Using MyEtherWallet for Tao Governance: Staking

4 min readJan 11, 2021

MyEtherWallet is one of the most well designed, battle tested, and user friendly Ethereum wallets available. In this article I will explain how to use it to interface not with the Ethereum network, but with the Tao network and for the purposes of participating in Tao’s proof of stake governance.

I’m going to keep this as a step-by-step guide with screenshots each step along the way. It’s actually really easy.

Here’s what you’ll need to have beforehand:

Install MetaMask
Connect it to the Tao Network
Get some Tao and add it to the MetaMask wallet

With that, go to myetherwallet.com and click the “Access My Wallet” choice.

The next window provides a selection of wallets you can use to connect with MEW, but for this tutorial we’re going to select MEW CX which will enable us to login with MetaMask.

A window will pop up which will ask you to confirm the SSL connection before continuing. If you have any question, click on the lock icon in the URL bar of your browser and make sure it’s a valid EV certificate.

After accepting the terms and logging into your MetaMask wallet, you’ll see a display which will list your address, balance, and a whole bunch of token stuff that exists on Ethereum. There are some tools which can be used on Tao, but for this Tutorial we’re going to directly access the proof of stake governance contract. Select “Contract” and then “Interact with Contract” from the menu on the left.

A form will appear which will ask you for the contract address. The Tao Network Governance Contract Address is:

0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000088

Below this is the “ABI/JSON Interface”. This is the toughest part of the entire thing, really.

First, click the link below to get the ABI for the governance smart contract. Select the text in your browser and Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Tao-Network/ming/master/contracts/TaoValidator.abi

Once you’ve copied it to the clipboard, click in the text box in the browser form and paste the JSON into the form.

When you click “Continue” the next screen will appear that will allow you to execute various smart contract methods. If you type “vote” in the search box you’ll see the “vote” method appear. Click on it to continue.

You’ll need to know the address of a validator to vote for, so pop into the #tao2-technical-chat channel on Tao Slack and ask someone for theirs. I’m sure someone will be more than happy to provide it. :)

Paste the address in the “_candidate” field and then enter the amount you want to stake. The rewards system is proportional and an explanation can be found here.