FAQ
Lace is a light wallet platform built on Cardano. Its first release includes a light wallet, an NFT viewer, an easy staking feature, and a decentralized app (DApp) connector. Unlike full-node wallets, light wallets do not synchronize the full copy of the blockchain. Lace is all about ease, allowing you to manage your digital assets and interact with Web3 without all the complexities of a full-node wallet. Lace lets you:
- Send and receive ada and Cardano native tokens
- Stake your ada and receive rewards for participating in the network
- Connect to and use DApps
- Store, send, receive, and view your NFTs
- Connect with a Ledger hardware wallet for added security
- View your transaction history
Lace is available as an extension in the Google Web Store. You can add Lace to your Google Chrome browser.
No, you can’t create multiple wallets in Lace. But the team is working on it. Stay tuned!
A private key is a long sequence of digits and letters that uniquely verify ownership of your digital assets. Private keys should only ever be shared with the key's generator or parties authorized to decrypt the data.
Because the private key can be hard to remember, Lace gives you a recovery phrase (also known as a mnemonic or a seed phrase) of 24 words instead, which you set up when you first create your wallet. Typically, the longer the word sequence, the less likely someone will be able to guess your recovery phrase. You use the phrase to recover your wallet and access your assets, so make sure you store it securely. If you are recovering your wallet from another platform on Cardano, you may have a 12 or 15 recovery phrase.
You will receive your recovery phrase when you first create your wallet. Make sure you keep it in a safe place, preferably in a tangible (offline) way. If you lose your recovery phrase, there is no way to recover it and access your digital assets. The IOG development team behind the wallet doesn’t know your recovery phrase and there’s nothing that can be done to help you in the event of its loss.
If you forget your password, you can only recover your wallet by using your passphrase. So make sure you always store your passphrase securely offline – write it down and keep it in a secure location.
If you lose your recovery phrase, you lose access to your wallet and your digital assets. That’s why it’s so important that you store it somewhere safe.
No. There’s really no way to recover your wallet if you lose your recovery phrase. This is fundamental to how the blockchain works. You and only you are the owner of your recovery phrase and that is why losing your recovery phrase means losing access to your digital assets. That’s why it’s of critical importance that you save your recovery phrase in a safe place.
You first need to purchase ada from an exchange and send it to your wallet address – you can find your wallet address by clicking the Receive button.
You can send ada to any Cardano-compatible wallet. Lace includes safeguards to prevent you from sending digital assets to wallets that don’t support Cardano, but it's always a good idea to triple check the address you are sending your digital assets to. A good rule of thumb is that all Cardano addresses start with ‘addr1__’.
Lace lets you switch between networks to test new releases and features, before they’re deployed on the mainnet. There are three networks you can choose from: two testing environments (preview and preproduction) and the mainnet environment (production).
Network switching means there are fewer bugs on the mainnet and means everyone enjoys a smoother experience. Plus, it means you can give your feedback on new features before a release makes it to the mainnet – so by the time a new feature makes it to the mainnet, it should already work the way it should, and suit your needs. What’s not to love?
When adding the Lace extension to Chrome you will notice a pop-up stating that Lace will read your browsing history. Declaring requests such as this to users is a requirement from Google for anyone publishing to the Chrome store (more on that here).
When a DApp requests a connection to Lace using the CIP-30 - Cardano DApp-Wallet Web Bridge (the DApp connector), Lace uses the Chrome Tabs API to pull information from the DApp to read its URL, name, and icon so that this information can be displayed inside Lace. By using the Tabs API, Lace is explicitly required to declare these permissions – just as any other extension employing CIP-30 would have to do.
Rest assured, no other information is read or retained by Lace. The Lace team and IOG are absolutely committed to respecting user privacy and will not use this data in any intrusive or inappropriate ways.
The original hierarchical deterministic wallets created a new change address for every transaction. HD wallets were designed because of privacy and security concerns in multi-address instances. However, we later found that in Cardano, this is irrelevant, due to the association of stake credentials.
Single addresses are easier to use for people who are new to Web3, meaning Lace will reach a wider audience. In addition, our team is working hard on finding a way for users to be able to import a multi-address wallet (you’d still only be able to spend from the one address on Lace).
We’ll continue our research to improve privacy and security and to see how else we can make Lace better – let us know if you’d like to get involved in upcoming tests by registering your email address and opting in to the Customer Research option. If you’re already a Lace subscriber, you can update your preferences via any Lace email footer by clicking 'Update preferences'.
When you restore a multi-address wallet, the discovery procedure only happens once during the initial restoration. As you restored your multi-address wallet prior to Lace support being rolled out, the discovery procedure did not take place. Now that multi-address support has been added to Lace, you can restore your wallet again and see everything. Just delete the wallet and restore it again in Lace.
Yes, you can. However, if additional addresses are created in the other wallet you would have to delete and restore the wallet in Lace again in order to activate the discovery process. Then you would be able to see everything in every address in Lace.
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To send ada, you need the recipient’s Cardano address. Add the address and the amount you want to transfer to the recipient in the ‘Send’ tab of your wallet.
To receive ada, copy your ‘Receive address’ to the clipboard from the ‘Receive’ tab. Next, share it with the person who is going to send you ada (or other Cardano native assets) or use it yourself to send ada from another wallet or exchange.
Your public address is a unique identifier that serves as a virtual location for your digital assets. You can think of it like a postcode or a zip code.
Any blockchain network, including Cardano, charges transaction fees (ie, for sending ada, delegating ada to a stake pool, or withdrawing rewards). The fee amount depends on the size of the transaction. More details here.
These fees cover resources like electricity and computing power. They also protect the Cardano network against attacks.
The transaction bundle feature lets users send multiple types of digital assets to multiple wallet addresses with just one transaction fee. Pretty neat, right?
Normally, sending different types of digital assets means making individual transactions for each asset and paying a fee for each of them. Likewise, sending digital assets to multiple addresses usually requires separate transactions, each with their own fee.
Transaction bundles not only save users fees, but they also reduce the number of transactions being made on the network, thereby reducing network congestion.
From paying employees, to making an airdrop to the entire world – the opportunities are endless.
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Cardano was one of the first blockchains to support ‘staking’, however on Cardano, the process differs slightly from other chains. Cardano was designed to (1) always let users have access to their digital assets, and (2) let more advanced users run stake pools. Users with a less technical background can still receive rewards by staking their assets and actively taking part in the network.
On Cardano, you ‘delegate the block production rights’ associated with your stake rather than the ada itself. This way, your ada never leaves your wallet, it's never locked, and the stake pool operator (the expert user) mints blocks on your behalf. This allows you to safely select a stake pool that works best for you, without having to worry about the security of your digital assets.
Most Cardano-enabled wallets have a staking feature. Depending on the wallet you use, you may or may not be able to choose where to delegate your stake. In Lace, you can choose the stake pool that you want to delegate to.
After delegating your stake, you post a delegation certificate – containing your stake key and stake pool identifier – on-chain to publish your staking/delegation choice. This choice roughly states “I declare that the block production rights associated with the digital assets in this public address are delegated to this stake pool”.
After delegating ada to a chosen stake pool, you don't have to do anything. Newly added ada or assets will be automatically staked with the chosen pool. Re-delegation only happens when you want to change your original choice of stake pool for another.
You can choose a stake pool based on a number of factors. The amount of assets you can receive as a reward for participating in validating the network is influenced by several parameters – operating cost, operating margin, and pledge. You’ll need to research each pool to make your decision – just hit the staking tab on your wallet to view the pools.
- Rewards on asset means the amount of ada in each new block that will be automatically distributed to the stakeholder by the network.
- Operating cost is the total ada charged by the stake pool operator to cover the cost of running the stake pool. The cost per epoch is calculated from the total ada rewarded to a stake pool, before the operator takes their profit margin.
- Operating margin is the percentage that the stake pool operator takes for minting blocks on behalf of the delegator. This is on top of the operating costs for the stake pool. This is a variable defined in the formal specification to allow stake pool operators to compete on the best operator price for the delegators.
- Saturation refers to the amount of ada delegated to a stake pool in relation to its maximum possible size. Cardano automatically limits the maximum size of a stake pool in order to promote decentralization. If everybody delegated their funds to the same pool, one pool could own 51% of all the stake and take over the network. That’s why if you delegate to a pool over the maximum size, that pool only receives the same rewards as for its maximum capacity, so you would receive less rewards than if you’d chosen another pool.
- Rewards on stake: this is a little more complicated. Let’s say a stake pool holds 1% of all the stake in the system, then this stake pool is expected to mint roughly 1% of all the blocks in one epoch. If you hold 10% of the stake in this stake pool, then you should receive 10% of rewards, or 0.01% of all the rewards in this epoch - cost + margin.
You can see the staking process visualized here.
Your rewards are automatically distributed to your rewards address at the end of every delegation cycle. Each cycle consists of four epochs, and each epoch lasts five days, so it will take 16-20 days to receive the rewards in your Lace wallet. After the initial delegation cycle, the rewards continue after each epoch ends until you redelegate to a new stake pool.
If a single-address wallet has already been delegated, then restored in Lace, the delegation will continue without any changes or action needed. Don’t forget that once your ada is delegated to a stake pool, it will always remain in your wallet, and isn’t locked.
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With the beta release of multi-staking, Lace users can delegate to up to ten pools simultaneously
Put simply, it's the percentage of your stake that's assigned to a specific pool.
Yes, you can choose the percentages for each pool in your multi-staking selection. This great new feature means you can view and adjust the ratios of all your stake pools by adding or subtracting a percentage, all from an easy-to-use interface when you click on Manage.
Stake distribution will drift through transactions because of Cardano's EUTXO model. If the amount of ada changes for one address, so will the stake to that particular pool.
This means that any variation of the UTXO set will drift stake distribution. The first iteration of Lace's multi-delegation feature includes an improved TxBuilder that reduces the impact of this, though stake distribution will inevitably drift after many transactions. Upcoming iterations will include improvements to approximate the stake distribution to the user preferences. Transactions that are constructed outside of Lace by DApps will likely not take into account stake distributions and cause more drift.
No. Once preferences are submitted, Lace will always query user stake information on-chain and reflect the actual status in the staking tab, including any stake distribution drift that may have occurred.
Wallets with over 80 UTXO sets won’t be able to use multi-staking, due to the protocol's limitation of the maximum transaction size. The next iterations will include a feature to inform the user that their wallet exceeds protocol-set limits for delegation.
No, Ledger hardware wallets don't currently support multi-delegation. Future versions of Lace will add multi-staking support for hardware wallets.
Changing one pool for another one: This doesn’t impact the user as previous accrued rewards not yet distributed from the old pool will be deposited in the user’s reward account for the next 2 epochs.
Removing a pool: Requires deregistering the stake key associated with that pool. All pending rewards already distributed are withdrawn in the same transaction as the key deregistration. Rewards in the calculation epoch phase, or waiting to be distributed, will be lost.
Changing pools or ratios costs the same as a normal transaction in Cardano. Remember that increasing the number of pools to delegate requires a 2 ada deposit per new pool for stake key registration. This deposit is returned when you decrease the number of pools.
The current version of Lace calculates total rewards for a specific pool. The next iterations will calculate rewards per epoch instead.
The current beta version of the multi-delegation feature does not support unstaking your funds. Future versions of Lace will however enable the removal of active delegations.
Lace will inform you via a modal message and a banner when a pool you are delegating to is about to retire, is effectively retired, or is saturated, so you may change your staking preferences.
In some cases, other wallets may display different balance or stake information to Lace. This occurs because Lace is the only wallet that derives stake keys over index 0, according to active standards set out on CIP-18 and CIP-1852. Other wallets may not track these addresses, resulting in the apparent difference.
To resolve this incompatibility, change multi-delegation to single delegation or staking, choosing a pool that is not part of the current delegation portfolio. This will have the effect of moving the delegated funds to the stake key with index 0. Afterwards, you can change the single delegation to any pool (including those that were part of the current delegation portfolio. This will have the effect of moving the delegated funds to the stake key with index 0. Afterwards, you can change the single delegation to any pool (including those that were part of the multi-delegation portfolio) again.'
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Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are tokens that may serve as evidence of ownership of virtual (or even physical) assets. The specific rights that attach to NFTs vary. NFTs are currently most widely used as evidence of ownership of digital art.
NFTs can either be purchased directly from the creator’s website during their minting phase or on a secondary marketplace such as jpg.store, artano.io, cnft.io, and more. Make sure to have funds in your wallet, connect your wallet to the DApp, find the NFT you want to buy, and click to purchase. The Lace extension will pop up and ask you to enter your password to process the purchase. Once the transaction is completed, the NFT will be transferred to your wallet.
Head to the NFTs tab in the Lace extension to view your NFTs.
Handles are NFTs issued by ADA Handle and owned by a Cardano wallet address to provide holders with custom and human-readable addresses.
Minting a handle involves a clear and convenient process. Simply go to the ADA Handle minting page, secure your handle by checking its availability, and purchase it.
Sending funds to a handle holder is a straightforward process:
- Go to the ‘Send’ screen on your Lace wallet
- Type the handle you want to send funds to in the “Address or $handle” input field
- Wait for confirmation that the handle is found
- Select the amount and type of tokens you want to send
- Review your transaction
- And send
To personalize your handle, visit the new ADA Handle portal, connect your Lace wallet, and choose the handle you want to personalize or create a new one. You can then choose an available background or NFT from your Lace NFT collection that you’d like to showcase, or mint new NFTs to include in your handle personalization.
Yes, you can! Simply go to the Ada Handle preprod page, connect your Lace wallet, change your network to preprod from the wallets’ settings, mint a new test handle on the preprod minting page, and personalize it here.
You can see your personalized handle on Lace in three places:
- As an avatar in the upper right corner of your wallet, in the profile area
- As an NFT in your Lace NFT tab
- And in the wallet address section of your Receive tab
How do I benefit from personalized handles in Lace?
Personalized handles are more than just custom, human-readable addresses. They’re also:
- One-of-a-kind profile pictures (PFPs) that you can show off
- A type of ‘calling card’ that you can add your social links and a QR code on
- Your unique and personalized digital identity on the Cardano blockchain
Got a question you can’t see here? Join our #Lace-community Discord channel to get answers from the community and the Lace team at Input Output Global.
The Lace DApp connector is a feature allowing you to connect your Lace wallet with Cardano DApps. If the DApp utilizes smart contracts, you’ll need a minimum of 5 ADA to set as collateral (available from the settings menu). This will increase the capability of your wallet by giving you access to actions such as minting tokens, burning tokens, swapping tokens, and much more.
Collateral ensures the interaction between a wallet and a DApp’s smart contract is executed successfully. In Lace, we require 5 ada to be set as collateral. This amount will be designated from within your wallet as collateral, and will be used only if an interaction with the smart contract fails. You can withdraw your collateral at any time. Just remember to set it again before interacting with your favorite DApps.
Lace is accessible via the window.cardano.lace namespace where you can pull the Lace wallet name and logo from the public API to display in your connect buttons list.
If using a hardcoded list of wallets your DApp supports, please add Lace to the list of ‘trusted sources’. If users have not installed Lace, please direct them to lace.io.
If your DApp scans the window.cardano namespace for a list of available wallets, you shouldn’t need any updates and if the wallet is installed, Lace will be visible.
Most Cardano DApps require you to set collateral before interacting with a smart contract. In order to set up your collateral, you need to have 5 ada available. To do this, go to Settings, click ‘set collateral’, and we will designate 5 ada in your wallet as a back-up so you can interact with Plutus smart contracts.
When you go to a DApp website, make sure the https protocol layer is active on the browser search bar. Malicious actors may create fake websites looking to get your wallet information and funds. Depending on the type of browser you use, you will see a key or padlock symbol where you can check website security details. Avoid any links or domains that reflect local hosts for non-DNS domains. You as a user have the sole responsibility to decide if a DApp is trustworthy.
Wallets and DApps in Cardano may implement or use CIP30 in a way which makes it incompatible with your wallet. We are currently working on standardizing the DApp CIP30 communication protocol so all wallets and DApps are fully compatible.
We are still working on the hardware wallet DApp connector feature. In the meantime, you can still use your hardware wallet to send and receive tokens, and stake your ada with Lace.
This is to be expected. Clicking ‘Always’ will add the DApp to a persistent list, whereas clicking ‘Only once’ will only allow the DApp access to your wallet for the duration that the DApp tab is open.
Got a question you can’t see here? Join our #Lace-community Discord channel to get answers from the community and the Lace team at Input Output Global.
Get in touch with the Input Output Global support team and leave a ticket on our service desk platform. A member of the team will get back to you as soon as possible.
Lace is the proprietary light wallet platform from Input Output Global and is exclusively published by Input Output Global. Any wallets or platforms called Lace but published by any other entity than Input Output Global are not genuine and should be considered a scam.
The Lace browser extension is only available from the Chrome web store.
The only official website for Lace is www.lace.io.
Beware of scams. Stay vigilant and report any suspicious apps or websites to the Cardano Fraud Detection Bureau.
Got a question you can’t see here? Join our #Lace-community Discord channel to get answers from the community and the Lace team at Input Output Global.