This post is for those who are already familiar with Tezos, participated in ICO, completed the KYC verification, and want to claim their tokens to start delegating to earn staking rewards.
I've been hunting around for information since last night, learning about baking and delegation and such, and (as with most cryptocurrency projects), there's often a nice reward for those who are early and are willing to take risks. Well, in this case, I'm probably taking more risks than I really should this early on, but Tezos was always a gamble, so I figured why not!
Below I'm going to describe some of the steps laid out in this reddit post which is four hours old.
Give that post a read first.
You have to first activate your account, which this tool does: https://stephenandrews.github.io/activatez/ You can also do it yourself if you have the command line tooling installed.
Should you trust this online activation tool? Well, no, you shouldn't trust anything, but going through the whole process of downloading and compiling from source is kind of a pain, so I'm going to take some risks here. Do not blame me if something here doesn't work and you lose your tokens.
After you activate your wallet and you verify it on http://tzscan.io/ (you'll have a freak out moment for about 30 seconds where you think nothing happened because the site gives you a pop up saying it worked, but you won't see anything on chain), then you can access your coins using the Tezbox web wallet:
You should have all this information from the ICO process. One thing that tripped me up (and freaked me out because it loaded up an empty wallet with the wrong address) is that the ICO Password asked for is not the password you use in conjunction with your email address to login to the Tezos verification site. It's the password you should have saved directly connected to your public hash.
Again, keep in mind, this web wallet is brand new:
So really you probably shouldn't be trusting it until it's been tested and verified by more of the Tezos community, but hey, we're living dangerously here anyway, right?
If all goes well, you should see your ICO balance in your wallet. After that, you have to create an account starting with KZ before you can delegate to a baker for rewards. Do that by clicking the Add Account button in Tezbox:
Wait for the account to show up on the explorer and then transfer the amount you want to delegate to that address. Then click Delegate and add the address you want to delegate to. I'm currently delegating to Tezzigator who created this really helpful video which got me up to speed quickly on what Baking is and how Delegation works.
They also built a cool spreadsheet you can make a copy of to better understand the potential rewards for baking or delegating to a baker. Tezzigator currently takes a 10% fee which is not bad considering the costs and headache of running your own Baking node.
For more on what Baking, Endorsing, a "Roll" is, etc, see this fantastic Medium article: It’s a baker’s life for me. You can also view this cool infographic created by Tezos Korea and translated into English:
Lots of great Tezos related resources available here https://tezos.rocks/ including other delegation services you can use.
There's also a Ledger Nano S wallet which supports delegation and remote commands for baking, but you have to compile it from source as it's not yet officially supported by the Ledger people. Eventually I hope it shows up in the Ledger Manager so I can transfer my tokens out of a web wallet address to something more secure like a hardware wallet. I should probably have compiled this myself and installed it, but based on the little bit of poking around I did, the web wallet seems pretty solid, created by a community member who has a financial interest in building good tools and seeing Tezos succeed.
I hope you found this useful! Passive income through staking and delegation is a beautiful thing and getting in early may mean higher rewards before most of the network catches up and starts staking also. Feel free to share this post with the wider cryptocurrency community.
Remember, this is not financial advice and only you can take personal responsibility to secure your assets. Related: How Do You Teach Experience? What Will Your Cryptocurrency Story Be?
