Stake your ada across multiple pools with Lace's new multi-staking feature (beta)

Introduction

Since its mainnet launch in April of 2023, the Lace light wallet platform has iterated through several upgrades, regularly adding new features and enhancing usability.

The 1.5 release includes a beta version of multi-delegation or multi-staking, a feature that will enable Lace users to delegate their ada to multiple stake pools without partitioning funds across multiple accounts.

Currently Ledger hardware wallet does not support multi-staking but we are working on it and support will be added in upcoming releases.

Learn more about multi-staking, how it works, and what this capability means for Lace and the Cardano ecosystem as a whole.

What does multi-staking mean for SPOs, and the Cardano ecosystem as a whole?

The ability to delegate stake to multiple pools offers a dual benefit for users and SPOs.

Users can delegate their stake to multiple pools from a single wallet, allowing them to spread their stake across multiple community SPOs. Multi-staking enables a single account to support different SPOs/ projects/ organizations, which leads to more diversified block creation and encourages network decentralization.

From an SPO perspective, and since users will no longer be limited to supporting a single pool, stake pools will have a higher chance to be selected by users, thus increasing the pool's delegate base.

Multi-staking features

Lace's multi-delegation, or multi-staking feature, allows users to distribute their ada stake over several pools.

The first iterations enable stake delegation to up to five stake pools from a single account. By using the single account model, voting power is not disrupted.

Lace's multi-staking solution allows the user to:

• choose the ratio for each pool stake (where ratio refers to the % of stake assigned to a specific pool). Note: the beta version will only have fixed ratios. Later iterations will include a slider to choose custom percentages.
• future versions of the multi-staking feature will enable Lace users to share their delegation portfolio. This will introduce a social aspect to the delegation activity, as it will encourage users to share their portfolios with others, and at the same time, helps to standardize portfolio representation across tools for more interoperability.

Read this document for a more in-depth explanation of the portfolio sharing feature.

Stake drift at a glance

The multi-staking strategy requires the creation of multiple stake keys derived from the same account. This creates a new address for every pool the user wants to delegate to (though the UI displays the first address for simplicity). Under the hood, Lace simply distributes change during transaction construction to attempt to match the ratio set by the user.

The result is that the wallet ends up having several addresses, with ada funds split across them. When the wallet submits and receives transactions, the UTxO set & ada amounts of these addresses will vary though, and since we can not control 100% of the distributions outputs, nor control when funds are received, alteration ('drift') occurs. These addresses have a common payment credential, so are associated similarly to HD wallet addresses, which usually share a stake key.

Multi-staking workflow

To delegate stake to multiple stake pools in Lace:

1. Go to the Staking screen and select Browse pools.

2. Select the pools you wish to delegate to (up to 5 pools, selected by Name or Saturation in the first iteration of this feature.)

3. These pools will become your delegation portfolio.

4. Push or tap Next to view a Summary screen, which shows the delegation portfolio,  transaction fees, and deposits associated with this operation.

5. Push or tap Next and enter your wallet password to confirm.

6. Lace now displays the Overview screen in the Staking page, showing the multi-delegation.

Get Lace today and join a growing community

Community feedback on beta multi-staking, and any other new feature, is essential to expand Lace's versatility and usability. Your valued feedback will help us develop the wallet further, and ensure that Lace continues to evolve in line with the demands and needs of its users.

Lace now has a brand new Discord Server, a place where community members can share interests, tips, hang out with other Lace and blockchain enthusiasts, and become part of a thriving ecosystem.

Get Lace today and get access to a host of exciting features for your Web3 journey

• Add Lace to your Chromium-based browser (Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Brave, or Chrome).
• Register to our mailing list, in the footer, to receive news and updates on all things Lace.

Fernando Sanchez