FAQ

An epoch is Cardano's unit of time: five days, counted continuously since the start of the chain. Everything in staking follows it: the snapshot of who delegates how much, the blocks a pool is picked to produce, and the rewards that are paid out afterwards. The current epoch and how much of it is left is shown on our home page.

Cardano caps how much stake a single pool is rewarded for. The cap follows the protocol parameter k, which sets the number of pools the network aims for, and the total supply divided by it is the saturation point. A pool that holds more stake than that does not earn more: the rewards are spread over more ADA, so everyone delegating to it receives less. Staking with a pool below its saturation point, like CBH, keeps your rewards at their full rate and keeps the network decentralised. The current saturation of CBH is shown on the pool statistics page.

Pledge is the operator's own ADA, committed to the pool as skin in the game: it earns rewards like any other stake, but it also means the operator loses alongside the delegators if the pool underperforms. Margin is the percentage of each epoch's rewards the pool keeps on top of its fixed cost. Both are registered on chain where anyone can verify them, and the values CBH has registered are always shown live on our pool statistics page.

The protocol has no minimum: any balance can be delegated and earns its share. What you do pay is the transaction fee of the delegation itself and, the very first time you delegate, a one-off deposit of 2 ₳ for registering your staking key. The deposit is not a fee: the chain holds it and gives it back if you ever deregister the key. With a very small balance those costs take a while to earn back.

You delegate again. A delegation replaces the previous one, so your ADA stay where they are; there is no unstaking and no waiting period. Your staking key is already registered, so the switch costs only the transaction fee, without a new deposit. The switch takes effect with the next snapshot, and your rewards from the old pool still arrive for the epochs it earned them in, so there is no gap.

Cardano works in epochs of five days, and a new delegation needs a few of them before it pays out: it is recorded in the epoch after you signed, becomes active in the next one, and its rewards are distributed after that. In practice the first rewards arrive around 15 to 20 days after you delegated. From then on they are paid every epoch, automatically, straight to your staking address.

From two sources: the protocol reserve, a share of the total supply that is released a little at a time with every epoch, and the fees of all transactions in that epoch. The network shares this pot among the pools according to how much stake they held in the snapshot and how many of their assigned blocks they actually produced. The pool takes its fixed cost and margin from its share, the rest is split among its delegators in proportion to their stake. Your rewards come from that pot alone; no pool can pay more than the protocol allots it.

Block production on Cardano is a lottery: each epoch a pool is assigned slots in proportion to its stake, and a healthy pool produces the blocks it is assigned. If a block is missed, say because the node was briefly unreachable, the rewards for that one block are never created. Your ADA are never at risk; a missed block only lowers that epoch's rewards slightly. The block history on our pool statistics page shows exactly how CBH performs, epoch by epoch.

It is, and they do not. Delegating is non-custodial. Your ADA never leave your wallet, and we never get access to them. You only assign the stake weight of your balance to our pool, and you keep your keys. Nothing is locked up: your ADA stay spendable the whole time, and you can re-delegate to another pool or stop staking whenever you want.

Yes. Delegating is one transaction, and you can change or undo it at any time: your ADA stay spendable while you stake, without a lock-up or a notice period, and a delegation lasts until you replace it. To move to another pool, you just delegate again. To stop staking entirely, deregister your stake key in your wallet; the chain then returns the 2 ₳ deposit from your first registration. Either way, nothing needs our approval and nothing can be held back by the pool.

Every pool on Cardano charges two things per epoch: a fixed cost that covers running the servers, and a margin on the rewards that remain. CBH charges a margin of 1% on top of a fixed cost of 170 ₳ per epoch; everything else goes to the delegators. The fees are taken from the pool rewards before they are shared out, so there is nothing you pay separately.

Everything you see here is public on-chain data from the Cardano blockchain: pool figures, block history and network figures. Our server fetches them at regular intervals through blockfrost.io, an established Cardano API service, stores them in its own database and serves every page from there. Your browser never talks to Blockfrost itself. When you use the reward check, the address you provide is looked up the same way, server side. How we handle addresses, caching and server logs is described in our privacy policy.