrs to days, depending on hardware and amount of data

Now you have a large amount of folders containing txt files with HOPEFULLY has your data
Now you want to search through the file contents for parameters, i used a windows PC to do this with the HDD connect via USB. I downloaded a program called “UltraFileSearch” https://www.ultrafilesearch.com/download.html which is free for 30days and has great search results
I used the search terms “cborHex” that gave me the best results

let it run and pray
This also can take hrs to days depending on hardware and data
At the end it’l’ hopefully give you enough keys so that you can create any that were missing

Goodluck :smiley:

StagDigital
I have now been successful in retrieving my funds using my above mentioned method

Chadizzle
Apologies you haven’t had luck. I do believe if you’ve overwritten your keys, my above method wouldn’t work