Useful Links
This section contains links to common tools and information sites that are used by stake pool operators both when setting up their nodes and while maintaining their pool.
Setup Tutorials
This list contains tutorials to help you setup your Cardano Stake Pool. Some of these materials include bonus items related to maintenance and improvements to your pool such as security hardening:
Stake Pool School - these are the official training materials from the Cardano Foundation. As of this writing some commands and instructions are quite dated but the underlying concepts are discussed deeper compared to other tutorials. I suggest to look into this first if you are not in a hurry.
CoinCashew - this is a straightforward tutorial on how to build your stake pool using command line tools. If you prefer to understand what is going on, this is a good, frequently updated resource.
Guild Operators - creators of popular automated tools like cntools and gLiveView, the Guild Operators' site has resources on how to use their scripts to create a pool and much more.
Specialized Builds
The following are links to very specific builds created by members of the Cardano Community. Compared to the Setup Tutorials above, these builds are more specific to certain hardware and/or configurations. As such, fewer people have used these instructions so there may be as yet undiscovered errors so please proceed with caution. Nevertheless, these are very good resources and if you are looking for these specific builds, you would be happy to see that they have been extensively documented already:
Kubernetes - This site goes through instructions on how to setup Cardano nodes on Kubernetes/microk8's. This site is created and maintained by DanTup [CODER].
Raspberry Pi - this site gives instructions on how to setup Cardano nodes on Raspberry Pi's. It is maintained by the Armada Alliance. Thanks to Wael [PIADA] for sharing this link.
Ansible - this repository contains an Ansible playbook for provisioning secure, optimized Cardano nodes for Stake Pool Operators (SPOs). It was originally developed by the [MOAI] Pool.
Pool Explorers (Mainnet)
These are sites that help you look at the characteristics of stake pools in Mainnet (production Cardano network) including pool ID, history of blocks produced, current delegations, etc. There are a lot more explorers than this list but these are some of the most popular ones:
Pool Explorers (Testnet)
These are sites that specifically let you explore the stake pools in the Testnet (Cardano testing network).
Block Explorers
These are sites for investigating details about a wallet or a transaction:
Wallets
Official wallets
These are the officially supported wallets where you can store your Cardano coins, stake your coins and check rewards:
Daedalus - a full node wallet that downloads a copy of the blockchain.
Yoroi - a light, fast wallet ideal for day to day use created by Emurgo.
Community created wallets
These are light wallets that were created by community members but don’t cross them out yet. Some of these wallets have surprisingly better capabilities than the official wallets and are faster to use. They also are able to connect to both mainnet and testnet environments among others. Some of the notable community wallets include:
CCVault - a light wallet with all the usual capabilities plus the ability to interact with smart contracts. It also has advanced capabilities like ability to delegate to multiple pools from the same wallet.
Nami - a light wallet that also has smart contracts capability. Limited to delegating to Berry pool.
Gero - another light wallet with smart contracts capability
There are other wallets out there but these are the ones that are more popular. For safety, remember to only download these wallets from the official websites.
Pool Health Checkers
When setting up or performing changes on your pool, these sites can help to check if your nodes are configured correctly:
I would venture to say that pool.vet is a mandatory tool you should run whenever you changed anything on your node from registration to KES updates to addition of relays. It sometimes has delays synchronizing with the network but they will have useful warning messages when this happens and the site is usually back in sync after a few hours.
This is an invaluable site for checking if your ports are open correctly. Useful when you have just setup new nodes or if you want to check if external relays are running before adding them to your topology files.
Official Links
These are the official links to various official Cardano sites and social media:
Cardano Developer’s Portal - main site for developing in Cardano
Cardano Stack Exchange - technical forum where developers can ask questions and get answers
Plutus Documentation - documentation on Cardano’s smart contract language
Cardano Forum - more general site where you can discuss all things Cardano
IOHK Website - the official website of IOHK
IOG Technical Community - this is the main Discord link to IOG’s technical community which combines discussion rooms for developers, stake pool operators, plutus pioneers and others.
Delegator Questions
SPOT Check was created as a helpful site for stake pool operators. Nevertheless, we understand that delegators who are not familiar with Cardano may also have questions. Therefore, we have created a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) in our main website. Please go to this link instead for beginner/delegator questions:
https://blockchainlens.wordpress.com/faq/
Scam Reporting
Report any scam attempts to cardano-fraud@iog.io
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