Root Reborn — the short version
Release v438 · PR #2968 · live on mainnet at spec_version 441
The one thing to know
Today, if you stake on root, your balance goes up on its own — roughly every couple of days (irregular), TAO rewards just land in your stake. You do nothing.
After Root Reborn, that stops being automatic. Your rewards no longer land by themselves — you have to claim them. And here's the upside: the longer you wait to claim, the more you get, because your rewards are compounding into alpha the whole time you leave them alone.
Why waiting pays
Instead of dropping flat TAO into your stake, your root validator now takes your rewards and invests them into a basket of subnet alpha tokens it picks. That basket earns the alpha's yield and rides its price. So your rewards auto-compound at the alpha basket's rate — expected to beat the old flat root rate — for as long as you don't touch them.
The trade-off: between claims you're holding subnet-alpha exposure, not pure TAO. Prices move. When you want out, you claim and it converts back to TAO.
What you actually do
- If you stake root: pick a validator whose picks you trust — their basket is now your portfolio. Then just leave it to compound, and claim when you want your TAO (a single
claim_root()cashes out your whole share at once, back to root stake). Nothing lands automatically anymore. - Switching validators? Claim first. Your basket is tied to the validator you staked with — it doesn't travel with you. One
claim_root()sweeps every validator you're currently staked to (both at once if you have two), but a validator you've fully left is skipped — its basket sits parked, not claimed. So if you shift 100% to a new validator and then claim, you only get the new basket; the old one waits until you re-stake (it isn't burned or given away). Clean move:claim_root()before you switch. - If you run a root validator: you now have a job — publish which subnets to buy (via
set_root_weights). Good picks make your stakers compound faster and pull in more stake. Your performance is public and rankable. - If you own a subnet: get rated highly by root validators and you receive real buy-flow instead of just being sold into. First time root capital expresses a preference between subnets.
- Keep it in perspective: the bulk of your return is still your root stake itself. The autocompounding here applies only to your rewards — a small slice on top — so this changes how that slice grows, not your whole position.
What claiming costs
Because claiming is now manual, each claim is a transaction — and it costs a fee. The fee scales with how many subnets your validator's basket holds: more baskets = more work = a bigger fee. The good news is it's a small slice, and far cheaper than claiming on root today (a root claim currently touches all 128 subnets; here it only touches your validator's handful).
Worked example — 10 TAO staked at ~7% APY, claimed after 10 days (rewards earned: 0.01917 TAO):
| Validator's baskets | Claim fee | You keep | % of reward kept | Effective APY after fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | ~0.0007 TAO | 0.01848 TAO | 96% | 6.74% |
| 7 | ~0.0017 TAO | 0.01743 TAO | 91% | 6.36% |
| 10 | ~0.0024 TAO | 0.01680 TAO | 88% | 6.13% |
| 15 | ~0.0034 TAO | 0.01575 TAO | 82% | 5.75% |
Gross rate before fee is 7.00%. Two takeaways: the fee is real but modest, and a validator who spreads into many baskets quietly costs you a few points of yield — one more reason your choice of validator matters. Fee figures are estimates at the current network fee rate; actual cost varies with network load.
Status
Live on mainnet: Root Reborn shipped in Release v438 (PR #2968) and the chain now runs spec_version 441. One operational item is still a live network decision — the root weight rate limit that sets how often validators can rebalance their basket vectors (hourly / daily / weekly).