Rewards Post-Altair

Expected Rewards

The rewards you can expect on mainnet as of November 2 2021 are:

  • Attestations: 0.0040-0.0042 ETH per day
  • Blocks: 0.018-0.03 ETH per block
  • Sync committee membership: ~0.08 per sync committee participation

Why?

  • The new sync committees feature has created a new role for validators. Every 256 epochs (27 hours) a new random group of 512 validators is selected to publish sync committee messages, which are similar to attestations.
  • If you observe substantially higher rewards for a day or two without any block proposals then your validator is likely a member of a sync committee.
  • Rewards for block proposals are 4x higher than previously. This is to incentivise efficient and timely block production.
  • Net issuance has remained the same, so the expected long term earnings for validators are the same but the percentage of rewards from attestations is lower.
  • You should expect slightly lower attestation rewards. Given the current validator count you should expect around 0.0040-0.0042 ETH per day per validator.
  • The issues with late blocks causing attestations to miss head/target still exist. The estimate above for attestation rewards factors in 1-2 missed target votes and 8-9 missed head votes per day. These misses are outside your control and are due to mild misbehaviour by a small number of block proposers. Several protocol changes to disincentivise late blocks are being discussed to resolve the issue.

Further Reading