How to set up an Eternl wallet and stake Cardano ADA

Eternl is one of the most popular wallets at the moment and for good reason, but honestly, it feels like it was created by developers rather than designers so it can be a bit confusing at first glance.  But don’t worry it’s actually simpler than you think. 

How to set up an Eternl wallet and stake Cardano ADA

Before we dive in, we’re not going to be covering how to set up an Eternl wallet in this post but don’t you worry, we have a whole video about it right here ????.

Main page overview

If you click on the Eternl logo you can change which wallet you have selected as well as add a new wallet.

Down the bottom of this page, you can have a look at the latest announcements from the developers, the FAQ section and settings.

On the right you change between light and dark mode, I’m more of a fan of dark mode myself as it speaks to my blackened soul. And then on the right, you can also use this little button to go back to your wallet selection.

Beneath you can see the current value of ADA, the current Epoch number and the completion percentage and time remaining. Not sure what an epoch is? Check out this video that tells you everything you need to know about Cardano ADA. ????

Moving down again we have all of the main sections which are:

• Main page
• Transactions
• Sending ADA
• Receiving ADA
• Staking centre
• Staking vault
• Catalyst
• Settings

Summary 

This is an overview of your wallet.  You can see your total funds, your balance and your rewards. The Total Funds are the balance plus the rewards. Pretty simple!

Available funds

This is your total funds minus any pending transactions, if you have them.

Staking Vault

This feature has been retired so just ignore it. I’m sure it will get removed in an update at some point.

Rewards history

Shows you the performance of your staking rewards.

Staking Key

This is the address that all of your staking rewards are sent to. By default your rewards all go to the staking wallet and are automatically delegated to the same pool.

Withdraw rewards

All of your staking rewards are automatically re-delegated so you only need to use this if you want to move your rewards to a new wallet or sell them.

Delegation history

This is where you can track the record of staking pools that you’ve been delegated to.  We are delegated to Upstream, maybe you should be too?

Rewards history

Check the rewards that you have earned during each Epoch.

Token list

This is where you’ll store your NFTs and any other tokens or coins that are on the Cardano blockchain.

UTxO List

UTxO list isn’t covered in the video because it’s quite complex and deserves a blog and video of it’s own, but if you want to know more you should check out this blog from Investopedia.

Account list

This is a standout feature of Entrnl.  You can stake to multiple pools from the same wallet!  All you need to do is click Add Accounts, enter your spending password and then you’re free to add up to 23 more accounts.  This does come with a caveat though. The more accounts you add, the longer it will take your wallet to load.  In our example we’ve left it at one because we think Upstream is the best place to stake your ADA anyway!

The transactions page

Let’s have a look at the next page, Transactions.  This is pretty straightforward really. There’s a sub-page that shows your transaction history and another for any pending transactions. Enough said.

The spending page

Can you guess what you do on this page? That’s right, spend, or more technically accurate, send your ADA.  You can either paste in an address or if you have multiple Eternl wallets, you can use the tool down below to move your ADA between your own wallets. 

Staking centre

This is our favorite page because it’s where you can help to support the decentral nature of Cardano, which is the idea at it’s core. At the top of the page you will see the pool you are currently delegated to. Hopefully that’s Upstream. Scroll down and you will find a search bar and beneath that is a list of the pools you can delegate to. Full transparency, we don’t know how these are ranked but there must be something wrong because Upstream isn’t at the top. You can also click this tab to see Eternl’s stake pools which you can delegate to if you want to support the Eternl project.

Staking vault

This is a retired feature so it might not even exist by the time you read this.

Catalyst

Catalyst is awesome. It’s a voting mechanism for the Cardano community to use to decide which Cardano based projects, also proposed by the Cardano Community, get awarded funding. These project proposal could be anything from tools, websites, events, DAPPS and many other cool things. You need at least half a million ADA in your wallet to be able to use this page to vote for the projects you like. If you scroll down and click Learn More underneath IdeaScale, then you can learn more about the proposals on offer. We’ll have a more in depth look at Catalyst in a future blog.

Settings

Honestly, as a beginner, you can ignore most of these as they are more for advanced users, and as we have learnt, that’s definitely not us yet! But a few to take a look at are Name and Password where you can change your wallet name and spending password. You can set a Wallet Access Password so that you need a password to get into the wallet on your phone, probably something you should do. You can also upload your own icon for your wallet or randomise what is available.  You can also set an NFT in your wallet to be your wallet background which is pretty cool!.The withdrawal feature automatically withdraws your staking rewards if needed when sending a transaction.  Enable Send All which adds or removes a button when sending your ADA to send ALL of your ADA. We keep this one switched off just for safety.  Lastly you can test your recovery phrase just to make sure you have it written down properly.

And that’s it.  Etnerl wallet in a nutshell.  We did gloss over some of the advanced features so if you would like to know more about these then please do let us know! If you want to keep up to date with more wallet guides, Cardano news, how to guides and more then make sure you subscribe to our youtube channel and follow us on twitter. Our DMs are open!  And of course if you are looking for a pool to delegate your ADA to, might we suggest Upstream.  See ya.