Cardinal offers a free-to-use self serve form to create a stake pool as well as a white-gloved staking service to setup your pool and token for distribution, for a one-time fee of 300 SOL. Open a Discord Ticket if you’re interested in white-glove help and services. Otherwise you can read the docs and do setup yourself!

Intro

There are two types of “fees” associated with Cardinal Staking:

• Gas fees - These are the fees associated with 1) paying “rent” to store data on the Solana blockchain and 2) paying fees to validators for processing transactions. The vast majority of the fees in Cardinal Staking fall into this category.
• Explicit fees - These are fees that Cardinal charges on top of gas fees for specific transactions. There is only 1 fee that falls into this category.

In describing the fee structure below, we will denote each fee specified as gas (G) or explicit (E).

Pool Initialization

Creating stake pools

Initializing a stake pool costs .000005(G) sol for the transaction fee, .004(G) sol for the stake pool account, and .003(G) sol for a reward distributor account. This ~ .007(G) combined sol is recoverable by the creator if the pool and reward distributor are closed.

Creating stake entries

The first time an NFT is staked or fungible tokens are staked, it will have to initialize a stake entry and associated accounts. This initialization can also be performed up front by the stake pool creator using the script here so that users do not have to bear this cost. Like with the stake pool and reward distributor initialization costs, these costs are recoverable if the pool is closed. The costs are as follows:

.00434(G)sol to create the stake entry and associated accounts

• .00228(G) sol for stake entry
• .00206(G) sol for reward entry (only if reward distribution is present)

User Activity

Staking

Cardinal charges a fee of .002 (E) sol to a user every time a token is staked.

Claiming Rewards

Cardinal charges a fee of .002 (E) sol every a users claims fungible token rewards on a single staked token.

Note when you claim rewards for the first time, an amount of .00206(G) sol is spent towards the creation of the claimer’s rewards mint token account.

Unstaking