WAX rewards are without a doubt one of the most exciting features of the WAX blockchain. Whether you are a long-term holder or a trader, WAX rewards can be earned by anyone with minimal efforts. What rewards exist and how can they be earned?

Different kinds of WAX rewards

As you may already know, there are various kinds of WAX rewards. To get these rewards, you will have to do different things. We will explain all WAX rewards and what you need to do to receive them.

Staking rewards

The first kind of WAX reward is the staking reward, which can be earned by staking your tokens and voting for at least 16 Guilds or a proxy, and is meant to encourage token holders to become active and engaged voters.

Staking rewards (Source: WAX blog)

A fixed number of WAX Tokens is set aside each day for WAX staking rewards. The number of tokens that each token holder receives daily depends on their current stake weight, relative to other stakers. For example, if your stake weight amounts to 0.5% of the aggregate stake weight on any given day, you will receive 0.5% of the WAX staking rewards amount.

Calculating the stake weight (Source: WAX blog)

Your stake weight can be calculated using the above formula. It is your current amount of staked tokens multiplied by your vote strength. Your vote strength is a number anywhere between 0 and 1, with 1 being full vote strength. If you vote weekly, you maintain the highest possible vote strength. If you do not vote weekly, your vote strength will slowly decay. Your stake weight will be 0 until you vote (for the first time), at which point it will increase to 1.

The staking rewards are automatically staked 50/50 for CPU and NET after claiming them, and count as Genesis WAX Protocol Tokens, which we will explain below.

Genesis Block Member (GBM) rewards

The second kind of WAX reward is the Genesis Block Member (GBM) reward, which is designed to encourage civic engagement and reward long-term WAX community members.

GBM rewards can be earned by Genesis WAX Protocol Tokens, which can be earned in 2 ways, namely:

The first way to get Genesis WAX tokens would have been during the token swap. If you held your own tokens during the token swap and have performed the token swap yourself (and have not unstaked these tokens yet), you have an amount of Genesis WAX tokens equal to the amount of tokens you swapped during the token swap. Performing the swap is no longer possible, though.

The second way to get Genesis WAX tokens is from staking rewards. As said above, the staking rewards are automatically staked 50/50 for CPU and NET after claiming them, and count as Genesis WAX tokens. This is the only way to get new Genesis WAX tokens at this moment.

Genesis WAX tokens compared to regular WAX tokens (Source: WAX blog)

Genesis WAX tokens are equal to regular WAX tokens, the only difference is that regular WAX tokens do not earn GBM rewards. Once a Genesis WAX token is unstaked, it permanently becomes a regular WAX token, which means it can never become a Genesis WAX token again (also meaning it is never able to earn GBM rewards again).

Each staked Genesis WAX token will produce one regular WAX token over the course of 3 years, meaning that one Genesis WAX token will produce 1/1096 part of a regular WAX token each day, for 1096 days. The produced tokens are called GBM rewards and are regular, liquid, WAX tokens.

Other rewards

Staking rewards and GBM rewards are not the only rewards that can be earned on WAX, though. There are Guild rewards and other rewards in the future as well.

Guild rewards

The WAX blockchain is operated by 21 Guilds and 36 standby Guilds. These Guilds produce blocks, operate the WAX blockchain and contribute to the WAX ecosystem, and earn rewards for doing so. You can view how much each Guild earns every day here.

Future rewards

The WAX team announced that there will be new rewards in the future as well. How these rewards will work exactly, is not known yet.

“Transfer agents and WAX Marketplace are other ways to earn WAX Tokens. Both will be introduced at a later date.” — WAX team

Claiming the rewards

Rewards are great, but they are not automatically added to your account, so you will have to claim them. We will explain how to claim your Staking rewards and GBM rewards in a couple of simple steps.

You are able to claim these rewards every 24 hours. These rewards stack up, though, so there is no need to claim every 24 hours.

Before you are able to claim the rewards, the keys of your account need to be in Scatter. If this is not yet the case, follow the official instructions on how to get your keys in Scatter here.

Once that is done, make sure your Scatter is unlocked, and go to the ‘Claim GBM Rewards’ page on Bloks.