The first step to staking Cardano and making passive income is to open an account with a cryptocurrency exchange platform. I personally use Coinbase for all of my crypto transactions. Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the U.S. and I have not had any issues purchasing crypto with them as I have with other exchanges that were not based in the United States. If you don't have an account with them, you can sign up here: Coinbase
2. Create a Yoroi wallet
After you've purchased Cardano from an exchange, it's time to make a Yoroi wallet to transfer it to. You can download it by visiting https://yoroi-wallet.com/#/ and choosing which download applys to you. Your options are chrome, edge, firefox, android, and iOS.
[WARNING: Store your 15-word recovery phrase in a safe place! If you lose the recovery phrase, you risk losing your ADA. This is the only way to back-up your account]
3. Transfer the Cardano from COINBASE to Yoroi
Now we are ready to transfer the cardano we purchased on coinbase over to our yoroi wallet. To start this process, we click on the receive tab in our Yoroi wallet to generate a new address. Copy the address to your clipboard and open coinbase. Locate the send button and enter the desired ammount of Cardano you are going to send. Paste your address in the "to" section and preview send. If everything looks correct confirm the transaction and you should now have ada in your yoroi wallet.
4. Delegate to a stake pool
To begin delegating, locate the "delegate" tab. You will be brought to a screen with a list of pools. Some tools to help with your selections are:
- https://pooltool.io
- https://poolstats.org
- https://cardanoscan.io/
Choose the best stake pool to maximize your rewards. The first time you delegate your Cardano to a stake pool you will have to wait 15-20 days before you start earning rewards. It takes around 3 epochs to start earning your first rewards but from there on out you will earn every epoch (5 days). The best part is your Cardano compounds the interest it earns.
It is very straight forward and super rewarding once you start earning passive income. Here is a Cardano staking calculator that estimates earning based off the amount of Cardano staked and how much it will compound over so many years. https://cardano.org/calculator/
Good luck and share with your friends if this helped you!
