Staking Rewards

Staking rewards are minted by the protocol, not released from a vesting contract. In proof-of-stake networks, validators and delegators lock tokens to help secure the chain and are paid in newly created supply for doing so. Because the payment comes from issuance rather than from an allocation someone is waiting to receive, it usually does not appear as a scheduled unlock event. The exceptions are worth knowing: Celestia's CIP-31, final and shipped in the Lotus upgrade, states that rewards earned by a lockup account update that account's daily unlock rate through a recalculation over the updated balance and remaining lockup period, so those rewards do land on a vesting schedule. Tokenomist's own framing of this is direct: vesting schedules are a useful starting point, but they do not capture emissions from mechanisms like mining or staking, which means token supply grows even without any scheduled unlocks.

The cost of that growth lands unevenly. Holders who stake receive a share of the new supply; holders who do not simply see their proportional ownership decline. A headline staking rate is therefore best read as the price of standing still rather than as a yield in the traditional sense: participating roughly preserves your share of supply, while sitting out concedes it. This creates implicit pressure to stake that shapes user behavior and token utility, and it is why a token can look fully distributed on an unlock chart while still quietly redistributing ownership every epoch. Timing matters too, and it is a design choice rather than a rule. On Celestia all tokens may be staked whether locked or unlocked, and rewards on unlocked stake arrive liquid, but since CIP-31 rewards earned by a lockup account are added to the locked balance and vest over the remaining lockup instead of joining the float on receipt.

Reward rates are policy, not physics, and most protocols step them down. Aptos pays validators and delegators from a maximum reward rate that decays by a relative 1.5% a year, and two governance votes have overtaken the decay: AIP-119 in April 2025 and AIP-140 in February 2026 brought the on-chain rate to 2.60%, which is also its configured minimum, so as of August 2026 the rate sits on its floor and the decay does nothing. Solana's inflation rate is scheduled to fall from 8% to 1.5% over a decade. Polkadot goes further and makes the rate adaptive: below a 50% staked target inflation rises to attract stakers, above it inflation falls. Cosmos shows what happens when the parameter becomes contested. Proposal 848 capped the maximum inflation rate at 10% and passed narrowly, on about 51.7% of votes excluding abstentions, with the fall in annualized ATOM staking yield from roughly 19% to 13.4% coming from the proposal's own projection rather than from a measured outcome. Proposal 868 then targeted the 7% inflation floor that would have kept minting ATOM even at 100% staked, and it failed, so the floor still stands and live mint parameters keep minimum inflation at 7%. The objection to cutting it was blunt: a lower rate means a weaker incentive to stake, and therefore weaker security. Dilution and the security budget are the same line item read from two sides.

This is the emission that outlives the vesting schedule. Reviewing tokens named in the 2023 SEC action, Tokenomist observed that most tokens launched in 2020 or earlier had almost completed their unlocking process, with only the staking rewards remaining as an incentive for validators, naming SOL, MATIC and ATOM. For a mature asset, the unlock calendar can be empty while the supply curve still slopes upward. That is why Tokenomist publishes a release schedule rather than a vesting schedule, classifying distribution by mechanism (mining, staking, activity-based rewards, yield farming, protocol incentives, auctions) so that issuance with no formal unlock date still shows up in the forward supply picture.