Operating with Cold Keys

One of the primary things to keep in mind about cold keys is that they are often kept on cold nodes which are not connected to a main blockchain and are offline.

The primary use of cold keys is to generate a operational certificate along with the verification key and KES period.

This will show the code needed to generate an operational certificate or node.cert:

cardano-cli shelley node issue-op-cert \
 --kes-verification-key-file kes.vkey \
 --cold-signing-key-file cold.skey \
 --operational-certificate-issue-counter cold.counter \
 --kes-period 65 \
 --out-file node.cert

(The code used comes from https://iohk.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/900001209326-Node-s-operational-certificate-and-KES-period-stake-pools-)