How gasrent picks witnesses and decides when to change your votes

Short answer

We rank witnesses by estimated yearly yield, vote for the best three and split your votes evenly between them. Once the votes are placed, we move them for a better yield only when the gain is clear, pays for the transaction, and at least a week has passed since the last change. A broken vote is fixed at once.

Reading the Witness yield table

On the Supply page, open Show votes under a wallet. Each row is a witness.

Our pick is for this one wallet. It is the best three witnesses if we would change the votes now. If we would leave them, Our pick stays on the witnesses the wallet already has, so the two columns match. That is why a witness with a slightly lower yield can still be marked.

How we rank

1. The table of witnesses and their reward numbers is refreshed about every hour.
2. Only places 1 to 100 are considered. A witness must have a known brokerage and a yield above zero.
3. They are sorted by Est. yield. A tie goes to the one with more votes.
4. The top three are the target.

Yield already counts the part the witness keeps. There is no need to compare brokerage by eye.

How votes are split

Your voting power is divided evenly across the three witnesses. Any remainder goes one vote at a time to the first ones. If a wallet has less than three votes, each vote goes to its own witness.

Keeping the current votes

A witness you already vote for is kept while it stays within the first 110 places, even if it is no longer in the top 100 we pick from. This avoids moves caused by small shifts.

When we change votes at once

• No votes at all.
• One percent or more of the voting power is not voted, or more is voted than the wallet has.
• A witness has left the table or fell below place 110.

These do not wait.

When we move votes for a better yield

All of these must be true:

1. At least seven days have passed since our last vote for this wallet.
2. The new set is better than the current one by at least 0.005 percentage points a year. This is only to ignore daily noise in the estimates.
3. The change is free or pays for itself. Which of the two applies depends on the wallet bandwidth.

How condition 3 is decided:

• If the wallet has enough spare bandwidth to carry the transaction, it is free, and the first two conditions are enough.
• Otherwise the network burns TRX for the whole transaction, and the extra yield must repay that within 60 days.

What the transaction costs

A vote transaction takes about 245 bandwidth points plus 29 for each witness. For three witnesses that is around 330 points. A burned point costs 0.001 TRX, so about 0.33 TRX.

Bandwidth is taken all at once from one source. If your wallet has 220 points left and the vote needs 332, the network does not use the 220. It burns the full 0.33 TRX. A free wallet gets 600 bandwidth points a day, which covers one vote of three witnesses.

What the 60-day rule means in numbers

The gain has to cover about 2 TRX a year for a vote of three witnesses.

So a small wallet seldom moves and a large wallet moves on a small difference. If the wallet has free bandwidth on a given day, the move is free and the check passes whenever the other conditions hold.

Production ratio

The ratio of blocks a Super Representative actually produced is used in the block reward part of Est. yield. A witness that misses blocks gets a slightly lower estimate. It does not change the vote reward part, which depends on votes only. Witnesses outside the top 27 do not produce blocks and are not affected.

Limits

• The numbers are estimates from the network parameters at the time we read them.
• A witness can change its brokerage at any time.
• We check each wallet once a day, so a change between checks is seen at the next one.
• If you vote yourself while automatic voting is on, the next change from us replaces your list. Press Stop automatic voting if you want to own the choice.

See also What gasrent does automatically for your wallet, and why and How Tron voting rewards work.