Retiring a Stake Pool

We assume that we have a registered stake pool with cold keys cold.vkey and cold.skey, a payment address with sufficient funds (for the transaction fees) payment.addr and an associated payment signing key payment.skey.
To retire our pool we need to:
Create a deregistration certificate and
Submit the certificate to the blockchain with a transaction
The deregistration certificate contains the epoch in which we want to retire the pool.
This epoch must be after the current epoch and not later than eMax epochs in the future, where eMax is a protocol parameter.
So we first need to figure out the current epoch. The number of slots per epoch is recorded in the genesis file, and we can get it with
cat testnet-shelley-genesis.json | grep epoch
> "epochLength": 21600,
So one epoch lasts for 21600 slots. We get the current slot by querying the tip:
export CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH=relay-db/node-socket
cardano-cli query tip --testnet-magic 1097911063
​
> Tip (SlotNo {unSlotNo = 856232}) ...
This gives us
expr 856232 / 432000
> 39
So we are currently in epoch 39.
We can look up eMax by querying the current protocol parameters:
cardano-cli query protocol-parameters \
--testnet-magic 1097911063 \
--out-file protocol.json
​
cat protocol.json | grep eMax
> "eMax": 100,
This means the earliest epoch for retirement is 40 (one in the future), and the latest is 139 (current epoch plus eMax).
So for example, we can decide to retire in epoch 41.
Create deregistration certificate
WARNING This involves the cold keys. Take the necessary precautions to not to expose your cold keys to the internet.
Create the deregistration certificate and save it as pool.retirement:
cardano-cli stake-pool deregistration-certificate \
--cold-verification-key-file cold.vkey \
--epoch 41 \
--out-file pool.dereg
Draft the transaction
cardano-cli transaction build-raw \
--tx-in <UTXO>#<TxIx> \
--tx-out $(cat payment.addr)+0 \
--ttl 0 \
--fee 0 \
--out-file tx.draft \
--certificate-file pool.retirement
Calculate the fees:
cardano-cli transaction calculate-min-fee \
--tx-body-file tx.draft \
--tx-in-count 1 \
--tx-out-count 1 \
--witness-count 1 \
--byron-witness-count 0 \
--testnet-magic 1097911063 \
--protocol-params-file protocol.json
For example:
171309
We query our address for a suitable UTxO to use as input:
cardano-cli query utxo \
--address $(cat payment.addr) \
--testnet-magic 1097911063
​
​
​
       TxHash             TxIx        Lovelace
------------------------------------------------
9db6cf...                    0      999999267766
We calculate our change:
expr 999999267766 - 171309
> 999999096457
Build, sign and submit the transaction:
Build the raw transaction:
cardano-cli transaction build-raw \
    --tx-in 9db6cf...#0 \
    --tx-out $(cat payment.addr)+999999096457 \
    --ttl 860000 \
    --fee 171309 \
    --out-file tx.raw \
    --certificate-file pool.retirement
Sign it with both the payment signing key and the cold signing key (the first signature is necessary because we are spending funds from paymant.addr, the second because the certificate needs to be signed by the pool owner):
cardano-cli transaction sign \
    --tx-body-file tx.raw \
    --signing-key-file payment.skey \
    --signing-key-file cold.skey \
    --testnet-magic 1097911063 \
    --out-file tx.signed
And submit to the blockchain:
cardano-cli transaction submit \
    --tx-file tx.signed \
    --testnet-magic 1097911063
And we are done. The pool will retire at the end of epoch 40. If we change our mind, we can create and submit a new registration certificate before epoch 41, which will then overrule the deregistration certificate.
QUESTIONS AND FEEDBACK
If you have any questions and suggestions while taking the lessons please feel free to ask in the forum and we will respond as soon as possible.
Last modified 2yr ago