How Tron voting rewards work, and why staked TRX should vote

Short answer

When you stake TRX, you get TRON Power. If you vote with it, the network pays you a reward, block by block. The size depends on which witnesses you vote for. A few percent a year is the usual range, and it moves with the network. If you do not vote, you earn nothing from this, even though the TRX is staked.

Voting power

In Stake 2.0, one TRX staked for energy or for bandwidth is one unit of TRON Power, and one unit is one vote. You can split your votes between up to 30 witnesses. Votes you gave stay until you change them.

Energy you delegate to others still counts as your power. That is why a wallet can lend energy and vote at the same time.

Who gets voted for

A witness is a node operator. The 27 with the most votes are Super Representatives, and they produce blocks. The next 100 are partners. Together these 127 share the voting reward.

Where the reward comes from

The network sets aside two pools for every block:

• A vote reward shared by all 127 by the number of votes each one has. More votes on a witness means a smaller slice per vote.
• A block reward that goes only to the 27 Super Representatives, split between them.

Both pools are network parameters and can change. gasrent reads them from the chain every hour.

The share a witness keeps

Each witness decides how much of what it earns it passes to its voters. The part it keeps is called its brokerage. A witness at 20 percent keeps one fifth and passes four fifths to voters. At 100 percent it keeps everything and voters get nothing. At 0 percent voters get all of it.

This is why two witnesses with the same votes can pay differently. It is also why a number such as "keeps 5 percent" is not enough to rank them, because the votes count matters too.

The estimate we show

On the Supply page, Est. yield is the yearly percent for one staked TRX that votes for that witness. It is calculated from:

• the reward per vote from the shared pool,
• plus, for the top 27, that witness's share of the block reward divided by its votes,
• minus the part the witness keeps,
• with the block part cut by how many blocks the witness really produced.

It is an estimate, not a promise. It changes when votes move, when a witness changes its brokerage, and when the network changes its reward numbers.

Why small differences can still matter

A gap of 0.1 percentage point a year is only 1 TRX on 1,000 TRX. On 100,000 TRX it is 100 TRX. That is why gasrent looks at the size of your stake before it decides to move votes. The details are in How gasrent picks witnesses.

Changing your votes

You can change votes at any time. Doing so does not burn the reward you already earned. The network credits it first and then applies the new votes. The change is one transaction, and a transaction needs bandwidth. A wallet that has spare bandwidth pays nothing. If it has not, the network burns a small amount of TRX. For three witnesses that is about a third of a TRX.

Taking the reward

The reward is not sent to you automatically. It builds up on the network side until you withdraw it.

• You can withdraw once every 24 hours.
• The TRX lands on the same wallet. Nobody else can be named as the receiver.
• The withdrawal also needs a little bandwidth.
• You can do it in TronLink, on Tronscan, or with the Claim to my wallet button on the Supply page. We count it whichever way you choose.

What can go wrong

• A witness can change its brokerage, so your yield changes.
• A witness can fall out of the top 127 and stop earning. Votes for it then earn nothing until you move them.
• A witness can miss blocks, which lowers the block reward part for the top 27.
• The network can change reward amounts.

gasrent watches the first two and moves your votes when they happen. See What gasrent does automatically for your wallet, and why.