IoTeX Zanzibar hard fork pays voter rewards on chain

IoTeX (IOTX) confirmed on October 19, 2026 that the Zanzibar hard fork was live on mainnet and that staking rewards are now paid by the protocol. The activation height the project published is block 53,533,081, estimated for 02:00 UTC that day; the confirmation post is timestamped 02:54 UTC. Under IoTeX Improvement Proposal 59 (IIP-59), voter rewards for migrated delegates are computed on chain and paid once each reward era, with no off-chain distributor and no claim. IoTeX said the first of those distributions would land the next day, and that delegates without a complete reward profile would stay off the new path.

Larger staking books have gone the other way. Ether staking is already an institutional position, and regulators are being asked whether a staking receipt is a product of its own. IoTeX is not issuing a receipt. For migrated delegates it removes the distributor and pays the voter from consensus state. The payout can be read on chain. The protocol will not invent a voter share the delegate never set.

How the chain splits a reward

Before Zanzibar, Hermes sat outside consensus. It held keys, recomputed staking weights, claimed delegate rewards and sent voters their portion, taking a service fee. IIP-59 puts that job in the protocol. The chain reads voter portions from the DelegateProfile contract, pays commission immediately to the owner, and pools the voter share. There is no claim and no distribution fee. Settlement is once per reward era of 24 epochs, which the proposal calls roughly a day, even though the share accrues every block and every epoch. Commission on each reward is floored, so the division remainder goes to the voter pool.

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Payment goes to the voter's account, to a destination the voter sets, or into an eligible native staking bucket already registered in the AutoDeposit contract. A registered compound bucket takes precedence over a direct destination. Hermes forwarding records are not imported, so a voter who used them has to set a destination again. If the profile is missing or unreadable when the era snapshot is taken, that era's voter portion is treated as zero and the reward is paid to the owner as commission. The specification also refuses to overdraw a pool: payouts attributed to a delegate cannot exceed the amount frozen for the era.

Who migrated, and when the first payout is due

The v2.5.0 release note counted the candidate set at block 52,004,121, before the fork. It found 88 Hermes-vault delegates with both portion fields set, and said those would be migrated automatically. Nine vault delegates with incomplete portions would stay on Hermes. Another 26 candidates, not using a vault address, were outside that pass and would have to opt in. The automatic pass runs once, in the activation block. A later opt-in is owner-only and one-way; the proposal has no return to the old path. The vote itself had closed in August. IoTeX's governance page shows IIP-59 passed, on a ballot open from 00:00 UTC on August 8, 2026 to 00:00 UTC on August 15, 2026, with 41,062,730.34 votes in favour, 0 against and 0 abstaining, from 38 voters.

Raullen Chai, co-founder at IoTeX, wrote on August 17, 2026: "Huge milestone for the @iotex_io community with IIP-59 officially approved!"

The October 2 post set the mainnet height and said rewards would be settled at those 24-epoch boundaries. The October 19 confirmation quotes an October 13 instruction to operators: move to iotex-core v2.5.1, change nothing in the configuration, and do not resync, because nodes left on v2.4.x fall out of consensus at the fork. That confirmation is also the payout clock. The first on-chain distribution was due the following day, not in the activation block. The fork also puts proof-of-possession checks on delegate keys, ahead of Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) signature aggregation. The release note adds that mainnet does not need a replacement genesis file: the height and the contract addresses are in the binary.

For a custodian, the change is operational. Rewards can be aimed at a separate account, as desks already prefer when staking sits beside custody, and it arrives while staking rules diverge across the US, EU and UK. Zanzibar does not promise a voter share. Delegates left off the automatic migration stay on Hermes until an owner opts in, and a migrated delegate with a bad profile can keep an entire era. The check after October 19 is whether the delegate was migrated, and whether the first era credits the account the voter controls.

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