Solana staking rewards dropped ~14% at epoch 1024 — Everstake MEV commission now 100%

Coins and transactions
1

I stake SOL natively through Trezor Suite, which delegates to Everstake (vote account 9QU2QSxhb24FUX3Tu2FpczXjpK3VYrvRudywSZaM29mF). My per-epoch rewards dropped sharply at epoch 1024 and have stayed at the lower level since.

My stake amount was unchanged throughout this period. The stake account was fully active before epoch 1021 and I made no deposits, withdrawals, delegations or partial deactivations at any point, so there is no warm-up or cooldown effect involved.

Rewards below are normalised to epoch 1021 = 100, since only the relative change matters here:

Epoch Reward (indexed) Change
1021 100.00 —
1022 99.96 −0.04%
1023 99.61 −0.35%
1024 85.34 −14.33%
1025 85.12 −0.25%

The drift between consecutive epochs is around −0.2% both before and after the step. The step itself is −14.33% (ratio 0.8567) across a single epoch boundary. That is not what variation in MEV or priority fees looks like — those fluctuate irregularly epoch to epoch. It looks like one component of the reward was removed at once.

Current data for that vote account from the Stakewiz API:

  • Standard commission: 7.00% (700 bps) — unchanged
  • Jito MEV commission: 100% (10000 bps)
  • Total APY: 4.82%, of which 0.00% from Jito MEV
  • Skip rate 0%, uptime 99.98%, not delinquent

So delegators currently receive none of the MEV rewards. That matches both the size and the shape of the drop.

My questions:

  1. When was the Jito MEV commission on this vote account set to 100%, and was the change announced anywhere?
  2. Is Trezor aware of it? The Trezor Suite documentation describes Solana staking as subject to “a 7% commission applied by Everstake” and does not mention a separate MEV commission at all.
  3. Are there plans to raise this with Everstake, or at least to display the MEV commission in Suite so users can see what they actually receive?

If anyone else stakes SOL through Trezor Suite, could you check your rewards around epoch 1024 and confirm whether you see the same step? It would be useful to know whether this affects all delegators or only some.

2

Resolved — and it was not Everstake. Apologies for the false alarm.

The cause is SIMD-0525, a network-wide change: Solana is reducing slot time in 50 ms steps, from 400 ms down to an eventual 200 ms. An epoch is a fixed 432,000 slots, so a shorter slot means a proportionally shorter epoch — and a proportionally smaller reward per epoch.

Slot time Epoch duration
400 ms 48.0 h
350 ms 42.0 h
300 ms 36.0 h
250 ms 30.0 h
200 ms 24.0 h

The arithmetic matches exactly. 350 → 300 ms is a −14.29% change. I measured −14.33%.

The first step, 400 → 350 ms, activated at epoch 1020 (21 August). If you look further back in your own reward history you should find a second step there of roughly −12.5%. That is the corroboration — two steps, both matching the slot-time reductions.

So nothing was lost. Rewards per epoch are smaller, but epochs arrive proportionally more often. The annual yield is unchanged, and this affects every Solana staker equally, regardless of validator or wallet.

Two more reductions are planned (250 ms and 200 ms), each behind its own feature gate and supermajority vote, so expect two more steps of the same kind — around −16.7% and −20% per epoch respectively. They are not losses either.

One separate finding worth recording, since it came up while investigating:

I pulled the per-epoch history from the Jito API for this vote account. The Jito MEV commission is 10000 bps (100%) and has been for every epoch I checked, 1015 through 1030 — so it was not the cause here. Trezor checked on their side and confirmed the 8% → 100% change happened before SOL staking went live in Trezor Suite.

But it does mean delegators receive no MEV rewards at all. Based on the validator’s actual MEV revenue per epoch, that puts the effective commission at roughly 8% in quiet periods and around 11% when network MEV activity is high, versus the flat “7% commission applied by Everstake” stated in the Trezor Suite documentation.

That is a much smaller matter than what I originally posted, and it is not a reason to change validator. It might still be worth reflecting in the docs, or surfacing the MEV commission in Suite, so the number users see matches what they get.

Thanks to everyone who looked into it.