Moving to the new Daedalus wallet and the Cardano mainnet
Cardano is a project that I've been tracking for quite some time... and when the Shelley era was launched on the Testnet I hopped on board to setup delegations to staking pools, and to see how the whole system worked out. The incentivised testnet (in keeping with the slowly slowly approach of Cardano) was a way for the team and community to kick the tyres of the staking system that was added with the Shelley upgrade whilst the mainnet remained on the non-staking Byron era.
It did mean that there were additional testnet wallets and nodes to set up... and that was a little bit of a pain in the arse as there were long long synchonisation times in addition to some slight differences of opinion between the main Daedalus and Yoroi implementations of the wallets... however, in the end, it all ended up working, and as a little "thank-you", stakers and staking pool operators on the testnet were able to claim "real" ADA on the mainnet.
About a month ago, the Shelley era of staking and pools/delegation launched on the mainnet. Which meant that a new Daedalus wallet would need to be downloaded (see the picture above!). Of course, when downloading from the internet, it is always a good idea to double check the checksum (SHA256 in this case) of the program that you are downloading to make sure it is the same as what the provider is intending to distribute. Just as a quick note, a checksum is an operation that is carried out on the .exe file (data) which produces a unique signature. Any changes in the data results in a wildly different checksum.... thus, if the checksum matches, you can have some faith that the program that you downloaded is the one that was intended (without interference or corruption in transit).
So, with the new Daedalus wallet installed... it was time to leave the machine on overnight to let the node update and sync with the rest of the Cardano mainnet. In the Shelley era testnet, it kept hanging... which was super-frustrating... but this version of the sync completed without too much fuss (just lots of time...).
Upon restoring the Byron era wallets, I was informed that I would need to create new Shelley era wallets to claim my testnet ADA rewards.... sigh, this is a bit of a pain. Unfortunately, it also happened to coincide with my trips away... so, I had to delay the process until I returned back to home internet.
Of course, now that I'm home again... the node is out of sync again over the intervening few weeks and so, I'm going to have to wait a bit before I can do anything. I had a quick explore around before (when the node was last synced) and the delegation centre and all the rest of the tabs look very similar to the Shelley-era testnet interface, just in less garish colours. So, once I have the correct era wallets up and running.. there shouldn't be too much difficulty in selecting an appropriate delegation pool. Hopefully, the pool discovery is a little bit more fluid than the testnet...
There is a bit of a nice incentive to delegate to lesser pools, as the reward payouts (as determined by the code, not the pool) are higher for smaller pools. However, that does also mean that you will get rewards less often... but it does create a new game mechanic for delegators!
I read a quick story this morning (which is why I got reminded to sync the nodes and set up the wallets) that the first month APR (denominated in ADA) was around 5% which is slightly higher (but still in the ballpark region) of the expected APR of 4.x% that was predicted by the testnet. So, I think people are pretty satisfied with the way the first month turned out.
Now... I'll just check in and see if that node is synced yet... or if I will forget about it for another few weeks and have to repeat the whole process again!
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