pool.md

Registering a Stake Pool

Let us register our own stake pool!

For this tutorial we assume that you have set up a block-producing node with one or more relays, created the necessary keys and operational certificate for your block-producing node, registered a stake address and have some funds at your stake address.

1. We need to create a stake pool registration certificate:

    cardano-cli shelley stake-pool registration-certificate \
        --cold-verification-key-file node.vkey \ 
        --vrf-verification-key-file vrf.vkey \
        --pool-pledge 100000000000 \
        --pool-cost 10000000000 \
        --pool-margin 0.01 \
        --reward-account-verification-key-file stake.vkey \
        --pool-owner-staking-verification-key stake.vkey \
        --out-file pool.cert
   

   Parameter	Explanation
   stake-pool-verification-key-file	verification cold key
   vrf-verification-key-file	verification VRS key
   pool-pledge	pledge (lovelace)
   pool-cost	operational costs per epoch (lovelace)
   pool-margin	operator margin
   reward-account-verification-key-file	verification staking key for the rewards
   pool-owner-staking-verification-key	verification staking key(s) for the pool owner(s)
   out-file	output file to write the certificate to

   So in the example aboce, we use the cold- and VRF-keys that we created here, promise to pledge 100,000 ada to our pool, declare operational costs of 10,000 ada per epoch, set the operational margin (i.e. the ratio of rewards we take after taking our costs and before the rest is distributed amongst owners and delegators according to their delegated stake) to 1%, use the staking key we created here to receive our rewards and use the same key as pool owner key for the pledge.

   We could use a different key for the rewards, and we could provide more than one owner key if there were multiple owners who share the pledge.

The pool.cert file should look like this:

type: StakePoolCertificateShelley
title: Free form text
cbor-hex:
 18b58a03582062d632e7ee8a83769bc108e3e42a674d8cb242d7375fc2d97db9b4dd6eded6fd5820
 48aa7b2c8deb8f6d2318e3bf3df885e22d5d63788153e7f4040c33ecae15d3e61b0000005d21dba0
 001b000000012a05f200d81e820001820058203a4e813b6340dc790f772b3d433ce1c371d5c5f5de
 46f1a68bdf8113f50e779d8158203a4e813b6340dc790f772b3d433ce1c371d5c5f5de46f1a68bdf
 8113f50e779d80f6   

2. We have to honor our pledge by delegating at least the pledged amount to our pool, so we have to create a delegation certificate to achieve this:

    cardano-cli shelley stake-address delegation-certificate \
        --staking-verification-key-file stake.vkey \
        --stake-pool-verification-key-file node.vkey \
        --out-file delegation.cert 
   

   This creates a delegation certificate which delegates funds from all stake addresses associated with key stake.vkey to the pool belonging to cold key node.vkey. If we had used different staking keys for the pool owners in the first step, we would need to create delegation certificates for all of them instead.

3. Finally we need to submit the pool registration certificate and the delegation certificate(s) to the blockchain by including them in one or more transactions. We can use one transaction for multiple certificates, the certificates will be applied in order. We start by calculating the fees (as explained here):

    cardano-cli shelley transaction calculate-min-fee \ 
        --tx-in-count 1 \
        --tx-out-count 1 \ 
        --ttl 200000 \ 
        --testnet-magic 42 \
        --signing-key-file payment.skey \
        --signing-key-file stake.skey \
        --signing-key-file node.skey \
        --certificate-file pool.cert \
        --certificate-file delegation.cert \ 
        --protocol-params-file protocol.json 
   
    > 184685
   

   Note how we included the two certificates in the call to calculate-min-fee and that the transaction will have to be signed by the payment key corresponding to the address we use to pay for the transaction, the staking key(s) of the owner(s) and the cold key of the node. We will also have to pay a deposit for the stake pool registration. The deposit amount is specified in the genesis file:

    "poolDeposit": 500000000
   

   In order to calculate the correct amounts, we first query our stake address as explained here. We might get somethin like

                               TxHash                                 TxIx        Lovelace
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    9db6cf...                                                            0      999999267766
   

   Note that the available funds are higher than the pledge, which is fine. They just must not be lower.

   In this example, we can now calculate our change:

    expr 999999267766 - 500000000 - 184685
    > 999499083081
   

   Now we can build our transaction:

    cardano-cli shelley transaction build-raw \
        --tx-in 9db6cf...#0 \ 
        --tx-out $(cat payment.addr)+999499083081 \
        --ttl 200000 \
        --fee 184685 \
        --out-file tx003.raw \
        --certificate-file pool.cert \
        --certificate-file delegation.cert 
   

   We sign:

    cardano-cli shelley transaction sign \ 
        --tx-body-file tx003.raw \
        --signing-key-file payment.skey \ 
        --signing-key-file stake.skey \
        --signing-key-file node.skey \
        --testnet-magic 42 \
        --out-file tx003.signed
   

   And submit:

    cardano-cli shelley transaction submit \
        --tx-file tx003.signed \
        --testnet-magic 42
   

That's it! Our stake pool has been registered.