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The validator subsidy underwrites network liveness and is one of the DAO's most consequential early decisions. The RFC weighs ending it immediately, a phased reduction, or continuing it, alongside an optional pseudo-jailing mechanism to enforce uptime.

Where it stands (August 2026)

Re-measured on 16 August 2026 at epoch 335598, the concentration figure in the RFC has moved, and against the target. The RFC weighs the decision on a top-50 share of roughly 85% and asks for a median around 1%. A whole read of the validator list returns 4,773,496,229 XRD staked, of which the top 50 validators hold 90.66%; the top 10 alone hold 39.94%, and the median of the 100-slot active set – the 50th validator, on 20,791,259 XRD – is 0.436% of stake, under half the target.

The survey question the RFC poses therefore lands on a narrower base than it assumes. Only 89 validators hold a million XRD or more, and the bottom of the active set runs to tens of thousands: rank 100 holds 45,500 XRD. Those are the operators for whom ending the subsidy is a decision about whether to keep a node running at all, and they are the same operators the recruitment card is trying to add to.

After the restart (September 2026)

Read again on 16 September 2026 at epoch 341,235, five days after mainnet restarted, concentration has not moved off the August reading and is still above the one the RFC argues from. Registered validators hold 4.61 billion $XRD, 161 million less than in August. The top 50 hold 91.1% of it and the top 10 hold 40.0%, and the 50th validator, radix.stake.fun, holds 0.438% – against the roughly 85% top-50 share the RFC weighs the decision on, and less than half its ~1% median target.

The restart also produced the uptime problem pseudo-jailing is meant to handle, and it is clearing slowly rather than not at all. 19 of the 100 validators in the active set had made no proposals since 11 September when this was read at epoch 340,611; three have since brought their nodes back and one fell out of the top hundred, leaving 15 on zero and holding 4.8% of registered stake against 5.8% three days earlier. The recruitment card has the measurement. The protocol keeps them in the set while they earn no emissions, so their delegators earn nothing until the operator returns or the stake moves – and the stake is moving: 562,527 $XRD has been unstaked from the largest of the fifteen, the Weft Finance node, in the three days since. That is the mechanism pseudo-jailing would replace with a rule, and the rate at which delegators find it on their own is the measure of what the rule is worth.

Deliverables

  • Vote the subsidy timeline (immediate / phased to ~2-month transition / continue).
  • Decide whether to implement pseudo-jailing (committee votes, stake-weight thresholds, 70%+ opt-in).
  • Address validator-set concentration (top-50 hold ~85% of stake; target ~1% median).
  • Survey validators on how many would exit if the subsidy ends.

Dependencies & cross-references

Sources

HydrateLast updated Sep 21, 2026v1.3.17 revisionsVerified Sep 16, 2026