October 8, 2021: Payouts for the month of September complete, PLUS, plan for SNO Payments rules

Node Operators
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First off, hello! Payouts are now complete.

We paid 598 unique wallet addresses on layer 1. All of these wallet addresses earned enough that the payment fee was 1/4th of the payout amount or less (but see below for future months!). There is no specific minimum payout threshold dollar amount, but it was roughly around $52.

We paid 915 unique wallet addresses through zkSync. Once again, we did not enforce minimum payment fees here at all as an incentive. Thanks to everyone who opted in! zkSync is especially valuable to us as we can cover (smaller) transaction fees with STORJ instead of Eth. Across both layers, there were 1507 unique wallet addresses.

When we got together for the Fireside Chat last month, there were a number of questions about payouts, minimum thresholds, L2 payouts on zkSync, and changes to the payout rates for storage, egress bandwidth and repair bandwidth. We’ve been working on a proposal to the community, and based on a suggestion from @brightsilence, we have an approach we’re ready to share with the community for feedback.

This proposal is only for how we handle payouts. As we’ve previously stated, we don’t have any immediate plans to make changes to the payout rates for storage, egress bandwidth and repair bandwidth.

We’re proposing the following changes to the monthly node payout process:

  • Reducing the L1 payout threshold from 25% to 10%
    • This means that with higher ETH transaction fees, less nodes will be paid each month on L1
    • We will continue to do L1 payments on a monthly basis
    • Example: If ETH transaction fees at the time of payouts are $10, the minimum payout for that month will be $100; Payouts below the threshold are accrued for the next regular payout
  • Adding a 10% bonus to all L2 payouts
    • We want to incentivize more use of L2 payouts for lower transaction fees
    • We will continue to do L2 payments on a monthly basis
    • Example: If a normal payout transaction is $100, the actual payout on L2 for that month will be $110 paid in STORJ

Ultimately, we are interested in paying transfer fees in STORJ where possible, and zkSync lets us do this. We previously considered a fixed-amount bonus per zkSync transaction, but ultimately that policy seemed more likely to be abused by bad actors.

Please let us know your thoughts! We expect this will go into effect for October earnings that will be paid in the month of November.

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Thanks for the update @jtolio! That’ll do it for me, I’ll make sure to make the switch before the next payout cycle. Good to see you liked it idea of a percentage bonus and implemented it this quickly.

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I’ve always recommended zksync for new SNOs. Now that’s just a no-brainer. Yeah, transaction costs to move the tokens to an L1 exchange are a bit higher, but the 10% bonus will cover that. And added to that is the upside that you can pay for the transaction with Storj. New SNOs would otherwise first have to acquire ETH and send it to their wallet. All of which comes with transaction costs of its own. L1 payouts really only make sense to large node operators now, with access to multiple IP subnets. And even they should probably just take the extra 10%.

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Must have just missed the cutoff amount (My estimate for the payout was ~49.99). However only 1 of 4 nodes show an undistributed amount. Should I be concerned? or does it take a while for the undistributed amount to post?

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At recent fees this means I won’t get an L1 payment for about a year. In fact whatever is left unpaid is stuck with STORJ given the same threshold applies to graceful exit as for regular payment and I don’t have a lot held back (or can I still take advantage of the 4x threshold if I complete a graceful exit quickly?). Why not offer the option to subtract the fee from the L1 payout, the same way mining pools do?

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This means that only 1.5K of 12K total nodes get paid every month and that amount is bound to get smaller. I wonder how many of those are leaving without ever seeing a dime. Do you have that statistic ?

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1.5K wallet addresses doesn’t mean 1.5K nodes. (I’m running 9 nodes for example, using a single address for all of them)

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I have 2 nodes, the older one is 11 month old, the newer one 7 month old. These two are generating around 10 USD/month together.
Frankly speaking, I tried but could not find a step-by-step instruction about zk-sync → ETH conversion for the mentioned 10% extra. What I found was waaaaay more expensive.
I’m ready to receive the earned money by any way, which is the best for Storj, but I think a very basic, understandable instruction manual would be great.
10 USD each month is not much, but already a good and visible earning for any SNO. So we should get it on a regular base, without any extra tricks. For example, I can cover my monthly internet cost with it and this is all why I started this whole project.

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All satellites report back payout info to your node individually. It can take a couple of days before everything is up to date. No reason to worry.

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same here I have 40+ nodes on 1 payout address
Most on them over 12 month.
500+$ a month

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I’m curious, are you going to make the switch to zkSync?

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Please Storj think about again to have WRAPED Storj

The Ethereum fees are the hell. zkSync is defacto not usable. PoS on Ethereum still take ages

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I understand these changes and am ok with them.

The 10% bonus for zkSync did it for me - moving my nodes to use zkSync right now. Will see how it works.

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With this proposal anyone who earns enough to get paid every month can benefit from zksync, and the more you earn, the greater is the benefit. No way someone from top 10 earners is not going to switch, unless he hates money or zksync.

It becomes less obvious the closer you get to the threshold, especially if you want to withdraw every month. You’re probably going to pay more in fees and then there’s the inconvenience of having to use zksync wallet. Last time I checked it was not possible to set max gas price for your withdrawal, so you can’t set the gas low and expect the tx to execute in a day or two, but at half price.

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Could you translate all the fees you had to pay into eth gas? Gas cost and eth price both vary, but required gas amounts always stay the same.

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thanks for this info. Glad to hear it works on Ledger!

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Yep. 8 hours later (over night) and all nodes show undistributed amount. I’m ok with getting paid every 2 months via L1. Even with a 10% cutoff it would only be 3 months, not great but tolerable.

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I will not switch, I would need to earn at least 80 per month just to break even. I’m sure that all those wales earning hundreds of dollars each month this is a good move.

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You keep raising the threshold on me. I’m not using zksync until exchanges support it natively. Let me guess - when I finally get to 10% you’re going to raise it again?

Apparently the same threshold applies to graceful exits as well. I guess you’re going to have to hold on to it for a few years and then escheat it to the state for me to pick up. I hope you’re properly managing that, right?

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For those of us who have no use for L2 transactions, @jtolio is STORJ willing to consider the option of SNO paid L1 fees? For example Ethermine stopped paying network fees to miners and is also encouraging an L2 solution. But (!) they do allow anyone to manually initiate a payout on L1 and pay the gas fees. Can STORJ allow the same?

2 Likes