When a stake pool is not operating anymore, it must be retired. A stake pool must be retired in order to recover the 500 ADA deposit.
In order to retire a stake pool, a stake pool deregistration certificate must be created and submitted to the blockchain with a transaction (similar to the stake pool registration certificate). The transaction to submit the stake pool deregistration certificate must be signed with the cold key (cold.skey) and with the payment key of the payment address where the UTxO used to pay the transaction fee resides.
When creating the stake pool deregistration certificate, the epoch when the retiring takes place must be specified. After the stake pool is retired, the 500 ADA deposit is returned to the stake pool rewards address (just like the regular stake pool rewards). In order for this to happen, the stake key must be still registered until the rewards are withdrawn. If the stake key is not registered, the 500 ADA deposit are lost (they will be sent to the treasury instead).
The following script can be used to create the stake pool deregistration certificate:
#!/bin/bash
source ./env
cardano-cli stake-pool deregistration-certificate \
--cold-verification-key-file ${NODE_HOME}/pool-keys/cold.vkey \
--epoch 365 \
--out-file ${NODE_HOME}/pool-certificates/pool-deregistration.certThe transaction to submit this certificate is similar to the transaction described in the section above. The --witness-override 3 should be updated to 2 (because the transaction will only be signed by 2 keys: the cold.skey and a payment skey).
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