To understand consensus layer rewards, we first must understand what the consensus layer entails. A consensus means a general agreement is reached. On Ethereum, this means that at least 66% of the nodes agree on the global state of the network. This consensus layer incorporates the consensus mechanism, which is the entire stack of protocols, incentives, and ideas that enable the distributed set of nodes to agree upon the state of the Ethereum blockchain.

The consensus layer rewards awarded are for participating in the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol by proposing or validating blocks, voting for their view of the head of the chain, and participating in sync committees.

Breaking this down further, a validator can receive the following types of consensus layer rewards.

Block proposal reward

This reward is for validators that propose blocks.

Additionally, block proposal rewards can include whistleblowing rewards for providing evidence of dishonest validators, for example, proposing multiple blocks in a single slot or submitting contradictory attestations.

Attestation reward

Attestation rewards are the most common type of reward for validators.

An attestation is a vote in favor of the validator’s view of the chain. Every epoch (6.4 minutes), a validator proposes an attestation to the network. This attestation entails the most recent justified block and the first block in the current epoch. This information is then compiled for all participating validators in the network, enabling it to reach consensus regarding the state of the Ethereum blockchain.

Validators attest to their view of the chain as part of the consensus protocol by:

• voting for a source checkpoint for Casper FFG;
• voting for a target checkpoint for Casper FFG; and
• voting for a chain head block for LMD-GHOST.

Sync committee reward

A sync committee is a group of 512 validators. Every 27 hours (256 epochs), 512 validators are randomly assigned by the Ethereum network to a sync committee.

This committee continually signs the block header that is the new head of the chain at each slot. This purpose is to allow light clients (less than complete node, i.e. a pruned node), mobile phones, or embedded devices to verify the blockchain without needing to connect to an external provider. Light clients can authenticate block signatures, reducing the computational power required to authenticate a block header. Validators in the committee get significantly more rewards for serving light clients.

For those interested in learning more about consensus layer rewards, we recommend reading Rewards at eth2book.info and PoS rewards and penalties.

An essential property of consensus layer rewards is that they decrease as more validators join and increase as validators exit.

The consensus layer rewards stay the same regardless of network traffic volume.