Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson Introduces New Feature to Enable Partial Staking in Multiple Stake Pools

Cardano’s Shelley mainnet upgrade has come a long way since its launch on July 29, 2020. Shelley has already reached two major milestones as it approached epoch 3. 

IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson recently introduced Cardano’s delegation portfolios and hardware updates for Cardano in a recent YouTube video. 

Cardano’s native cryptocurrency ADA holders can delegate their stake to a stake pool run by another party, or run their own stake pools to earn rewards. The ability to delegate or pledge a stake is fundamental to the Cardano network, and the size of the stake is proportional to the ADA held. 

Cardano’s Ouroboros protocol chooses who to add to the next block on the blockchain depends on the amount of stake delegated to a stake pool. The stake pool will then receive monetary rewards for adding a new block. The more stake delegated to a stake pool will enable the stake pool to be more likely to create the next block, and the monetary rewards will then be shared between everyone who delegated their stake to the stake pool. 

Delegation on Cardano is enabled by Daedalus, a full node wallet developed by IOHK, the blockchain engineering company behind the network. Cardano’s current delegation works in the 1 to 1 method, where if a user wishes to delegate the stake of the ADA cryptocurrency to a stake pool, one wallet corresponds to one stake pool. 

If a user wanted to delegate staking to many different pools, the user would need to manually split the wallet in order to stake in different pools. Hoskinson explained that this was an implementation that allowed Shelley to be launched a bit earlier, he further admitted that this has some “undesired consequences” in decentralization. 

According to Hoskinson, if users we able to easily stake with different pools, users could proportionately delegate, benefiting smaller pools, supporting decentralization. 

Cardano introduces a new feature for delegation

Hoskinson introduced a user-driven concept to benefit smaller stake pools, which he calls “delegation portfolios.”

In the Daedalus wallet interface, there are small tiles that represent stake pools, where users will be able to select the ratios and different stake pools to delegate to, which then creates a portfolio. He added:

“Not only do you have the option to delegate to that portfolio, but you’ll also have the option to share.”

With this new feature, users will be able to share their portfolios with the broader Cardano community.

In addition to users being able to upload their portfolios into Atlas, a project which aims to create a seamless user experience for Cardano users. Project Atlas was described as a next-generation explorer, which is anticipated to be launched soon, says Hoskinson. 

“I think this will really help diversity in the ecosystem because now people can have a great user experience to do one to many delegation, partial delegation to different pools.”