Short recap of HF day: An SPO's perspective
It’s 5am in Singapore.
Bleary-eyed from just 2 hours of fitful sleep, I trudged to my laptop and tuned into The Cardano Effect’s live show.
Yes, it’s Shelley Hardfork day.
It was good hearing from Charles, and even better to match faces to some of the most diligent and generous stake pool operators from Telegram and Twitter.
Then the countdown came and went. Nothing. The system didn’t blow up. There was an overwhelming sense of emptiness to it. And that is precisely what made the hardfork combinator such an admirable feat of engineering.
Cardano has done it.
Now the mad race to get registered is on!
Earlier I had updated the Cardano build and synced up the databases for KOPI nodes. It took quite a while, roughly 1.5-2h per node. The initial database bootstrap was perhaps the only time raw CPU power came into play for staking. I had also downloaded Daedalus 2.0.0, synced up the chain, and restored my Byron wallet beforehand.
KOPI was primed to go the moment Shelley went live.
From the get go I created a new Shelley wallet, and swiftly transferred over my Byron funds. Then I steeled myself for the ultimate heart-stopping process, the transfer of pool pledge to the CLI wallet.
Why heart-stopping? This is because pledging is not available from Daedalus, Yoroi or any hardware wallets. It can only be performed through a CLI wallet, which is not a HD wallet with seed mnemonics. Just imagine transferring a big pledge to a random string of letters!
(*Tip: Do a trial transfer with a small amount of ADA first, before committing your full pledge)
As a security precaution, the creation of wallet and pool keys were performed offline and subsequently encrypted and stored in dedicated thumbdrives.
The final act of the morning was to submit the pool registration. To be honest, my fingers were shaking a little when pressing enter to submit. This is the culmination of 2 months of practice runs from testnet v1.13.0 to mainnet v1.18.0. Not to mention the many more hours spent reading and learning about everything Cardano.
My relief was palpable when the pool registration went through without a hitch. And switching to Daedalus, it was gratifying to see KOPI registered as the #46 pool in Cardano’s history.
My mantra for the day was “Proceed slowly and deliberately, with extreme caution”. This really kept me in good stead.
Sweaty palms, wobbly fingers and dazed eyes notwithstanding.
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