How do I select an inflation destination?

Question

How does one set an inflation destination to receive inflation Lumens?

Answer 1

Some wallets have the ability to input inflation destination (usually in the settings)

If your app does not offer you an option to set the Inflation destination, you can do it manually by using the official Stellar Laboratory. This will work for all wallets, including paper wallet.

Go to https://www.stellar.org/laboratory/#?network=public

Click in the tab "Transaction Builder": https://i.stack.imgur.com/CB8pC.png

Paste your Public Key in "Source Account": https://i.stack.imgur.com/vobpZ.png

Click the blue button "Fetch next sequence number for account starting with...": https://i.stack.imgur.com/F3p8n.png

Scroll down the page to "Operation Type", click the dropdown menu and choose "Set Options": https://i.stack.imgur.com/u7kWz.png

Paste the inflation address in the "Inflation Destination": https://i.stack.imgur.com/N3GH4.png

Scroll down the page and click the blue button "Sign in Transaction Signer": https://i.stack.imgur.com/9cUvT.png

You will be redirected to a new page, scroll down and paste your Secret Key in "Add Signer": https://i.stack.imgur.com/AzmAb.png

Scroll down and click the blue button "Submit to Post Transaction endpoint": https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZCX9f.png

You will be redirected to a new page, click the blue button "Submit": https://i.stack.imgur.com/lUVq7.png

Done!

Read more about Inflation in official documentation: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/inflation.html

Source

Note: If you're using the Stellar Account Viewer and the Nano Ledger S to access and store your Lumens, the steps vary slightly. When you get to the point where you 're redirected to a new page after clicking the "Sign in Transaction Signer", rather than pasting your secret key, you'll use the other option and "Sign with Default BIP Path" before completing the rest of the steps. (thanks Kißizer24)

Answer 2

You can also use the Stellar Horizon API to set your inflation destination yourself (without using a wallet app).

You need to create a new Operation and set options your operation to change the inflation destination that points to the wanted inflation destination.

Here's an example code in JavaScript (from my own project):

async function voteFor(target, senderKeys) {
  const account = await server.loadAccount(senderKeys.publicKey())
  const transaction = new StellarSdk.TransactionBuilder(account)
    .addOperation(
      StellarSdk.Operation.setOptions({
        inflationDest: target
      })
    )
    .build()

  transaction.sign(senderKeys)
  return await server.submitTransaction(transaction)
}

The inflationDest: target here sets the inflation destination for your account (="wallet" — the account that holds your funds).

The senderKeys is a Keypair object holding your own private key, and target is the public address of the inflation destination you want to set.

Answer 3

As a complementary to @Rubber Ducky's and @jehna1's excellent answers, I'll add some existing external tutorials which I think are more user friendly.

1. Set Up Your Lumen Inflation by Lumenaunts. it's essentially the same as @Rubber Ducky's answer however with some screenshots. This site also provides a couple of other nice tutorials for beginners.

2. With Stellar Desktop Client. Stellar Desktop Client has been listed on https://www.stellar.org/lumens/wallets/ for relatively a long time and is majorly developed by the ripplefox.com anchor, it has built-in xlmpool/RippleFox pool support but you can surely customize with your preferred inflation address.

3. With Ledger Nano S. It still utilizes the Stellar Laboratory but specialized for Ledger Nano S.

4. With Firefly mobile wallet. Firefly is developed by a Chinese Stellar-based company fchain.io and the repository is hosted on GitHub/StellarCN.

EDIT: I know SE does not advocate linking to external pages without self-contained answers, however these tutorials are either specific to clients/wallets, or cannot be rendered well at SE sites.