IoTeX Zanzibar activates on-chain staking rewards through IIP-59, with 432,542 IOTX reportedly paid to voters across 46 delegates.
Author: Akshay
21th October 2026 – IoTeX activated its Zanzibar hard fork at MainNet block 53,533,081 on October 19. The upgrade now pays staking rewards directly through protocol consensus.
High Signal Summary For A Quick Glance
Steady attention without excessive speculation.
The change arrives through IIP-59, called Protocol-Native Voter Reward Distribution. It retires Hermes, the centralized service that distributed voter rewards since 2020. According to IoTeX, the protocol has already paid 432,542 IOTX to voters since activation.
Zanzibar ships in iotex-core v2.5.0, with v2.5.1 recommended for node operators. It went live around 02:00 UTC on October 19, and first distributions followed the next day.
The core shift is simple. Instead of an off-chain server claiming and paying rewards, the IoTeX protocol now does that work itself. Every payout settles on-chain and anyone can verify it.
Co-founder Raullen Chai framed the goal plainly when he proposed the change. “Delegates set a commission rate on-chain,” he wrote. “Every epoch, the protocol automatically splits rewards.” Commission goes to the delegate, and the rest goes to voters by weighted stake.
Importantly, the upgrade leaves the rest of staking untouched. Delegate selection, vote-weight formulas, productivity scoring, slashing, foundation bonuses, and priority tips all stay the same.
IoTeX runs on Roll-DPoS consensus. Stakers lock IOTX into buckets and vote for delegates, and the top-voted delegates produce blocks and earn rewards. Those rewards then split between the delegate and its voters.
For migrated delegates, commission goes to the owner immediately. Meanwhile, the voter share builds up in a per-delegate pool until the protocol settles it.
Settlement happens at each reward-era boundary, set by default to 24 epochs, which is roughly daily. At that point the protocol freezes rates, total weight, and bucket state through a copy-on-write snapshot.
Then it pays voters in bounded chunks across 256 address shards, capped by a per-block budget. Because the work is bounded, settlement stays predictable and does not stall block production.
Voters can take direct credits or auto-compound into a native staking bucket through AutoDeposit. Either way, payments are automatic, so no claim transaction is needed. The voter portion also carries no middleman fee.
Delegates that did not migrate stay on the legacy path. Hermes vault delegates with a complete on-chain profile moved over automatically. Missing profiles default to full commission, and opt-in runs one way.
Hermes was built in 2020 as a stopgap. Chai described it as a centralized Go service that held private keys, recomputed weights, and paid voters while charging fees.
That design carried obvious risks. If the service went down, voters simply did not get paid. A single operator also held the keys that moved funds.
The IoTeX Zanzibar upgrade removes that trusted middleman from core staking economics. “Less trust. More verification,” the official account posted at activation. “Every payout is fully verifiable.”
Zanzibar also adds BLS proof-of-possession on candidate keys plus several EVM and gas correctness fixes. In addition, it lays groundwork for future signature aggregation under IIP-52.
IoTeX’s IIP-59 introduces protocol-native voter reward distribution, replacing Hermes-managed reward payments for eligible migrated delegates. The proposal was approved in August 2026 and activated through the Zanzibar hard fork on 19 October, with cumulative payment figures reported on 21 October.
Raullen Chai and Chen Chen propose IIP-59, titled Protocol-Native Voter Reward Distribution, to move eligible voter rewards toward an on-chain distribution system.
The IoTeX community forum publishes an explanation of IIP-59, outlining its expected benefits for voters and delegates and the proposed changes to reward distribution.
Voting begins on IoTeX Hub, with the announced voting window running from 7 August through 15 August. The proposal emphasizes removing Hermes service fees and enforcing reward distribution on-chain.
IoTeX officially announces that the Protocol-Native Voter Reward Distribution proposal has passed. Approval establishes the governance decision, but the new system still requires network activation.
IoTeX publishes the v2.5.0 Zanzibar release notes and schedules mainnet activation at block 53,533,081.
IoTeX publicizes the upcoming Zanzibar upgrade, including IIP-59, EVM fixes and BLS proof-of-possession changes. Activation is estimated for 19 October at approximately 02:00 UTC.
Node operators are urged to upgrade to v2.5.1 before the hard fork. Binance announces a temporary pause of IOTX deposits and withdrawals around the network upgrade.
The mainnet reaches block 53,533,081 and activates the Zanzibar upgrade. IIP-59 becomes live, and eligible delegates using Hermes vaults automatically migrate to protocol-native voter reward distribution.
The protocol begins settling voter rewards at reward-era boundaries, occurring every 24 epochs. Eligible voters receive automatic distributions without a separate claim step.
IoTeX reports that since Zanzibar, the protocol has distributed 432,542 IOTX to 13,846 voters across 46 delegates through 34,485 payments. These are project-reported on-chain figures and have not been independently cross-verified against aggregate explorer data in the supplied research.
The effect on effective staking yields remains unquantified in the supplied sources. Net APY changes depend on previous Hermes fees, compounding choices and differences in reward timing; no independent aggregate yield comparison is provided.
On October 21, the official account shared early results from the new system. It said the protocol had paid 432,542 IOTX to 13,846 voters across 46 delegates, in 34,485 separate payments.
IoTeX says those numbers are replayed block by block from on-chain data, not simulated. In theory, anyone with an explorer or node can therefore reproduce them.
Still, treat the aggregates as project-claimed for now. Independent dashboards and secondary outlets had not reproduced the exact totals during the research window. Reward events should appear on IoTeXScan in blocks after 53,533,081 for anyone who wants to check.
One wrinkle sits in the open. The IIP-59 proposal still shows a status of “Draft” in the GitHub repo. Yet the community approved it, and the network has activated it.
The vote itself ran on IoTeX Hub rather than the project’s Snapshot space. According to one independent analysis from Own Your Mind, that space has stayed quiet since IIP-40 in October 2024.
So far this reads as a process observation rather than opposition. Community feedback on the forum focused on design details. Examples included the default commission for missing profiles and the one-way opt-in.
Around activation, IOTX traded near $0.0038 to $0.0041, with a market cap close to $37 million. The moves were modest, and no clear price spike tracked the fork.
The open questions are practical. The net yield change for an average staker is not yet clear, since fees fell but cadence and routing shifted. The full split of migrated, opt-in, and legacy delegates is also not public.
For now, the headline claim is checkable on-chain, which is the whole point of the design. If the figures hold up under independent review, the result matters. The IoTeX Zanzibar upgrade would then show how to remove a trusted server from staking. This article is informational and not financial advice.
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