- What is a validator reward payout?
- On QRL 2.0, validator rewards are paid to the recipient address as a protocol-level operation attached to a block — not a transaction. The technical name is an EIP-4895 withdrawal; the mechanism lets validators receive rewards without paying any gas.
- Why does 'Withdrawals = rewards' on QRL 2.0?
- On a healthy active validator, balance accrues each epoch via attestation + (occasional) proposer + sync-committee rewards. Once balance exceeds MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE = 40,000 Quanta, the excess auto-sweeps to the recipient address — that's a partial withdrawal. Full withdrawals happen when a validator exits and its entire balance is paid out. Either way, the chain emits an EIP-4895 system-event, not a regular transaction — that's why withdrawals don't appear on /transactions.
- Do validator-reward withdrawals cost gas or have a transaction hash?
- No. An EIP-4895 withdrawal is applied directly by the protocol as part of a block — there is no transaction, no gas fee, and no ML-DSA-87 signature. The recipient's balance simply increases. That is exactly why reward payouts never appear on the /transactions feed and have no transaction hash to look up.
- How often are rewards paid out?
- Eligible excess balance is swept automatically as the protocol cycles through validators in index order, up to 16 withdrawals per block. On an active chain each validator is swept regularly; the exact gap depends on how many validators sit ahead of it in the sweep. There is no claim step — payouts are pushed, not pulled.
- Why is the recipient always the same for some validators?
- When a validator is activated its operator sets a withdrawal credential — the single address the protocol is allowed to pay its rewards to. Every reward that validator earns lands at that address unless the credential is later changed, which is why staking-as-a-service operators often pool many validators into one recipient.
- How fast can a validator withdraw after exiting?
- The withdrawability delay on QRL 2.0 is 16 epochs ≈ 34 hours (60s slots × 128 slots/epoch). That's fewer epochs than Ethereum's 256, but Ethereum's epochs are much shorter (~6.4 min), so its delay is ≈ 27 hours — the two are comparable in wall-clock time. After a clean exit the funds become sweep-eligible once the delay passes; the next withdrawal sweep picks them up. (Testnet value; subject to change.)
- How do I see the reward history of one validator?
- Every row in the feed links to the recipient address and to the beacon block that paid it. To see one validator's full payout history, open it from the validators list — its page lists every EIP-4895 withdrawal it has received, newest first. You can also deep-link the feed with ?address=<recipient> to scope it to a single wallet.