Staking Rewards
How the Flow protocol pays rewards to stakers
This information covers the current state of how rewards are calculated and distributed to node operators and delegators. All of the information in the document is still being designed and is subject to change based on research and discussion by the Flow core team and community. If any changes are proposed, the Flow community will be notified in advance.
Rewards
Rewards are paid at 6:00am PT (14:00 GMT) on Tuesday, every week, to all the users that have tokens staked.
Once distributed, rewards are unlocked and liquid, so they can be transferred at any time. Some custody providers might require extra steps to withdraw user staking reward so please contact your respective provider to get additional information as needed.
Epochs end at 10:00pm PT Tuesday (06:00 GMT Wednesday), every week. This means that reward recipients have approximately 16 hours to commit the rewards they receive in order for the rewards to be staked in the next epoch.
Rewards Distribution
The rewards distribution schedule has been designed to ensure there is enough liquid supply of FLOW available in the ecosystem to empower a wide variety of use cases and promote fair and diverse participation in the Flow ecosystem.
The numbers in this table represent the total amount of tokens that are paid as staking rewards at each epoch to the entire pool of participants in the Flow network as a whole. While total staking reward per epoch is known and fixed, individual rewards are variable depending on many factors. Please see the next section on how to calculate an individual staking reward.
| Dec 22 | Dec 29, Jan 5, 12, 19, 26 | Feb 2 weekly on Tuesdays until Dec 21, 2021 | Weeks 53+ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Rewards % (Annual) | 5% | 20% | 5% | TBD |
| Total Rewards Amount Per Week | ~1.2M FLOW | ~4.4M FLOW | ~1.2M FLOW | TBD |
Individual Calculation
Each user gets a percentage of the total rewards during each epoch that is proportional to their percentage of all the tokens that are staked by all participants.
The full reward calculation on a per-user basis is equal to:
New Reward(user) = Tr * (Sn / St)
where:
Tr= Total staking rewards to be paid out during the current epoch. (See table above)Sn= Amount of FLOW Staked by the target user for the current Epoch. (Different for each staker)St= Sum of all the FLOW staked by all the participants in the network. (Changes every epoch)
Rewards for delegators are also calculated in the exact same way that rewards for node operators are calculated, with one difference in that 8% of the staking reward amount is given to the node operator being delegated to (effected as a protocol layer fee, which is the same for all node operators). The remaining 92% is awarded to the delegator. Note: the 8% fee is only applied to the staking reward, not to the tokens delegated.
With this calculation, the node you choose to run or delegate to DOES NOT affect the amount of rewards you receive every week. The only variable that you can control is the number of tokens you have staked. The more tokens you stake, the more rewards you will receive.
Because of the variable nature of the rewards calculation, we cannot provide an expected weekly/yearly return for a single staker. You can plug your own numbers into the formula to see some sample calculations, but you won't be able to know exactly what you will earn until the beginning of the epoch in which you are participating in staking or delegation.