WOMEN

Sure! You've heard of bitcoin, right? Well, Cardano is a next generation version of that. When people talk about cryptocurrency, they're often talking about investing as the price keeps going up. That's recently been true, and it's kind of like a digital version of gold. Like gold, the supply is limited and therefore it can hold its value. Bitcoin is like a digital version of gold, without the backache of lugging it around.

Cardano adds other things beyond a public blockchain like bitcoin, such as smart contracts, security and scalablity.

Yes. Some blockchains make their blocks through a system called proof of work. Cardano uses a system called proof of stake, which gives more opportunities and most importantly uses almost no computer power to generate. It's greener, cheaper and faster. The proof of stake feature is what got me into investing. I can buy my Cardano and, just by holding onto it and registering it with a stake pool, I am paid rewards that work out at about 5% interest per year.

We can't be sure that bitcoin will keep rising, no more than we know that the price of gold might rise. It's the same with all of these cryptocurrencies. They're new, popular and making a lot of money for their owners. Maybe the price will go up more, maybe it will stabilise, or maybe it will even go down. I'm not a financial advisor, so I couldn't even guess. Personally, it seems so popular the price seems to keep rising. If Cardano just stays the same, even for a whole year, then I get my 5% which is still better than the bank. So far this year, Cardano has gone up 700% in the last 2 months, so I'm doing a little better. It may go down for a bit, but I'm happy in the long term anyway. Anything I get in the short term is just a bonus. You should do you own research though, so that you are sure it is something for you.

In that case, you're going to need a crypto currency exchange. There are lots about and they all do Bitcoin and Ethereum, which is an early smart contract cryptocurrency. Since we want Cardano there is a little less choice. However, the largest exchange in the world does it. It's called binance and it's the one I use. I'll talk you through the process for binance. Make sure you go to exactly the right website either through my link, or googling binance and making sure you get to binance.com. It should have a little https padlock in the browser. We need to treat it exactly like a bank, so be super careful that you go to the right place.

Yes, you need to do that, but you'll also need to identify yourself properly. It's all regulated and they want to make sure you are who you say you are. You'll need some photo ID, like a passport or a driving licence. They will also ask you to take a photo or a short video. It's actually a lot easier than it sounds. I did the photo and ID stuff with my phone. You take a photo of the ID and then a quick selfie. You don't see the pic again, so it was really quick. The website on my laptop synced up with my phone. It was really smooth.

Yes it can be, but, like the banks, they like to be super careful with your money. They use a two factor authentication like google, amazon and microsoft have started using. They just send you codes in an email or text message on your phone. I actually use a google authentication app which I had already. You can download it directly from google. It throws out 6 digit codes and you type them into Binance when they want to check its you. I only have to do it when I move my money around - it makes sense to be careful. I certainly feel like they are taking security seriously and looking after my money.

Well, that can be a little tricky depending where you live and who you bank with. Not all the banks are very happy dealing with exchanges. Here in the UK, its only Barclays, Natwest, RBS, Nationwide and TSB that are good with it. Some need you to go via debit cards. Natwest lets you do direct bank transfers, so is really easy. Lloyds and HSBC in particular won't play though. So you either need a new account or to go via some other company. If you do have one of the less easy banks, then try Revolut. You can set it up on your phone, add money from any bank and then send it out. They ask you to do the same ID stuff as the exchange, but that seems fair and helps protect you.

In the US, you can use Ally, Simple or even the National bank of Canada! You should check those. They all work with Revolut too. By the way, whilst Revolut is great for moving the money, they also look like they do Cryptocurrency. They do, sort of, but its not quite what we need. We need to buy the actual currency, not just invest in it. So make sure that you don't buy crypto from Revolut if you want to stake it. If you just want to invest, then that's your call, but it is something different.

You create your Cardano account and then deposit some money. It's funny, they call it Fiat currency. That's what we call USD and GBP etc. You can use the term fiat to mean real currency and not cryptocurrency. So yes, you tell the exchange that you want to deposit some GBP and they give you some bank details to send the money to. You should be careful like you are with any contact you add to your banking, but they give you the details and you can do a transfer with normal online apps. You can also use a debit card if you like, in the normal way direct on their website. I recommend the bank transfer but its up to you. Be careful if you decide to use a credit card and check you won't pay interest, so debit or bank transfer are easiest.

OK firstly something cool. The currency of Cardano is called ADA, this is after the Countess of Lovelace 1815-1852, an english mathematician and writer. She produced something similar to the first computer programme. ADA honours her name. There are 1,000,000 "pennies" in an ADA - these are called Lovelace (1ADA = 1,000,000 Lovelace). You probably won't deal in Lovelace for a few years.

So buying... If you are in the US it is easy, just select the ADA/USD market and select how much ADA you want to buy. It's about $1 at the moment so really easy to calculate. You get charged a commission of about 0.1%, which seems fair.

Update: As of 26/02/2021 you can now buy ADA directly from GBP on Binance. so the following is no longer necessary, but it ill still work if desired. In the UK it is a tiny bit more tricky. Currently, you can't use GBP directly to buy ADA, so we go via a coin called BNB. It is Binance's own coin, and the cool thing is that a trade costs half the price (0.05%), so you can go in and out of BNB for the price of a direct trade. You have to be a bit quick though as BNB can vary widly in price. It went up a lot recently, so don't get caught holding it. Buy BNB with GBP then immediatley buy ADA with BNB. This work for other currencies too if you do not have EUR or USD. If you want to day trade on the price, which I woudn't recommend, it is probably safest to use USDT, which is a cryptocurrency that matches USD in value. It costs the normal amount to trade though, so is not as cheap as BNB, but it is more stable. Another option is to covert your GBP direct to USD, then you can take a little more time and choose your price with a little more leisure. Anyway this isn't about trading, so let's assume you've got some.

Now you should have some ADA in your exchange portfolio (also called a Spot Wallet). You can stake from there on Binance, but it doesn't give you the full benefits, so you need to take the ADA out of the exchange.

If you take it out, then you can keep it safe. Exchanges are for... exchanging. They are safe, but people tend to try to limit the amount of exposure they have. It's considered good practice to take the cryptocurrency out and keep it safe yourself. Should anything awful happen, like the exchange get hacked, you'll be safe if you money is not in it.

Also, increasingly you can buy stuff with crpytocurrency. You can buy a Tesla for 2 BTC right now, or book a holiday and pay in ADA. But lets just assume you're going to keep it for that investment you intended. You need a wallet to put it in.

It is very cheap to transfer between ADA accounts normally, it is less than 0.2 ADA. Binance charge 1 ADA, but that still pretty cheap for the convenience.

You get a wallet to put the cryptocurrency in. It's really common across all of the Cryptocurrencies. There are several types - we'll discuss a few. For Cardano, it's pretty simple. There is a lightweight wallet that runs in a browser or on your phone app called Yoroi. It keeps most of the work on the cloud. The next version is called Daedalus, and is a bit bigger. You put it on your desktop or laptop and it tries to load in the parts Yoroi keeps on the cloud. It can take a few hours to finish loading, but then is pretty similar to the other one. Finally, you can use Daedalus with a hardware wallet, which is like a special key fob you plug into your computer. It's pretty much the same, but more secure.

The funny thing is, none of these wallets actually hold the money. They just have a secret key they use to identify themselves. If you have the key, you can access the money from another machine. They are super safe though; when you make a wallet using the software, you are given a phrase of random words. If you write that down and keep it safe, then you can use it to clone your wallet from anywhere. Don't ever share it or let anyone see it, though. It's good news though, because if your computer breaks or you lose your phone, you can just use the phrase to get it all back. It only takes a few minutes.

Well each person is different and has different preferences. Personally, I use these rules:

• For less than 5k Cardano I'd use Yoroi
• For more than 5k Cardano I'd use Daedalus.
• If I had more than 20k Cardano I'd probably buy a hardware wallet to use with Daedalus.

I guess its a bit like keeping money at home. Above a certain amount, you might buy a safe, right? Daedalus does take a long time to start the first time you use it, maybe up to 4 hours depending on your internet bandwidth. Why not start on Yoroi for practice and then change to Daedalus if you get serious about it?

Go to https://yoroi-wallet.com/

Check the web site is correct, and download it for your web browser. There's a video there, to help. I'd suggest using Chrome, but you can use most of the popular browsers. You get a tiny Yoroi icon in the top right corner, which opens a browser app like a website. You can use that to make your wallet. It's really easy from now on. Then:

1. Click on "Add new wallet",
2. Choose "Create wallet",
3. Choose "Cardano",
4. Choose "Create Wallet" again (ignore the paper wallet option.)
5. Then enter:
   • A name for the wallet (it's just a local nickname and noone sees it).
   • A spending password. You use this every time you spend from the wallet. Chances are that will be rare, so its worth having a fairly good pasword that you can keep safe or remember. This is protecting spending from a wallet that you have access to though, so it doesn't need to be impossible to use, as you need both the wallet and the password to spend.
   • Put the spend password in again
6. Now for the strange part. You get given 15 words to write down in order. Use a pen and paper - and do it twice. I use capital letters the first time and lower case the second time.
7. They you have to prove you know the words, so you click on them in order. It's a bit like a mini-game.
8. Put this word sequence somewhere super safe and you have a wallet!

Ok, it's a bit strange, but not too complicated. Select your wallet in Yoroi and click on receive. You'll see QR code (one of those fancy bar codes) and to the left of it a long string of gibberish that starts with addr... You can just click on the two little squares to put it in your clipboard. Try to remember some of the first and last characters, or some other part that is memorable.

OK, now we go to Binance or your preferred exchange, I'll tell you about Binance.

1. Choose the wallet menu and click on "Fiat and Spot"
2. Look for a row under "Crypto balance" that says "ADA Cardano"
3. Click on "Withdraw" to the right of the row
4. Make sure it says Coin: "ADA Cardano", if not, select it.
5. Paste the long gibberish into the Recipents ADA Address box. This a name for your wallet or at least an address of your wallet. You can have lots, but make sure the address you paste in is the one you copied. Check the letters you tried to remember, to be sure it is a match. Binance won't know if it is the right address, but it can check if it is valid. Once you've done it before it will save the address if you choose to reuse it.
6. Make sure Transfer Network has "Cardano" selected. This is really important. Click on it if you need to. It should get a yellow box and a yellow tick, and probably say "Fee 1 ADA".
7. Type in the amount in ADA, or simply click on "Max" if you want it all. That's probably the best option. It will tell you underneath how much is available.
8. They work our how much you will get and how much it will cost. Given the 1 ADA fee, they will be pretty similar.
9. Click "Submit"
10. They've recently added a pop up that is a little scary, warning you of taking your money out. That is because they stake your Cardano on their exchange, the rewards for which they lose if you move it to get the rewards yourself. We've taken good safeguards in preparing our wallet with these instructions, so we'll be fine in receivng the Cardano. You will need to click in the tiny checkbox and then hit "Continue."
11. Now for the security part. Click on Send code. Open your email and type in the code they just sent you. You gave them the email when you opened the Binance account.
12. Now open your two factor authentication device and type in the verification code from there. I used Google authenticator
13. Then click submit. It should take less than 5 mins. You might see in the history it shows progress.
14. Now go back to Yoroi to see the ADA arrive!

You probably won't withdraw too often, and it's worth it to keep safe. Remember to check the wallet for the first arrival of ADA.

We will do the delegation now. We only have to do this once, as once the wallet is delegated, any new ADA gets staked automatically.

1. Open Yoroi and choose your wallet. Check it has the funds you withdrew from the exchange. We are going to delgate to a stake pool.
2. Click on "Delegation List"
3. A list wll eventually come up. It can take a few seconds. There are lot of ways to choose your stake pool. Since you have read this far, I'll assume you will choose the WOMEN stake pool. It's a great cause after all.
4. Type "WOMEN" where is says Search by ID or Name
5. Click on the magnifying glass to search
6. Click on the [WOMEN] WOMEN in STEM pool
7. Click "Delegate"
8. You pay a tiny fee of 2 ADA to complete the process. That's a one time fee, which you won't need to pay again no matter how much ADA you have in your wallet in the future. You'll need your spending password to approve the spend. Remember, your ADA stays in your wallet (apart from the 2 ADA fee).
9. That's it - You're done! The first time you delegate it takes 4-5 epochs (that's between 20 and 25 days), from then on you get rewards every epoch (5 days).
10. Sit back and relax.

You can change staking pools at any time. You just pay the fee again and it takes 2 epochs to switch over. You shouldn't lose rewards during the switch, though. There's no point in cancelling delegations as it is free money. When you sell or spend your ADA, they join someone else's wallet and their delegation choices. Since it is their ADA, they will get the rewards. You only get rewards on ADA you own.

No problem, it's for a good cause. We all benefit from delegating, and since all the good pools generate almost the same reward over time, we might as well delegate to one that supports charitable causes. WOMEN is the cheapest of all fees and donates so much of the profits to supporting Women and Young people in STEM it makes sense.

Yes. There is a special address that you can Donate ADA to. It is pre-delegated to WOMEN so the ADA itsef and the rewards it generates all go to help the cause. The minimum donaton is 1 ADA and you can send whatever you like whenever you like. We have set up a page to explain donating in more detail. If you are ready to donate the special address is:

addr1q8vu32lqd345y778pthep5z9t2l8gzs48psnyp6ehf05fr38lfujrqg77jwjmw48t9wwslf3ulds5055wqrdwhwzhgtqn66dxz

You can get more information about Cardano here:

• Cardano home. "Making the world better for all"
• Cardano News
• Staking and delegating for beginners—A step-by-step guide
• Yoroi Wallet
• Daedalus Wallet
• Cardano Exporer for exploring addresses and transactions
• Cardano on Wikiepedia
• Offical stats on WOMEN stake pool