It is similar where those who participate earn rewards, but different to mining as it requires no equipment. Instead of miners, there are validators. The validators lock up some of their ADA as a stake in the ecosystem to a particular pool (cheapstakes pool). Following that, the validators bet on the blocks that they feel will be added next to the chain. When the block gets added, the validators get a block reward in proportion to their stake. Recommend watching ADAtainment youtube video here.

No risk, except that if a pool goes down, you will start getting no rewards (imagine setting and forgetting and finding out your friends pool shutdown months ago), so you need to monitor and make sure you pick a stable pool, which is why selecting CheapStaking as your preferred ADA pool is a no brainer!

Yes, you will be able to delegate to a pool from a hardware wallet or a paper wallet.

Current Cardano Parameters will see a payout of approx 4-6% per year for users delegating to a stakepool that has enough stake to mint blocks and has reliable infrastructure to stay online 24/7.

Pledging contracts are available with flexible terms, please email us for more information. 

Cheapstaking.com has a low fee of 0.9% on reward transactions + fixed fee (740 per epoch). These fees help cover infrastructure and monitoring costs. Using Azure cloud we can ensure a 99.9% up-time with advanced DDoS and Security. Whist many home based operations are offering 0% fees, a lower up-time will lead to lower reward compared to a fee based pool with higher up-time.