Daedalus Shelley Testnet 1.2.0-STN1 - Release Notes

Daedalus 1.2.0-STN1 is the third Daedalus release compatible with the Shelley Testnet. 

This release adds delegation features, including Delegation center, Stake pools, and Rewards. Shelley testnet users can now create Shelley wallets, fund them using the Shelley testnet faucet, and delegate the stake from their wallets to a stake pool of their choice. This will enable the users to experience earning testnet ada rewards before this feature becomes available on the Cardano mainnet when Shelley goes live later this summer. 

Additional features will be added incrementally to Daedalus to support the Shelley testnet during the Shelley rollout. These features include expansion of the stake pools functionality (the ability to display stake pool ranking based on the amount of stake a user is planning to delegate), support for legacy Byron wallets, enabling the movement of funds from legacy Byron wallets to new Shelley wallets, the dedicated Incentivized Testnet redemption feature, and the new update system with automatic downloads integrated with the newsfeed feature.

Delegation center

The Delegation center features details of the current epoch on the Shelley testnet and the countdown to the start of the next epoch. Epochs on the Cardano mainnet last 5 days, but epochs are only 6 hours long on the Shelley testnet, to facilitate faster testing.

It is important to understand that changes to delegation preferences take effect after both the current and the next Cardano epochs have been completed. 

This screen also displays the delegation preferences for Shelley wallets, including the list of pending delegation preference changes, which displays the epoch when a certain change will take effect.

Stake pools

The stake pools screen displays the stake pools that have completed all of the registration steps and are not operating as private stake pools. 

Small tiles facilitate the inclusion of as many pools on a single screen as possible. The tiles feature stake pool ticker symbols (short, up to 5 characters long identifiers of the stake pools), a clearly indicated and color-coded ranking number, and the saturation indicator. 

Clicking on a tile displays additional information for the pool.

The most important feature of this screen is the stake pool ranking. The ranking is based on utility function and game-theory research that calculates which pools will yield the best return of investment if we delegate to them. This significantly simplifies the process of choosing a stake pool. 

Note: This feature is intended for information purposes only.  Users should always base their decisions on their own research and assessment of the stake pools and of the risks involved.

This interface will look familiar to Daedalus users who have participated in the Incentivized testnet, but the user experience is very different, since the ITN did not have the utility function fully implemented.

Rewards

The rewards screen gives an overview of the rewards earned per wallet. This screen also allows to download this information as a spreadsheet.

Delegation wizard

The delegation wizard can be initiated from the Delegation center and from the stake pool details screen. The wizard guides users through wallet and stake pool selection, and final confirmation of the delegation choice.

Known Issues

Rewards not spendable

Due to temporary limitations in this version of Daedalus, rewards are currently not spendable. Wallet balances only show the amount of testnet ada in the wallet, which is available for spending. The total balance of the wallet, including rewards, is available on the wallet summary screen.

Downloading logs on older versions of Linux

Downloading logs on some older versions of Linux can cause Daedalus to crash.