Re-Delegation Smart Contract

Question

Prelude: I have a micro-cardano-pool ,less than 10K include 3 deligators (my friends). Despite the sike of the pool, I would like my pool be an active element in the mainnet network. Therefore I decided to participate in the interesting small-pools cooperative where all participants delegates their stake to a certain pool (from the programm) for several epochs. The number of epochs that allocated to the current active pool is a function of the stake contributed by that pool to the program in the recent past.

Current state : My friends and me delegate our stakes eccording to the program schedule (each one his stake).

Proposal : My proposal is to create a smart contract where few delegators will move their stake to this contract and only one (contract manager) could delegate the whole stake of the smart contract to a certain pool. Every participant (include contract manager) can pull only his part from the contract .

Question : Is it possible to delegate a smart contract’s stake ? What are the alternatives to the above smart contract?

Answer 1

If staking rights are being managed by a single trusted entity, then smart contracts are not necessary for your schema. Rather, you can use "franken-addresses", which are addresses built using multiple payment keys, but a single staking key.

In short, you and your peers may generate your own payment key pairs using cardano-cli, cardano-wallet, or whatever derivation path(s) you prefer. Your "staking manager" then generates their staking key-pair using similar methods. Finally, addresses are built with cardano-cli address build for each participant using their payment.vkey and the manager's stake.vkey.

Now, every participant gets their own wallet that they can deposit/withdraw from themselves, while all the wallets' staking rights are controlled by a single keyholder.

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Note: if implemented, the cohort must agree on a scheme as to who will be paying fees. As it stands, each wallet will require it's own staking certificate, which costs 2 ADA, plus standard tx-fee costs for delegation/redelegation.

Pro tip: you can save on some tx-fees if you submit the staking certificates all in single transaction.

Answer 2

Yes, a smart contract (script address) can delegate.

An example plutus script address from week 2 in the pioneers course is shown below:

Address {addressCredential = ScriptCredential 67f33146617a5e61936081db3b2117cbf59bd2123748f58ac9678656, addressStakingCredential = Nothing}

Note the parameter addressStakingCredential which allows a script address to be staked against a pool.

Answer 3

Check out this article - it's pretty well written and explains the inner workings of how delegation works using Plutus!

Liqwid Labs Stake Validators