Building and Signing Transactions

Question

I'm learning about Cardano. In reading how to set up a node for staking, I came across Building and Signing Transactions. Would someone kindly provide more context when building and signing should take place and by whom? The document showed manual CLI commands for those two procedures. Does that mean if you are administering a staking pool, someone has to build and sign the transactions manually? I don't believe that to be the case as it would take too long.

Answer 1

Pool operators do use the CLI directly, or have some shell scripts to streamline the transaction building steps. There are also several different suites of pool management scripts that automatically build the transactions required, in addition to many other features built on top of calls to cardano-cli.

As a pool operator, administration transactions often require special flags to cardano-cli which wallet software doesn't support. Specifically, pool operators must do these 3 functions:

• Register the pool, which involves 2-3 transactions
• Every 65 days, renew KES (Key Evolving Signature)
• Other pool updates, like changes to fees, relays, and metadata

"A transaction is a binding between inputs and outputs". This is true of all Cardano transactions, but the pool management actions above also include metadata. Some of the metadata fields are special/reserved and passed as flags to the CLI, and some metadata is supplied as user-defined JSON.

The stake pool setup documentation walks through the setup & KES management in much more detail.