Buying Ada in Singapore
To begin your journey into the world of Cardano, you first need to purchase some of their currency ADA. However, with many crypto exchanges offering different rates and services, it can be quite challenging for a newcomer to navigate / purchase ADA from these channels. In this page, we hope to break down the 3 main ways to purchase ADA in Singapore, and how to subsequently delegate your ADA to your selected stake pool to earn rewards. Let’s go!
1. Independent Reserve
1) Independent Reserve is a fully licensed provider of Digital Payment Token Services in Singapore. It allows account users to trade SGD/ 10 crypto pairs. However, users are unable to trade crypto pairs as of yet (eg ADA/BTC).
If you had a verified bank account with Xfers, it should be reflected accordingly and user should be able to deposit funds/ carry out trades fairly simply. IR also allows the more experienced traders to trade with limit/stop orders. Fees are chargeable for fund deposits & withdrawals (0.55%) which each trade transaction would also incur a brokerage fee between 0.02% to 0.5% (depending on your account plan and last 30 days trading volume).
We had published a detailed guide on using IR as a trading platform. Please refer to blog post
Note: IR has announced on 8 Dec 2021 that they have reduced platform fees. For deposits, there would be no fees for amounts above $1000 while a $2.50 fee is charged for amounts below $1000. For Withdrawals, a flat fee of $1.50 would be charged
2. Crypto.com
2) Crypto.com is a purely app-based digital assets exchange. Users are able to purchase ADA/SGD on the platform directly using credit card. Once purchased, users would also be able to transfer their ADA into their selected wallet. So what’s the catch?
As with all credit cards, the FX rates incurred for purchases are very high. The spot buy prices on Crypto.com is also higher than other exchanges. Both of these would reduce your crypto holdings quite substantially.
[Update as of Jun 21] Crypto.com is now accepting / processing any new application requests from Singapore.
3. Coinhako
3) Coinhako is a digital assets platform founded in Singapore. Users are able to purchase ADA/SGD on the platform directly through bank funds transfer. Unfortunately, users are unable to send/receive ADA to your wallet ie the purchase is mainly restricted to pure platform price trading. Upon enquiry with Coinhako, they are unable to provide a firm timeline when they could enable the send/receive function. As such, you would not be able to transfer ADA to your digital wallet for delegation.
Should you wish to use this platform, do note that Coinhako charges a high transaction fee of 1% for each trade (ie once for buy, once for sell). There is also a max cap of $20,000sgd and withdrawal fee of $2 per time.
We certainly hope the send/receive wallet function is enabled soon as this would make ADA purchase/ delegating way simpler.
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Feel free to connect with us via email/ Telegram if you wish to find out more/ have any questions and we would try to answer you as best as we can.
Delegating to Huatpool
Now you are the proud holder of some ADA, you can transfer them to your preferred digital wallet (Yoroi or Daedalus) or use a Ledger Nano for cold storage of your ADA. It is time to stake them via a stake pool and start earning rewards. The delegation process is really simple but there are some key points to highlight
Note: try not to leave them on the exchange unless you wish to stake with the exchange itself. As the saying goes, not your wallet = not your coins
b) There is no minimum staking amount for stake pools. However you would require a minimum of 2.17ADA to kickstart your first delegation (2 ADA to register your wallet for staking rights and 0.17 AD one- time transaction fee.
c) It would take n+4 Epochs for you to receive your rewards.
Above two screenshots are taken from Yoroi and Daedalus. As mentioned earlier, the delegation process is really straightforward.
a) View the list of Stake pools available for delegation.
b) Search for Huatpool to check our stake pool details.
c) Confirm your delegation to Huatpool.
After you have successfully delegated to a stake pool, it takes n+4 epochs or 20 days to receive your first rewards. please refer to the delegation cycle.
Example: Delegate in Epoch 252 (n), receive rewards at start of Epoch 256 (n+4).
In gist, it takes the 1st epoch to activate your delegated stake. Once stake is activated and the pool produces block in 2nd epoch, the rewards will be calculated in epoch 3 and distributed at the start of epoch 4 ( ie n+4)
Note: rewards are automatically delegated to the same selected stake pool. For best rewards, choose a stake pool that has low saturation, low cost per epoch, low pool margin fees and high pledges.