Validator Subsidy Sunset

Overview

The Radix Validator Subsidy Sunset was a community-approved governance decision that phased out the Foundation-administered validator subsidy over the first half of 2026, with the final payments made in the April–May window and the subsidy ending entirely in June 2026. The subsidy had originally been introduced to incentivise validators to run the Radix network during its early phase, compensating for low transaction fees. As the network matured, the community voted to transition to a sustainable, fee-driven economic model where validators earn through network usage rather than Foundation emissions.

The consultation ran in January 2026 and recorded 1,034,541,978 XRD participating from 604 unique accounts, with 71.6% voting in favour of the tapering plan.

Tapering Schedule

The approved plan implemented a three-phase wind-down, completed in June 2026:

• Foundation Administered (Feb–Mar 2026): Subsidy capped at 400k XRD or a USD cap (whichever was lower). February cap: $350 USD. March cap: $200 USD. This phase was managed by the Radix Foundation.
• Community Administered (Apr–May 2026): The subsidy dropped to $100 USD per month, paid in XRD, with administration transferring to the Radix Accountability Council and community entities. The April and May disbursements were the final two subsidy payments.
• Conclusion (Jun 2026): The subsidy ended entirely. Validators now sustain operations through validator fees charged to delegators.

The plan included a contingency clause allowing the community to hold a further vote if a Community Entity was not operational, or if a "Jailing" enforcement mechanism (which removes persistently underperforming nodes from consensus) was not in place by June.

Rationale

The Foundation's goal was always to bootstrap the network rather than subsidise validators indefinitely. The consultation framed the change as "reducing dependency on the Foundation and transitioning to a sustainable economic model." Validators were advised to adjust their fee structures, actively market their nodes to delegators, and – if exiting – properly unregister via the Radix Dashboard rather than going offline, since unregistered inactive nodes slow consensus for the entire network.

The vote result (71.6% in favour) reflected strong community consensus that the network was mature enough to support validators through organic fee income. The subsidy wind-down forms part of the broader 2026 Foundation transition to a decentralised, community-governed model.

Aftermath: the fee market that replaced it

The consultation's case was that the network was mature enough for validators to live on delegator fees instead of Foundation emissions. Two months after the last payment, what that market settled into can be read directly from the ledger. A paginated read of the Gateway's validator register at epoch 332862 (state version 546,817,889, 7 August 2026) returns 287 validator components, 188 of them registered, holding 4,730,263,018 XRD of delegated stake between them.

There is no single replacement price. The median registered validator charges 2%; the unweighted mean is 13.3%; the mean weighted by stake is 20.6%. The distribution is not a bell around any of those numbers but a barbell:

Roughly a third of all delegated XRD – 31.6% – is staked to a validator charging either nothing or everything. A validator's fee is the share of that validator's emissions it keeps before the rest accrues to its delegators, so at 100% the delegated stake earns no emissions at all; the mechanics, including why the fee a validator charges is often not the fee its ledger entry stores, are set out on Validator Nodes.

The 100% band is not a tail of dormant nodes. Three of the ten largest validators by stake sit in it – REDDICKS NODE at 232.4M XRD, DefiPlaza Investment Node at 165.3M and WOWO STAKING at 97.3M – and at each of the three the operator's own stake units account for under 1% of the stake-unit supply, so almost all of that stake belongs to other people. Every large validator in the band declares a project website on-ledger, and the register's own names describe the arrangement: a lossless lottery, a memecoin fund, a Community Council node whose own declared website no longer resolves. What the operator does with a retained emission – a prize draw, a token distribution, funding a council – happens off-ledger, and the protocol has no view of it. The wiki makes no assessment of whether any of these pay out; the ledger records only the fee.

Fee changes remain rare and slow. Across the entire register at epoch 332862 exactly two increases were pending: Radstakes from 15% to 25% at epoch 335294, and Cadwynbloc from 50% to 75% at epoch 332966. An increase cannot take effect for about two weeks after it is requested, which is the window delegators have to move; a decrease applies from the next epoch.

Follow-through: what the two increases did

Both took effect on schedule, and the delegators reacted in opposite directions. Read at epoch 337,829 (24 August 2026, 17:00 UTC) against each validator's state at the epoch its increase landed:

A tripling of the fee at one validator moved no stake; a ten-point rise at another moved nearly 7 million XRD. The protocol gives the same two-week notice in both cases, so what differs is whether anyone was watching. Neither increase was announced by its operator, and neither is visible in the field a reader is most likely to check: both validators still store their old fee factor, 0.15 and 0.5, while the register's effective_fee_factor reports the 25% and 75% actually charged. The Validator Nodes page sets out why the two fields disagree; the practical form of it is that the component state alone will tell you the wrong number.

The queue has since refilled, and at epoch 337,829 it holds four requests rather than two. StakeSafe is raising both of its large nodes from 15% to 25% at epochs 339,608 and 339,609 – 157.1 million XRD of delegated stake between them, and about 30 August 2026 at the network's recent five-minute epochs – and its seed node from 15% to 100% at epoch 339,609. Leaf Node's 1% becomes 100% at epoch 341,223, in the first week of September, over 25,670,173 XRD. Three of the four are on nodes whose operators this wiki tracks, and all four were readable on ledger the day they were signed.

What the queue did (17 September 2026)

All four requests have taken effect. Read from the Radix Gateway at epoch 341,571 (07:06 UTC, 17 September 2026) against StakeSafe's figures at epoch 339,152 (29 August) and Leaf Node's at epoch 337,829:

StakeSafe's two increases landed around 30 August, before the network halted. Leaf Node's was due in the first week of September, but the ledger produced no epochs until it restarted on 11 September 2026, so epoch 341,223 arrived on 16 September. Its delegators now earn nothing on 25.6 million XRD, and fewer than 100,000 XRD has left since 24 August. StakeSafe's seed node went to 100% on the same epoch as Rotterdam. All four still store their old fee factor.

At epoch 341,571 the queue held five increases. The first two have since taken effect.

Apollo Pool at 100% (19 September 2026)

Apollo Pool's rise from 20% to 100% took effect at epoch 342,116, 04:29 UTC on 19 September 2026. Its delegated stake was 11,323,359 XRD at that epoch and 11,324,911 XRD at epoch 342,339 nineteen hours later, a rise of 1,552 XRD, so none of the 11.3 million XRD staked to the node has been withdrawn and none of it now earns its delegators anything. The node ranks 68th of the 186 registered validators. Its component still stores the old 0.2, as every validator in this queue has; the register's effective_fee_factor is the field reporting the 100%.

The request was readable for a long time before it landed. It is already present at epoch 336,101 (18 August 2026), the oldest epoch the Radix Gateway still serves state for, so it stood on the ledger for at least 6,015 epochs, across the August halt, before it took effect.

Apollo Pool publishes https://www.ApolloPool.io as its info_url on ledger, and that domain is no longer the operator's. The Internet Archive holds the validator's own site from June 2021 to April 2025, last captured in full on 17 March 2025 under the title "Apollo Pool | Validator Node | RadixDLT" and describing a node run by three operators, with its Olympia-era validator address printed on the page. The registry record, read on 19 September 2026, gives a registration date of 23 August 2026 and Cloudflare nameservers, and both apollopool.io and www.apollopool.io answer HTTP 301 to an unrelated lottery site. Stake is delegated to the validator address rather than to the domain, so the node itself is unaffected, but a wallet or explorer following the on-ledger link now reaches that site instead. Only the holder of the validator's owner badge can change the field.

Avaunt Staking at 25% (20 September 2026)

Avaunt Staking's rise from 2% to 25% took effect at epoch 342,482, 10:59 UTC on 20 September 2026, over 138,920,293 XRD of delegated stake. That is rank 9 of the 186 registered validators and 3.0% of the delegated stake in the register, and more than the three requests still queued carry between them. The increase was signed on 26 August from the account that holds the validator's owner badge; the validator's page sets out the sale of that badge and the announcement that did not mention the fee.

None of the stake moved in the notice period. The register held 138,838,023 XRD for the node at epoch 341,523 on 17 September and 138,920,207 at epoch 342,481, the last epoch at 2%. Its component still stores 0.02, as Apollo Pool's stores 0.2 and the four before it store theirs.

What is still queued

Three requests remain, read across the register at epoch 342,483 (20 September 2026, 11:05 UTC):

No further request has been signed since 17 September. The dates assume the five-minute epochs the network has kept since the restart.

External Links

• Consultation Results: The Future of the Validator Subsidy – Radix Blog
• Original Consultation Post – Radix Blog
• Governance discussions (incl. node-runner subsidy payments) – RadixTalk
• Radix Foundation – RADIX.wiki