Total ADA, staked ADA, Rewards ADA, and Vote Delegation

I’m a bit confused between the numbers I’m seeing in Daedalus, Yoroi, and Lace in regard to my ADA. Here’s a couple of questions.

What’s the difference in a wallet between my staked ADA and my rewards ADA. In Daedalus I’m seeing a total ADA which is correct but are the rewards portion somehow different? Do I need to withdraw the rewards into the wallet?

I decided to delegate my voting to a DRep. I thought that I would be delegating all the ADA in a wallet to the DRep. It’s way off. In one wallet only 10 ADA were delegated. In another about 1000. In another over 20,000.

Is there a guide to DRep delegation that might explain this?

Thanks.

Duane Mitchell

In Daedalus, the balance contains the rewards. If you just want to know what your current stake, your current balance, you can completely ignore everything about rewards. It doesn’t matter.

Other wallet apps might not include the rewards in the balance. Then, balance according to Daedalus should be balance according to that wallet app plus unwithdrawn rewards.

No, it is never necessary to withdraw rewards except if you want to send them elsewhere. Daedalus doesn’t even have an option to explicitly withdraw, but does it automatically whenever you create a transaction from it. So does Lace. Other wallet apps have both, automatic withdrawal and a button (e.g., Eternl). Yoroi only has the withdraw button. This is the most expensive option since you always have to spend a transaction fee to withdraw rewards. It should be used rarely.

Yes, you are delegating your whole stake to the dRep.

Where do you get those numbers? Are those from the transactions that did the registration? Then, they don’t matter at all. Those transactions should not have moved any ADA (except for the fee) out of your wallet, just from your wallet back into your wallet. The important thing is the metadata of that transaction that says where you want to delegate your whole wallet. If the wallet app used an UTxO with 10 ADA, 1000 ADA, or 20000 ADA to do this transaction is completely irrelevant.

Maybe, https://docs.gov.tools/cardano-govtool/using-govtool/delegating helps.

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Thanks for the explanation. I don’t do much with my ADA so when I do it’s a little confusing. I did have 7 wallets at one point and I consolidated them to three. Then I evened out the total in each. In the process I did have to withdraw some rewards.

The numbers now make sense and in Daedalus I’m seeing my total as being accurate and I’m seeing the fraction of an ADA as being the voting power delegation fee. This is both in the Summary pane and the Transactions pane. No other numbers there.

In Yoroi the total ADA numbers match Daedalus. The rewards do not. The rewards in Yoroi match what is listed as Unspent (ADA) in the Rewards pane of Daedalus. There’s a larger number for Total (ADA). This must have happened when I moved tokens around to consolidate wallets. I assume.

In Lace the numbers don’t make much sense. They don’t match either Daedalus or Yoroi. In the Activity panel there’s a Vote Delegation deduction in the amount of 10 ADA. My total ADA in that wallet is exactly 10 less than what is reported in both Daedalus and Yoroi. There’s no entry listed as a transaction fee for delegating to a DRep as in the other two wallets.

In Lace there’s also a deduction listed of 20,000+ ADA in one wallet and 1000+ ADA in another. It’s showing my ADA totals in those wallets as being less than by those numbers. So based on that I’m wondering where that ADA went? I guess no where and it’s just delegated to the DRep.

It’s confusing as to why Lace is showing these ADA totals?

That makes sense. The unspent/unwithdrawn rewards are the (more or less) important part. That is what is currently still on the rewards address.

The total rewards reported by Daedalus are just of historic interest. They include all rewards that you have already withdrawn and that are part of your UTxOs now (or have been sent out depending on how you see it, you really can’t mark ADA and say “Okay, this particular stayed in my wallet in this transaction and this one over there was sent out.”). To really tell you something more, you’d probably have to do more accounting – consolidate numbers over all your wallets, take into account how long you have been staking which wallet. Without that, it just tells you: “With this particular wallet, I have made X ADA in rewards in total over its whole lifetime.” Which is a bit uninformative which is why a lot of wallet apps don’t show it or at least a lot less prominently.

If the total ADA match everything is okay, isn’t it?

If you are using Lace in parallel to Daedalus: Lace usually only uses a single address, while Daedalus and Yoroi generate new addresses for every transaction and give you new unused addresses as receive addresses. Lace does scan the wallet for other addresses when you import it, but doesn’t actively do it all the time. So, when you do a transaction in Daedalus while the same wallet is already imported in Lace, it will look like ADA left the wallet, but it did not, it just moved to an address Lace doesn’t know about by now.

You can resync in Lace’s settings to repair that. But you will have to do that every time you do a transaction in Daedalus or Yoroi.

No, as already stated in the last post: ADA do never leave your wallet to be delegated to a dRep (or to a stake pool for that matter).

I would really also consider:

  • … if it makes sense to use Daedalus at all if you are only using Cardano that rarely. It uses lots of resources (RAM, disk space, time to sync, especiall if only started after long gaps) for no relevant gain to end users.
  • … trying more wallet apps: https://cardano.org/what-is-ada/#wallets My favourite is always Eternl.
  • … if you are sticking to the IOG and Emurgo wallet apps because of security: A hardware wallet helps much more for security than sticking to particular software vendors.
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OK. That makes sense to me. The rewards address.

When I started Daedalus was all there was. I have kept a record of all my ADA purchases. It all reconciles.

Yes it does and yes it is OK. Thanks.

I had to look for that. Now it all reconciles.

Good suggestions. I’ll look into Eternl. Maybe others. I just want to track how my pools are performing and how much ADA I have.

I think this wraps it up for me. Thanks.

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This is a nice one. Thanks for the suggestion. Does everything I want.