Staking Guide
How Shekyl staker rewards are designed, why they are claimed rather than paid in the coinbase, and how the wallet does that claim for you.
Core Decision
Claim-Based Reward Disbursement
Shekyl uses a claim-based model for staker rewards rather than direct coinbase fan-out. Rewards accrue to a deterministic accounting pool. From v3.1.0-alpha.8 the wallet submits the emission-claim transaction itself once each reward epoch settles — there is no claim button, and the claim RPC methods are refused. Rewards below the compiled-in fee floor wait until they cover the fee.
Why Claim-Based
Keeps coinbase transactions compact and deterministic
Avoids variable-size miner transaction growth tied to staker-set size
Decouples payout cadence from block template construction
Improves compatibility during hardfork rollout
Economic Flow
Per-Block Accounting
Consensus computes staker emission share plus staker fee-pool allocation from adaptive burn components.
Accrual Pool
Computed reward amounts accrue to a global staker reward accounting pool.
The wallet claims automatically
Once each reward epoch settles, the wallet submits the emission-claim transaction. Rewards too small to cover the fee wait and aggregate. Nothing the user initiates is blocked by a background claim.
From genesis
Archival staking is the model
- • Stakers post collateral, hold chain shards, and answer retention challenges
- • Emission claims are a consensus transaction the wallet submits unattended
- • There is no separate claim-activation hard fork and no wallet-RPC
claimmethod
Shard Visualization
Stakers who archive chain shards will see each shard as a unique, reproducible visual in the wallet — a human-readable fingerprint of that window of chain history. The samples below are pre-rendered from our candidate compositor using illustrative fake-chain data.
Pre-rendered samples from the candidate compositor — illustrative fake-chain data, not live mainnet shards.
Each archival staking shard will have a unique visual derived deterministically from its public chain content. Two stakers archiving the same shard see the same image; different shards look different. That gives you a quick visual integrity check alongside cryptographic verification — and makes rare shards easy to recognize at a glance in the wallet.
The current candidate formula layers two difference composites: a round-ish foreground (aperiodic tile ⊖ phyllotaxis) over a crystalline background (truchet ⊖ crystalline), then merges those with a final difference pass. Palettes and blend strength come from the shard hash and aggregate chain statistics — fixed algorithms, variable aesthetics.
Across chain regimes
Same regime, different hash
Regime labels describe aggregate chain character; the shard hash still drives the final look. These two genesis-regime samples share a label but not an image.
Operator Notes
No immediate coinbase format change is required. The wallet claims on a cadence driven by chain progress; operators who want the shard-holding side of staking should start from the Staker-Operator Guide.