Rewards

Validators are paid from fees, and from fees only. At the end of each epoch, a share of the fees collected during the epoch is paid to that epoch’s validators, in proportion to their weight. Rewards are paid in USD.

The rule

Every transaction’s fee is credited to the treasury, which keeps a running total of the fees it has ever collected (specification v1.4). In the deferred phase of an epoch’s last Pulse:

1. The epoch’s fees are the treasury’s running fee total now, minus fees_mark, the total when the last epoch ended.
2. The pool is reward_permille thousandths of the epoch’s fees, rounded down. On the devnet reward_permille is 700, so 70 %.
3. Each validator in the epoch’s active set whose record is Active or Leaving receives pool × weight / total, rounded down, where total is the weight of the whole active set.
4. What is not paid stays in the treasury: the other 30 % of the fees, rounding, and the shares of validators slashed during the epoch.
5. fees_mark becomes the current fee total, so the next epoch counts only new fees.

Other money reaches the treasury too: the treasury’s share of a slashed bond, the remainder of a slashed stake after the reporter’s share, a slashed pool’s tenth, forfeited storage collateral, and slashed-bond funds no longer needed to compensate anyone. It stays there. It is never paid out as rewards, so slashing a validator does not enrich the others.

Pooled stake (specification v1.11). A validator with delegators shares its reward with its pool, in proportion to their earning stake against its own, and keeps a commission on the pool’s part; see Pooled stake. The total paid is unchanged: the pool’s part comes out of the validator’s share.

Rewards accrue on the validator’s record. The operator collects them with ClaimRewards { validator }, or receives them with the stake on WithdrawStake. Unclaimed rewards are forfeited if the validator is slashed. Claiming with nothing accrued fails with no rewards to claim.

An example from the devnet

From one run of sion demo staking --local (24-Pulse epochs, four genesis validators of weight 100,000):

Pulse  24  epoch 1 begins: 5 validators hold seats, the newcomer among them; 0.00224 USD of fees paid as rewards, split by stake
…
Pulse  29  operator-2 collects: Done: 0.00056 USD of rewards claimed for validator 04dde303; fee 0.0012 USD.

During epoch 0 the only fee was the registration’s, 0.0032 USD. The pool was 70 % of it, 0.00224 USD, shared by the four genesis validators: 0.00056 USD each. At Pulse 29, operator-2 claimed its validator’s share.

In epoch 1 of the same run, the newcomer was slashed for 50,000 USD: 2,500 USD went to the reporter and 47,500 USD to the treasury. None of that is a fee. The fees collected in epoch 1 were 0.0062 USD (the reward claim and the report), so the pool at the epoch’s end is 0.00434 USD; each genesis validator, at 100,000 of the active set’s 450,000 weight, receives 0.000964 USD, and the slashed validator’s share stays in the treasury.

The devnet’s fees are tiny because the devnet is idle. What matters is the shape: validator income is a fixed share of what users pay to use the network.

What is not built

• Payments to provers. The architecture pays provers from fees too. The devnet runs one prover thread and pays it nothing.