Very low voting rewards

Hi,

First of all, I hope I’m in the right forum category, it seems a bit daunting at first to find out what fits where.
But, to the topic of this thread: I’ve been staking (8 years period) and I’m getting nowhere near the mentioned 16%. In fact my calculations indicate I’m receiving only around 5%.

What I did to try and maximize the rewards was look at the users with the highest voting powers and followed the most-voting ones. In fact if I’m to put myself in this list, last time I checked I ranked 7th, so I (think I) already have a decent amount staked. Plus I always check regularly for manual votes and vote if there are any I can vote on.
So why are my rewards so low?
I didn’t change any dissolve settings as I still have to wrap my head around that. Or maybe that could be a reason?

Any clarifications around the issue would be most appreciated. Thank you.

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I’m assuming you are talking about ICP staking in a NNS neuron, not one of the SNS neurons. For the NNS, make sure you have at least one reliable Followee for the proposal topics below:

  • Governance
  • SNS & Neuron’s Fund
  • All Topics Except Governance and SNS & Community Fund

It’s ok to have more than one Followee. You can have up to 15 Followees for each proposal topic. However, your neuron will only vote if greater than 50% of them vote to Adopt or greater than or equal to 50% of them vote to Reject on each proposal. If you configure 4 Followees and two vote to Adopt, one votes to Reject, and one abstains, then your neuron will not vote on that proposal. In this example, your neuron did not reach consensus among the Followees according to the NNS definition of consensus.

Also note that ballots are created when proposals are submitted to the NNS. If you change Followees during a live proposal, your new selections won’t apply to that proposal.

Also note that voting rewards are settled up to 24 hrs after the end of the voting period. This is often several days later than when you actually vote.

The manual voting that you do is always able to override your Followee as long as you vote before your Followees.

If you configure a Followee for individual proposal topics other than the proposals topics listed above, then your Followee selection for that topic will override your selection for the All Topics Except Governance and SNS & Neurons Fund. This is because “All Topics” is a catch all that only applies if you don’t configure an explicit Followee for each individual proposal topic. This feature exists so you don’t have to explicitly configure Followees for each individual proposal topic.

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You have stated you did not change any dissolve settings. In order to get the maximum voting rewards you would need to modulate the “dissolve delay” parameter to the full time value, 8 years. At first glance this appears to be the reason you are seeing low rewards if you did not change your dissolve delay. Once you increase your dissolve delay, it can never be decreased unless by dissolving the neuron, dissolve delay can only be increased, just something to note.

Also keep in mind if you click dissolve immediately you would gain less voting rewards over time as your dissolve delay is decreasing over time as your neuron dissolves. If you want to gain maximum rewards over time you would set dissolve delay to 8 years and NOT click dissolve, thus when you gain your maximum age bonus after 4 years, your neuron would be getting the maximum rewards possible because of the max dissolve delay bonus and the max age bonus together.

Also make sure your neuron is voting on all proposals in order to gain the maximum rewards.

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All my stakes are set to the maximum period of 8 years and I didn’t dissolve anything.
I’ve just now calculated that my first year would see a 7.5% gain in vote rewards, despite the fact that I’ve followed the 15 neurons with the highest voting power, on all 13 topics (it was quite the job since there were about 25 neurons to sort from high to low).

But my second problem is that my ICP stake got lowered over time. Almost 10% of it is gone but I had a chat with a DFinity representative and they would reimburse me.
It hasn’t decreased any more for the last three days though and now I’m waiting to be reimbursed so I can re-stake it.

I’m curious why you decided to take this strategy when deciding how to configure your neuron? That is a lot of unnecessary work if you goal is to ensure max voting participation. What led you to believe it is necessary?

Also, please note that high voting power does not equate to high voting participation. Some of the most reliable voting neurons have only 1-20 ICP staked. They tend to be known neurons that were created for the purpose of active voting participation. You should research to find out if all the neurons you are following are actually voting on all proposal types all the time.

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Everything I can vote on gets voted on, either by neurons I follow or by myself.
Is there a difference between a high voting powered neuron voting for me or a low voting powered one?
I almost have no more manual votes to do any more (I check them daily), so I think that’s ok.

This is the statement that caught my attention. If you have a neuron with an 8 year dissolve delay and it votes on all proposals, then your annualized voting rewards are at least 16.1% just like everyone else. The only way you will not see this reward rate is if your neuron is not voting.

Probably wildly mistaken but can it be that the 15 neurons you follow can lead to vote clashing and nullifying a vote?

I vaguely remember something like that but it was either if

neuron x votes yes and neuron y vote no on topic Z the result is “no”

or

neuron x votes yes, neuron y votes no on topic Z result is no vote?

I guess it is ‘no’ and not ‘no vote’ but I’m not sure…

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The Synapse.vote named neuron is configured with 13 Followees on the Governance topic. I can confirm that there has never been an instance when the neuron didn’t vote according to the definition of majority that applies to neuron Followee voting. I confirm this manually on every proposal. Here is the definition of majority as it applies for neuron Followee voting for easy reference.

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If either a neuron I follow or I myself vote on everything I can vote on, shouldn’t I have my rewards maximized?
This is still not the case despite the statement mentioned above being the case.

[edit]
I also had a problem with my ICP staking amount going down by almost 10% and I had a chat with a DFinity representative about this, who said he was going to reimburse me to the original amount.
That was 3 days ago but I still haven’t received this.
I gave the representative my ICP receive address so I don’t know why this delay is happening.

Is my conclusion that you should only (manually) vote on proposals that have at least 50% Adopt or Reject present, correct?
So eg if you vote either way but the percentage is smaller than 50%, you’ll incur some sort of penalty, reward-wise?

Doesn’t a proposal voted on by whomever immediately gets a status of “cannot be voted on any more” (by yourself or any neurons you’re following), hence making clashing impossile?

PS: I hope my back-to-back posts don’t count as spamming. If so, I’m sorry.

No, this is not correct. If you want to vote manually then go for it any time. If you want to let your Followees vote for you then that is fine too, but make sure they actually vote. The only way you get a penalty reward wise is when your neuron doesn’t vote.

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