Validator Subsidy Sunset

Overview

The Validator Subsidy Sunset is the plan Radix token holders approved in February 2026 to taper the Radix Foundation's monthly payment to validator operators down to nothing by June 2026. The Foundation paid eligible validators about $500 a month in $XRD to offset infrastructure costs and keep the validator set diverse, a system the Foundation said was designed for the network's early phase. Under the plan, validators live on the fees they charge their own delegators instead.

The proposal came out of a community request for comments on RadixTalk, opened on 23 January 2026, and polling in validator channels. In that polling, the consultation post reported, 42% of community respondents wanted the subsidy ended at once, while 41% of validators said they might shut down without it. The Foundation put the plan to a token-holder vote from 5 February to 23:59 UTC on 12 February 2026, with 500m $XRD as the minimum participation for the result to count, as part of its move to a community-led model under its 2026 strategy.

1,034,541,978 $XRD from 604 accounts took part. 740,665,521 $XRD (71.6%) approved the plan; 293,876,457 $XRD (28.4%) voted to keep the $500 subsidy until the Foundation handed its activity to a community entity or the community accepted another proposal.

Tapering schedule

• Phase 1, Foundation administered (February–March 2026): the subsidy was capped at 400k $XRD or a dollar amount, whichever was lower: $350 in February and $200 in March. The 400k $XRD cap limited what the treasury paid out if the price of $XRD fell.
• Phase 2, community administered (April–May 2026): $100 a month, paid in $XRD in May and June, with administration meant to pass to a new community entity.
• Phase 3 (June 2026): the subsidy ends.

A backstop let token holders hold a further vote if the community entity was not operating, or if jailing, a protocol mechanism that removes underperforming validators from consensus, was not in place by June.

The entity did not exist in time. On 25 April 2026 the RadixTalk user projectShift asked the Foundation to make the last two payments itself, by the process it had used until then, and validator operators replied in support. The same post was updated to say the Foundation had told the Radix Accountability Council it accepted the request.

Advice to validators and stakers

The results post told validators to plan their fees on the assumption that the subsidy would reach zero by June, and to tell their delegators about changes in the meantime. An operator closing down was told to unregister first rather than switch the server off: a validator that stays registered while offline slows consensus for the whole network.

Stakers were advised to spread stake across at least three validators with high uptime, each holding under 3% of total stake, to move stake away from any validator that goes offline, and to watch their validators' announcements for fee changes.

The fee market after the subsidy

A validator's fee is the share of each epoch's emission that the validator's owner keeps; the rest goes into the stake pool its delegators share (validator blueprint). A read of the whole validator register from the Radix Gateway at epoch 355,311 (00:08 UTC, 4 November 2026) returns 184 registered validators holding 3.93bn $XRD of delegated stake. The median validator charges 2%; the unweighted mean is 16.8%, and the mean weighted by stake is 26.0%.

At 100%, delegators earn no emissions from that validator. A fee increase takes effect only after a delay set in the network's consensus configuration, while a decrease applies from the next epoch (update_fee); no increase was pending anywhere in the register at this read. The Validator Nodes page explains the fee mechanics, and each validator's current fee is on the Radix Dashboard.

External Links

• Consultation Results: The Future of the Validator Subsidy – Radix Blog
• Consultation: The Future of the Validator Subsidy – Radix Blog
• RFC – The Future of the Validator Subsidy & Pseudo Jailing – RadixTalk
• Node-runner Subsidies – Last two payments – RadixTalk
• Radix Foundation – RADIX.wiki