I’m a Polkadot nominator and I’ve been following the staking rewards recently. I noticed (and saw discussions) that there were some issues with the payouts during specific periods:
Eras 1981 to 1986: Rewards were significantly lower than usual.
Era 2035: Rewards seem to be missing entirely for many users.
As I’m not a technical expert, I would like to ask the community:
Is there an official plan to compensate or fix these missing rewards?
If so, what is the current progress of this process?
Where is the best place to track updates on this issue (e.g., a specific link or thread)?
I appreciate the hard work of the developers and the community in maintaining the network. I just want to stay informed about when we might expect a resolution.
Thank you for the reply. I have submitted the support form as suggested.
However, I would like to point out that since these issues (Eras 1981-1986 and Era 2035) affected almost all nominators across the network, I chose to bring this up in the forum to facilitate a public discussion.
I believe transparency is key for such network-wide incidents. I don’t quite understand why the details regarding the resolution or compensation plans need to be handled through private support tickets instead of being shared openly here for the benefit of the entire community.
I look forward to seeing more public updates on this matter.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Your question fits the type of inquiries we usually receive in Support, so I thought it would be a good idea to direct you there.
The topic of the staking rewards has been discussed publicly in different places. It’s not a secret, and it shouldn’t be hidden anywhere. It’s in the blockchain, after all.
I simply wanted to give it a more personal follow-up through Support, but I wouldn’t prevent anyone from replying to you in this thread.
Albert from Polkadot Support at Web3 Foundation here.
Thank you for raising this topic and for asking about sharing the support response. I’m posting it here directly for transparency and visibility.
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out.
It’s important to separate the two periods, as they were caused by different issues:
The reduced rewards during Eras 1981–1986 were related to the Asset Hub migration. There were community discussions at the time, but no formal compensation proposal was ultimately submitted.
The missing rewards in Era 2035 were caused by a staking miner malfunction. Similarly, while the situation was discussed, there wasn’t enough community traction to move forward with a proposal.
Any compensation would need to go through OpenGov. Since Polkadot is permissionless, anyone in the community can analyze the impact and submit a proposal if they consider it appropriate, but unfortunately, at the moment, there is no active proposal addressing these periods.
I understand that staking rewards are important for nominators, and I apologize for any inconvenience these incidents may have caused.
I am not entirely sure if it has been done here, but I am quite sure both have been communicated in X. I will re-iterate what I know about them here for the record:
1981 → 1986 was the first eras after the Asset Hub Migration project, where we knew staking rewards were configured mistakenly to be lower.
Era 2035 → An operation issue in the process of the staking election caused the primary election which selects all nominators to fail, and a fallback mechanism kicked in where only the most staked few thousand nominators are elected for that era.
Both were shortly recovered, and if we consider the annual APR of stakers, have a negligible impact on them. I understand though that it is not an optimal scenario for a staker.
On the first one, we had a conversation where I personally supported a referendum to refund the users affected, but it didn’t get traction.
The second one is less of a bug per-se, and more of an anticipated process. Polkadot does its best to elect as many nominators as possible for any given era, but in extreme cases, it cannot do that it and relies on the fallback. This has happened for a handful of eras in the past, and might happen again in the future.
I will make sure to communicate these mishaps that affect stakers here going forward, and always tagging the thread as staking for easier discoverability.
I think if the impact was widespread and affected everyone to a similar degree, then there would not be an issue of uneven distribution of benefits. In that case, it is understandable if no action was taken.
From my understanding:
Eras 1981 to 1986:
The impact should have been similar not only for nominators but also for validators.
Era 2035:
The effective staking threshold suddenly increased, which meant that some participants who would normally have received rewards ended up losing them. I am not sure whether those who did receive rewards ended up getting more than usual as a result.
This is the first time I have heard that this situation is considered expected. I am quite surprised. Is this due to human intervention, or is it simply how the mechanism is designed to work?
Given the large set of nominators and validators, Phragmén’s method is a difficult optimization problem. Polkadot uses off-chain workers to compute the result off-chain and submit a transaction to propose the set of winners. The reason for performing this computation off-chain is to keep a constant block time of six seconds and prevent long block times at the end of each era, when the validator election takes place
Hey! From what I’ve seen, the devs are aware of the missing/low rewards for those Eras. There isn’t a full ETA on compensation yet, but Polkadot governance threads and the Polkadot Treasury updates are usually the best places to track progress. Staying active in the nominator channels on Riot/Element also helps for real-time updates