How To Get ISPO Rewards By Staking Your ADA
Cardano is quite a craze nowadays, we are continuously seeking a surge in price. The Alonzo Smart Contracts is launching on the 12th of September and is keeping up the price movement. However, do you know that along with the smart contract stimulus (which will usher in lots of new projects) there is another stimulus also which will make you hold on to your ADA?
Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISPO) is one such feature in Cardano that will prove to be hugely beneficial. I have spoken about ISPOs before, but this article is a deep dive into how you can participate. I will be showing you the same using the XRAY Tokens from Ray's wallet.
What is ISPO?
In Cardano, anybody can run a stake pool. There are Cardano Projects who run their stake pools. However, the smaller pools have a lesser probability to secure a block, thereby reducing the chance of getting ADA rewards in a block. So somebody came up with a novel idea! How if we can incentivize the delegators to delegate with the project’s pool by offering the project’s token for free.
Advantages:
1.   Users just need to change their staking pool to the project’s pool
2.   Users continue to get ADA Staking rewards + Tokens of the project for free
3.   There is extra value coming out of the small stake pools thereby changing the staking dynamics
4.   Your ADA remains safe in your custody.
5.   No ADA Lockup period
Disadvantage:
1.   ADA rewards are in the hands of the pools, so before delegation, check if they are giving you all the rewards
2.   You can only stake with one pool with one wallet, so if you are targeting multiple pools, then you will have to put your ADA in multiple wallets
ISPO with Ray Pool
Ray is an advanced DeFi ecosystem for Cardano. It is not as popular as its competitors like ErgoDex, SundaeSwap, however, the project has a big vision and is working on the following solutions:
·      Staking
·      Wallet
·      Swap
·      Kickstart (Launchpad)
·      NFT Minting
·      GraphQL API provisioning
Ray has 3 pools
·      Ray
·      Ray 2
·      Ray 3
Pool Selection
While selecting a pool you have to select the one with a high Live Stake by still unsaturated (<100%). You can also see the Blocks Lifetime which is directly proportional to the rewards you get.
In the below example the pool Ray is still not 100% saturated and it is processing blocks much higher than RAY 2 and RAY 3.
Staking
You can use Ray Wallet, Daedalus, Yoroi, Adalite to delegate to Ray pools.
You can delegate using Ray Wallet from the following link. You will have to add your wallet using your private key.
In case you don’t trust Ray Wallet, let's use Yoroi, which is the official Cardano Wallet.
Add Yoroi as a Chrome extension
Open the wallet in your extension. Go to delegation List and search RAY.
You will find RAY in the list. You can click on the name of the pool to do much more research on the Pool.
Looks like the saturation number is 92% (hover your cursor around the saturation bar). For readers who will read this after this pool gets saturated, you can try RAY 2 and RAY 3.
Click on Delegate and go to Dashboard of Yoroi.
The dashboard will show you your current pool for the next 2 epochs and the Ray network from the 3rd Epoch. You will also see below that you are continuously getting ADA rewards. (My screenshot shows RAY in the current epoch too as I have already staked along the back)
Currently, in the RAY pool, the rewards are
·      XRAY Rate: 51.533126 ADA / 1 XRAY / Epoch
·      ADA ROI: ~ 5% / Year
You can occasionally check your XRAY Rewards by copying your address from the receive section of Yoroi (use an already used address)
Then paste it in the following link
It will show your XRAY Rewards. Note that you can not withdraw it yet. Withdrawal happens only after smart contracts are in place. For now, you will have to place your trust in them.
Anyways you are not losing anything, not your ADA, nor your ADA staking rewards. Very soon you will be able to do participate in ISPO with lots of other projects.
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ADA is doing very well! The staking logic is very much in line with my ideas. Very nice and clear tutorial. Thanks for your effort!
Staking pools on platforms are based on only one coin reward. ISPO sounds so cool, not only you will get staking rewards for ADA but you will also get some freebies for the project you like. It's just great.
Thanks for the detailed information and instructions!