Secure pledge with hardware wallet

Question

technical question for securing the pledge with hardware wallet.

Is it possible to have the pledged secured with ledger nano and not having to sign pool updates with it?

I mean, just have the ledger address as second owner for that purpose and every pool update, or actions signed just with normal keys?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Any wallet that is registered as an "owner" wallet (a.k.a. pledge wallet) must witness any submission of a pool certificate, even if the certificate is being submitted for a minor update. If the certificate is submitted without the witness of a (currently) pledged wallet, then that wallet will be removed from "pledge" status the following epoch.

In other words, all owners and/or operators of a pool must witness pool updates, or their wallet(s) will loose pledge status.

Answer 2

If you follow the steps below and register as a Pledge wallet you must sign as a witness for any pool update transaction. No way around that.

You'll need to do a few things to set up the 2nd pledge wallet:

1. Set up your Ledger, delegate, make sure you do this 2 epochs before any pledge changes
2. Install this to interface with your Ledger
3. Export your staking keys
4. Copy your stake.vkey to your cold env and update your stake pool registration certificate. Make sure you have these flags sent in:

--pool-reward-account-verification-key-file [LEDGER-STAKE].vkey
--pool-owner-stake-verification-key-file [NON-LEDGER-STAKE].vkey
--pool-owner-stake-verification-key-file [LEDGER-STAKE].vkey \

5. Copy your pool.cert back to block producer and prep a new multi-signature transaction
6. You'll need 4 witnesses: node.skey [LEDGER-STAKE].hwsfile stake.skey payment.skey
7. Submit the transaction