How this works

Nothing is credited to an account without a matching record. Every movement (a deposit, a reward, a withdrawal, a commission) is written as two or more balanced entries in a double-entry ledger: one account is debited and another is credited, by the same amount, at the same moment.

A deposit does not just increase a number next to your name; it increases your balance and increases the amount held in custody, in the same entry. A reward is not invented; it debits what the pool earned and credits your account by your share of it.

Because every entry has a counter-entry, the ledger always sums to zero. Add every account across the entire system at any moment and the total is zero. Your balance is never a number we set by hand: it is derived by summing your entries, and that derived sum is checked against the stored balance continuously. A disagreement between the two would be a bug we could detect immediately, not a fact we could quietly paper over.

Every reward a validator earns is split three ways, in proportions fixed before you delegate and shown on each pool’s own page: a commission that funds running the validator, a share that grows the infrastructure fund used to launch validators on new networks, and the remainder credited to every delegator in that pool, in proportion to what they held during the period.

What a pool pays out on a given day is not the raw amount earned that day. Each pool has a daily rate we set and review, deliberately below what the network is expected to yield. We record both figures separately for every pool and every day (what the validator actually earned, and what was paid out), so the gap between them is a number you can see rather than an assumption you have to take on trust.

On a day that earns more than it pays, the surplus goes to that pool’s reserve. On a day that earns less, the reserve covers the difference; if the reserve cannot, we waive our own commission before anything else is touched, and any remainder is funded by the company and recorded as a subsidy. It is never funded from another user’s deposit. The ledger cannot post it that way. The rate is not a guarantee: it is reviewed, it can change, and the reserve behind it is finite.

The network rate shown on a pool’s page is a separate figure: what the chain itself paid when it was last measured, published with its source and date. It is not a rate Sentinel offers.