Risk vs Reward

A friend of a very close friend of mine sets up pools. I know that the way Cardano is built, there is next to zero risk as far as delegating. How much risk is there in letting an associate do EVERYTHING except the pledge in your pool? Thanks in advance!

Define “do EVERYTHING”

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He is like “Gimme some ADA and I’ll set your pool up” :joy::man_shrugging:t4:. Don’t judge me. I’m 6’2” and he is 5 foot something. He lives on my street lol.

If u trust him is fine but he can have access to ur funds and pool keys;

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FRFR, you are a gift to the ADA community and NEVER sleep. Your pool should be saturated AF…

Wait, he has access to my funds by setting up the pool?

Is there a way for him to do EVERYTHING and me to step in and pledge with all protections intact?

@PhirePhlame Yes there is, it involves you storing your ADA in a HW wallet, which you do anyway, right? The pool owner (i.e. you) controls the pledge through his HW wallet, which is also the beneficiary of the pool rewards. The operator (i.e. the techie) has access to the servers, runs/updates/monitors them. Every time he needs to change the pool config, he sends the unsigned Tx to the you, you sign it with your HW wallet and pass it back to the operator, which he then can use with the pool.

You’ll also need to have an off-chain agreement that reimburses the operator. e.g. the owner pays the operator x % of the pool rewards

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I think he will be the PO if I understood well

Just to clarify the terminology (that I use) …

Pool owner: controls the pledge and receives the pool rewards
Pool operator: runs the servers

Maybe this is defined differently elsewhere. Anyway, these are two distinct roles - in most cases its done by the same person though.

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Yessir. I have the OG Trezor and the OG Ledger. :+1:t5:

Just fyi the pool wallet can’t be a HW wallet

He might be a real one. He JUST asked me if I had a Trezor lol

Great, in that case you can go along as long as nobody asks you to hand over the private key that controls your pledge. Please note (and this is important) your delegator rewards i.e. the rewards for your pledge, will get payed to the “pool reward address”, the same address that receives the fix + margin. Therefore, that address should be controlled by your ledger as well. For simplicity, it can be the same as your owner address.

The “pool reward address” receives the fix + margin + delegator rewards from all configured owners.

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I’m about to lose my life savings because I’m too lazy to learn Linux during a pandemic… :sob:



Here is a bit of maths, that you may want to have a look at. Assuming that you are the owner, you can calculate your owner rewards. From this you subtract your cost i.e. what you pay the operator. The remainder is your profit, which you can then compare with “just delegating”.

A good reward calculator is here.

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Thanks a million. I truly appreciate the info. It’s not about money with me, tho. Just running a 0% pool for 5 years and hoping my BTC/ETH/BNB/DOT/KSM holdings take off. I was drawn to Cardano’s vision even more so than Bitcoin. Sadly, I didn’t buy a lot like BTC, and I forgot my spending password to a 10,000ADA wallet…:man_facepalming:t4:

Did u forgot the spending password? But do u have the seed words for ada wallet? Because u can recover/restore it (the wallet)

Maybe. I gotta sweep a laptop I haven’t used since 2017. And I gotta buy a Model T. I copped the 3 Trezor bundle (2 never opened), but I need a Model T for my pool…:roll_eyes: