What changed
Before the Root Reborn upgrade (runtime v441, 3 August 2026), the dividends a root validator earned across the subnets were sold for TAO every epoch and paid out. They are not sold any more. Every validator registered on the root subnet now owns exactly one fund, and the dividends it earns are deposited into that fund as they are — alpha positions on the subnets that paid them.
If you stake TAO on the root subnet, you hold an accrual right to shares in that validator’s fund, in proportion to your root stake. Your principal has not moved: root stake is still TAO held one-for-one on netuid 0, and unstaking it returns TAO. What changed is where the earnings live — they now sit inside the fund, and their value moves with whatever the fund holds.
Your stake, your dividends and fund shares
Three things are yours when you stake on root, and they behave differently: the TAO you staked, the fund shares your stake has earned, and the value of those shares today. The rest of this section takes them one at a time.
Fund shares
Your principal stays TAO. Staking TAO with a validator on root keeps it as root stake, one-for-one. It does not buy fund shares. Unstaking returns TAO, subject to the root hold window (RootStakeUnlockInterval), which is counted from your last stake add, remove or claim on that validator.
Your dividends are not paid in TAO. They are deposited into the validator’s fund, and each deposit mints new fund shares at the fund’s current share price for the value it adds, so holders already in the fund are not diluted. Deposits are batched: a credit below the chain’s minimum keeps merging with later ones until it is large enough to deposit.
What you are owed is counted in shares. For each validator the chain keeps one running number: shares minted per unit of root stake (BasketRate). For each staker it keeps a watermark (BasketClaimed). Your owed shares are the rate times your root stake, minus your watermark, so they grow for as long as you are staked. When you add or remove stake, the watermark moves with it: you never gain or lose shares you have already accrued, which is also why you can unstake and still claim later.
Share price
A share’s price is the fund’s realizable value in TAO — what its holdings would fetch if sold, slippage included — divided by the number of shares outstanding. Your claimable value is your owed shares times that price. The shares only ever go up while you are staked; the price goes wherever the fund’s holdings go.
A worked example
Round numbers, one validator, chosen to make the arithmetic visible rather than to describe any real fund.
- You stake 1,000 τ on root with a validator. Counting yours, 100,000 τ of root stake sits behind it.
- Over a month, the validator’s dividend deposits mint 5,000 new shares. The rate rises by 5,000 ÷ 100,000 = 0.05 shares per τ of root stake.
- You are owed 0.05 × 1,000 − 0 = 50 shares. At a share price of 1.10 τ that is 55 τ claimable. If the fund’s holdings fall and the price drops to 0.95 τ, the same 50 shares are 47.5 τ.
- You stake another 1,000 τ. Your watermark rises by 0.05 × 1,000 = 50, so you are still owed 0.05 × 2,000 − 50 = 50 shares — nothing gained, nothing lost. From here you accrue on 2,000 τ.
- You claim with the price back at 1.10 τ. Your 50 shares are redeemed by selling your slice of every holding, and roughly 55 τ is added to your root stake, making about 2,055 τ — the exact figure is whatever the sales fill at. You are owed zero shares, and the new stake earns dividends from then on.
What the numbers mean
The figures the site shows for root staking, and what each one does and does not include.
| Figure | What it means |
|---|---|
| Root stake | The TAO you staked on root with a validator, held one-for-one. Unstaking returns it as TAO, after the root hold window. |
| Root yield | A validator’s root dividends only. It leaves out share-price change, so it is not what a root staker made. |
| Headline validator yield | The annual rate shown beside a validator when you pick one to stake with. It is the yield of the subnet pools, in alpha terms, not of root. |
| Share price | The fund’s value per share. The fund pages and directory mark it at spot and splice it onto the network index at the fund’s baseline, so compare its movement against the index, not its level against another fund. Claims are priced at realizable value. |
| Fund 7D / 30D | The change in the fund’s share price over the window: a share-price return, not dividends. Unavailable while a fund is too new, too small to price, or its history was reset. |
| Claimable (unrealized) | Your owed shares times the share price, now. Separate from your root stake, and it can go down. |
| Claimed (realized) | What your past claims added to your root stake. It is root stake from then on. |
| Your total return | Dividends plus share-price change. The site does not yet publish a verified per-holder figure; the staker TWR on a fund page describes a unit of stake in that fund, not your position. |
Why claimable can go down
Claimable is a count of shares times a price, and only the count is guaranteed to hold still. The price is the fund’s realizable value per share, and that value is mostly alpha on other subnets. When those alpha prices fall, when the pools the fund holds get thinner so a sale would fetch less, or when a validator’s rebalancing trade pays fees and slippage, the price falls and your claimable falls with it — even in a week when dividends kept arriving.
This is not hypothetical. Measured on 25 September 2026 over the preceding 100,000 or so blocks (about two weeks), the largest fund on the network added dividends worth about +0.22% while its share price moved −6.78%. A holder in that window accrued more shares and still saw their claimable value fall. The dividend figure alone would have told them the opposite.
Claiming
A claim (claim_root_with_hotkey, one validator at a time) redeems all your owed shares with that validator. The chain sells your pro-rata slice of every holding for TAO and adds the TAO to your root stake, where it earns dividends like the rest. There is no best moment to claim; there are trade-offs:
- Slippage. Selling your slice moves prices on thin pools. A larger claim sells more into the same pools.
- Transaction fee. Paid on every claim, and larger for a fund with more holdings to sell. Many small claims pay it many times.
- Dust. A claim worth less than the chain’s threshold (
RootClaimableThreshold) cannot be made yet. The shares stay owed and keep growing. - Exposure. Unclaimed, your value rides the fund’s holdings, up or down. Claimed, it is TAO root stake that earns dividends on a larger base. A claim also restarts the root hold window.
Buying shares directly
Investing (stake_into_basket) is the other way in, and it works the opposite way round from staking. Your TAO buys fund shares outright, priced at the fund’s value before your purchase, and is spread across what the fund already holds in proportion — or held as TAO if the fund holds nothing yet. You pay your own entry slippage and swap fees. No root stake is created, so the shares do not grow on their own, and unstaking does not return them: you get the value back by claiming.
Since runtime v464 (17 September 2026) a validator can also rebalance its fund with trades (swap_basket) when fund trading is switched on network-wide. They are ordinary swaps inside chain caps, covered under Rebalancing below.
Three ways money moves
Stake. You stake TAO on the root subnet with a validator. You do not buy anything: each time that validator’s dividends are deposited into its fund, new shares are minted, and your entitlement grows by your share of the root stake behind the fund. It accrues on its own, with no transaction from you.
Invest. You can also buy shares outright with TAO, from 0.002 τ up. The TAO is spread pro-rata across what the fund already holds, by realizable value, and is held as TAO cash if the fund holds nothing yet, so the shares you get represent exactly the exposure they describe. A pure investor needs no root stake at all — this is a first-class position, not a top-up.
Investing is the one path here that pays trading costs. Your TAO buys alpha at market, so the deposit carries the ordinary swap fee and the slippage of every pool it lands in, and you receive shares for what it was worth after that — not for what you sent. The fund’s own two flows are fee-free by contrast: dividends are credited without a fee, and the sales that pay a claim are too. Slippage still applies to claims. A validator’s rebalancing trades are the exception: both legs pay the ordinary swap fee and move the pool prices, and the whole fund bears that cost.
Claim. Claiming converts your accrued fund value into root stake on the same validator. It never lands in your wallet. To get TAO out, claim first, then unstake — two separate steps. A claim takes everything you have accrued with that validator: there are no partial claims, and no way to pick which subnets it comes from. Claims are per validator; the network refuses the account-wide version for anyone staking with two or more validators, so the fund pages offer one claim per validator and nothing else.
Is it worth claiming?
Not necessarily — and that is a normal answer. Not claiming leaves you long the fund: its holdings keep compounding with the validator’s own dividends, and your root stake keeps minting fresh shares. Claiming leaves you long root stake instead, on a larger base that mints more shares from then on. It is a choice about which exposure you want, not a chore you are behind on.
The switch is not free. Your slice of the fund’s holdings is sold to pay you, and those sales move the price on thin pools — that slippage is the real cost. There is no swap fee on a claim. There is a transaction fee, and it behaves unusually: the network reserves an upper bound up front and refunds the difference in the same block, so the figure your wallet quotes before you sign is a deliberate over-estimate. The amount actually charged scales with how many holdings the fund has to sell.
Two more things worth knowing. A claim worth less than the chain’s dust threshold is skipped rather than paid — nothing is lost, and the entitlement keeps growing until it clears. And unstaking from root does not forfeit shares you have not claimed: what you have accrued stays accrued.
Two prices, and which one counts
A fund holds alpha on many subnets, so “what is it worth” has two answers. The realizable value is what those holdings would actually fetch if they were sold today, with the price impact of selling them included. The spot value multiplies each holding by its current price and ignores the impact entirely.
Realizable is the money number. Every share minted and every claim paid is priced at it, and it is what the site quotes when it tells you what a claim would be worth. Spot is shown beside it as a reference, with the difference labelled exit slippage. On a fund holding thin pools the two can diverge widely, which is why a page quoting spot as “what you would get” is telling you something that is not true.
Choosing a manager
Take rate and uptime used to be the whole comparison. They still matter, but the fund has made allocation the bigger question: two validators earning identical dividends can end up with very different portfolios, and that difference compounds.
The fund’s share price against the network-wide index is the manager’s record. Both series are spliced so they start together on the index line at the moment the fund’s baseline is stamped, so the gap between them is allocation skill rather than a difference in starting point. Your own return as a root staker is a different series — the staker time-weighted return, which measures what a unit of stake in that fund has earned since the same stamp. The site shows both, labelled.
Two cautions. A fund marked no baseline yet has no starting price on chain, so it has no share price, dividend return or comparison with the index until it does; those figures show as a dash, not as zero. And a figure some tools publish as “staker yield” is not a yield or a rate of any kind: it is a mark of what has accrued but not yet been claimed, re-valued at today’s price, and it moves with the market even in a week when no dividend landed at all.
The fund directory ranks every fund on these measures, and each fund page shows its holdings and its history.
Rebalancing: what a validator can trade
Dividends are kept as they arrive: each one is credited to the fund as the alpha it was paid in, on the subnet that paid it. Nothing is sold on the way in, so there is no fee and no slippage. Every fund receives its dividends this way.
Since runtime v464 (17 September 2026) a validator can also change what its fund holds. A rebalancing trade sells part of one holding for TAO and buys another holding with it; either side can be the fund’s TAO cash slot on the root subnet. Fund shares and every staker’s entitlement are unchanged — only the fund’s composition moves. The trade is signed by the coldkey that owns the validator’s hotkey, or by a proxy that coldkey has authorised for fund trading.
The chain bounds every trade:
- Trading has a network-wide switch, and governance can freeze trading for a single fund, for example after a suspected key compromise. A frozen fund still accepts investments and pays claims.
- Each leg must fill within 2% of the strictest of the subnet’s moving price, its fast moving price and its spot price, or the trade fails.
- A turnover allowance: the TAO passing through a fund’s trades comes out of a budget sized as a share of its NAV, which refills over 7,200 blocks (about a day).
- A liquidity cap: after a buy, the fund may hold no more than a set share of that subnet’s pool alpha reserve, and it may not buy more than that share within a day.
- A concentration cap: a buy may not leave one holding above a set share of the fund’s NAV. Only buys are checked; a holding that grows past the cap through price or dividends is left alone.
The switch and the three caps are chain settings that governance can change. The chain parameters reference reads their current values from the network.
Before 17 September 2026
From 27 August 2026 (block 8,938,466) until runtime v464 (enacted at block 9,088,597, 17 September 2026), validators could not trade their funds. They could instead publish a root weight vector (set_root_weights): a list of subnets that steered where future dividends were sold and redeployed. A vector needed at least 16 destinations, none above 6.25%, could be changed at most once every 100 blocks, and never rebalanced what a fund already held. Twenty-one validators published one. Runtime v464 removed the call, and no fund carries a vector today.
What you cannot do
The limits below are properties of the chain, not of this site. Any tool offering you one of them is showing a control that does nothing.
- Sell, transfer or lend fund shares. There is no secondary market for them on chain; the only ways they move are a claim and a key swap.
- Claim into your wallet. The payout is always root stake on the same validator.
- Claim part of what you have accrued. A claim takes all of it, or none.
- Choose which subnets a claim is paid from. The claim is priced against the whole fund.
- Direct a validator’s trades. Only the coldkey that owns the validator’s hotkey, or its authorised proxy, can rebalance the fund.
- Invest into a validator that is not registered on the root subnet. No root seat, no fund.
Glossary
- Fund
- The pool of stake positions a root validator accumulates from its dividends, known on chain as the validator’s beta basket. One per root-registered validator, always.
- Fund shares (β)
- How ownership of a fund is counted. Shares are a claim on a proportion of the fund, not on any particular subnet inside it — which is what lets the fund change what it holds without touching anybody’s entitlement.
- Realizable NAV
- What the fund’s holdings would actually fetch if they were sold today, slippage included. This is the number every mint and every claim is priced at.
- Share rate
- The running total of shares minted per unit of root stake on a validator. Your entitlement is that rate times your root stake, minus what you have already claimed.
- Share price (NAV per share)
- The fund’s realizable NAV divided by its shares outstanding: what one share would fetch today. It moves with the fund’s holdings, in either direction.
- Claimable (unrealized)
- Your owed shares times the share price, right now. Not part of your root stake until you claim, and it can fall as well as rise.
- Claim
- Redeeming your owed shares with one validator: your slice of every holding is sold for TAO, and the TAO is added to your root stake there.
- Claimed (realized)
- What past claims have added to your root stake. From then on it is TAO root stake like the rest, and no longer moves with the fund.
- Accumulate in place
- Each dividend is kept as the alpha it arrived as, on the subnet that paid it. This is how every fund receives dividends.
- Rebalancing trade
- A validator sells part of one holding for TAO and buys another holding with it (on chain, swap_basket). Fund shares and every entitlement are unchanged; only what the fund holds moves. Available since runtime v464, 17 September 2026.
- Curated (27 Aug – 17 Sep 2026)
- A fund whose validator had published a root weight vector steering where future dividends were deployed. Runtime v464 removed vectors on 17 September 2026; no fund is curated today.
- No baseline yet
- A fund with no starting price on chain yet. Until it has one, it has no share price, dividend return or comparison with the index, so those figures show as a dash. The starting price is set the next time the fund issues shares.
- Dust threshold
- The chain’s minimum for a claim to execute. Below it a claim is skipped rather than paid — the entitlement stays yours and keeps growing.