Delegation Economics

How LPT inflation, treasury allocation, reward cut, fee share, and reward reliability combine into real delegator outcomes.

Delegating LPT can earn you two things: a share of newly minted LPT and a share of ETH fees earned by your orchestrator. The first is protocol-driven. The second depends on real network demand. Both are filtered through the orchestrator you choose.

Where delegator rewards come from

Each protocol round, the BondingManager mints new LPT for bonded stake. The amount depends on the current inflation state, which adjusts around Livepeer’s target bonding rate.

As of 6 April 2026, the on-chain treasury reward cut remains 10% under LIP-92. Delegators and orchestrators share the remaining 90% of round issuance.

Inflation reward maths

Your LPT reward per round can be expressed as:

Where:

• is the issuance available to delegators and orchestrators after any treasury allocation
• is the total stake bonded to your orchestrator
• is total bonded stake across the network
• is the orchestrator’s rewardCut
• is your bonded stake

Worked example

Suppose:

• 900 LPT of round issuance is available to delegators and orchestrators after treasury allocation
• your orchestrator controls 5% of total bonded stake, so its pool gets 45 LPT
• the orchestrator’s rewardCut is 10%, so delegators share 40.5 LPT
• you hold 10% of that pool’s total bonded stake

Your round reward would be 4.05 LPT.

ETH fee revenue

Gateways pay orchestrators in ETH for completed work. Delegators only receive a share if:

• the orchestrator actually earns fees
• the orchestrator’s feeShare passes some of those fees through

The fee-side formula is:

Where:

• is total ETH fee revenue earned by the orchestrator
• is the orchestrator’s feeShare
• is your bonded stake
• is total stake bonded to that orchestrator

rewardCut and feeShare in plain English

Parameter	What it controls	Better for delegators
rewardCut	share of inflationary LPT kept by the orchestrator	lower
feeShare	share of ETH fees passed to delegators	higher

As of 6 April 2026, current Explorer product surfaces use Fee Share, not Fee Cut. For feeShare, higher is better. For rewardCut, lower is better.

Why reward reliability matters more than a tiny commission difference

Each round, the orchestrator still has to call reward(). If they miss it, the pool misses that round’s inflation.

That means a “slightly worse commission but near-perfect reward reliability” can outperform a “great commission headline with weak reliability”.

How rewards accrue and compound

Rewards accumulate in contract state. They do not automatically appear in your wallet.

To realise them, you call claimEarnings(). After that, you can:

• leave the resulting bonded balance in place to compound
• unbond if your goal is to exit and withdraw

See Manage Your Delegation before you claim, because the timing of a claim relative to the orchestrator’s reward() call matters.

What changes your real return in practice

Inflation changes over time

The current mint rate is not static. Check live state rather than relying on an old annualised screenshot or article.

ETH fees are demand-driven

Strong fee share only matters if the orchestrator actually earns fee revenue.

Orchestrators can change their terms

Commission settings are not permanent promises. Re-check them periodically.

Stake growth changes your pool share

If many more delegators join the same orchestrator after you, your percentage of that pool gets smaller.

Related pages

Choose an Orchestrator

Use the economics on this page to compare operators properly.

Protocol Parameters

Check the governance-controlled values behind inflation, treasury allocation, and unbonding.

Manage Your Delegation

See how claim timing, compounding, and redelegation affect realised return.

Livepeer Explorer

Inspect live network state instead of relying on stale static yield assumptions.