Delegating your stake

how to create the delegation certificate

Stake is concentrated in accounts, and you will need account public key to delegate its associated stake.

for own account

You will need:

• the Stake Pool ID: an hexadecimal string identifying the stake pool you want to delegate your stake to.

jcli certificate new owner-stake-delegation STAKE_POOL_ID --output stake_delegation.cert

Note that the certificate is in blaco, there's no account key used for its creation. In order for delegation to work it must be submitted to a node inside a very specific transaction:

• Transaction must have exactly 1 input
• The input must be from account
• The input value must be strictly equal to fee of the transaction
• Transaction must have 0 outputs

The account used for input will have its stake delegated to the stake pool

for any account

You will need:

• account public key: a bech32 string of a public key
• the Stake Pool ID: an hexadecimal string identifying the stake pool you want to delegate your stake to.

jcli certificate new stake-delegation ACCOUNT_PUBLIC_KEY STAKE_POOL_ID --output stake_delegation.cert

submitting to a node

The jcli transaction add-certificate command should be used to add a certificate before finalizing the transaction.

For example:

...

jcli transaction add-certificate $(cat stake_delegation.cert) --staging tx
jcli transaction finalize CHANGE_ADDRESS --fee-constant 5 --fee-coefficient 2 --fee-certificate 2 --staging tx

...
jcli transaction seal --staging tx
jcli transaction auth --key account_key.prv --staging tx
...

The --fee-certificate flag indicates the cost of adding a certificate, used for computing the fees, it can be omitted if it is zero.

See here for more documentation on transaction creation.

how to sign your delegation certificate

This procedure is needed only for certificates that are to be included in the genesis config file.

We need to make sure that the owner of the account is authorizing this delegation to happens, and for that we need a cryptographic signature.

We will need the account secret key to create a signature

jcli certificate sign --certificate stake_delegation.cert --key account_key.prv --output stake_delegation.signedcert

The content of stake_delegation.signedcert will be something like:

signedcert1q9uxkxptz3zx7akmugkmt4ecjjd3nmzween2qfr5enhzkt37tdt4uqt0j0039z5048mu9ayv3ujep5sl28q2cpdnx9fkvpq30lmjrrgtmqqctzczvu6e3v65m40n40c3y2pnu4vhd888dygkrtnfm0ts92fe50jy0h0ugh6wlvgy4xvr3lz4uuqzg2xgu6vv8tr24jrwhg0l09klp5wvwzl5

and can now be added in the genesis config file.