Scalable Reward Distribution with Changing Stake Sizes

This post is an addendum to the excellent paper Scalable Reward Distribution on the Ethereum Blockchain by Batog et al.¹ The outlined algorithm describes a pull-based approach to distributing rewards proportionally in a staking pool. In other words, instead of pushing rewards to each stakeholder in a for-loop with $O(n)$ complexity, a mathematical trick enables keeping account of the rewards with $O(1)$ complexity and distributing only when the stakeholders decide to pull them. This allows the distribution of things like rewards, dividends, Universal Basic Income, etc. with minimal resources and huge scalability.

1. Batog B., Boca L., Johnson N., Scalable Reward Distribution on the Ethereum Blockchain, 2018. ↩

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