Maximising Your APY

After you have joined the SubQuery Network, completed indexing of your first project, and announced ready to the network, you might have questions on how to maximise your APY and attract as much delegation as possible.

Join the Node Operator community

If you're a Node Operator on the Network, we strongly suggest that you keep up with the latest news, announcements, and tips by joining our Discord. Read more about the Node Operator community here.

Quick Checks

• We strongly recommend that you enable Auto Reduce Over Allocation to prevent being over allocated.
• Ensure you have at least one flex plan enabled for each project deployment so we can send requests to you from our gateway.
• Ensure projects are able to fetch metadata from deployment’s Query Service. An error will appear in the status column if there is an issue.
• Ensure that you are online. GET:{your_indexer_service_url}/healthy should return a 200 with something like

{
  "autoReduceAllocation": true,
  "controller": "",
  "coordinatorVersion": "v2.2.3",
  "indexer": "",
  "os": "Debian GNU/Linux 10 4-CPU",
  "proxyVersion": "v2.4.2",
  "uptime": 8066
}

Weekly Tasks

You may have already setup a Grafana dashboard to monitor metrics from your indexer-coordinator and indexer-proxy services, but there are important notifications and settings you should monitor in the Network App.

We strongly suggest that you log in at the start of each new Era (as close as possible to the start - set a calendar reminder), to resolve any warnings or notifications, as well complete the following key tasks.

Weekly tasks - Claim rewards

If you don't frequently claim your rewards (e.g. once a week), Delegators can see this and may decide against delegating to support you. Make sure you claim your rewards frequently (e.g. once a week), and ideally as soon as they become available after the end of the past Era.

If you are running v2.2.1 or later, rewards are collected automatically. This will result in an Era Reward Collection status of “Frequent” on the All Node Operators dashboard meaning that your Delegators can also receive their rewards. Be sure though that enough ETH balance is in your Controller Account for automatic collection.

Weekly tasks - Check for new project versions

Project creators might deploy new versions of their project codebases each time. We strongly suggest following their release notes and updating your project to match the recommended versions. In some cases you wont need to reindex, just update the project version.

Since Project Boost affects the amount of Stake rewards distributed for running a project, you may want to consider what project deployment version has the highest boost to maximise your Stake rewards.

Weekly tasks - Update SQT allocation

• Avoid having tokens allocated to outdated deployment versions. An “Outdated Allocation Projects” pop up will appear if this occurs. This means that you should adjust your allocation to the latest version (and update to the new version).
• Avoid having “Unallocated Stake”. To maximise rewards, ensure all tokens are allocated. An “Unallocated Stake” pop up will appear if this occurs.

Weekly tasks - Check Project health

• Ensure your project is online. Appending “/healthy” to the end of your http URL should return:

{
  "autoReduceAllocation": true,
  "controller": "",
  "coordinatorVersion": "v2.2.3",
  "indexer": "",
  "os": "Debian GNU/Linux 10 4-CPU",
  "proxyVersion": "v2.4.2",
  "uptime": 8066
}

• Ensure you have at least one flexplan enabled for each project.
• Ensure projects are able to fetch metadata from deployment’s Query Service. An error will appear in the status column if there is an issue.

Selecting what projects to run.

As a node operator, two types of endpoints (or nodes) can be run: SubQuery Indexers endpoints or RPC endpoints. See here for a complete list.

• Indexer endpoints typically receive a higher portion of their rewards via stake rewards which is relatively stable era-to-era.
• RPC endpoints typically receive more query rewards which can produce a higher overall APY but with more volatility as query demand changes.

These endpoints then index various projects. Project rewards come from a combination of its Stake Rewards and Query Rewards. They are generated by each project based on the amount of boost allocated to a project and then shared proportionally between the number of operators (for that project).

• Stake rewards are measured in stake APY, the Annual Percentage Yield you can expect from allocating SQT to a project. It is a function of the boost applied to a project, which sets the size of its total stake reward pool, divided by the stake allocated to the project.
• Query Rewards are generated when people pay for queries against a project.

To maximise rewards:

• look for projects which have high boost, but low allocated stake. (for stake rewards)
• look for projects that have high average query rewards per Node Operator (for query rewards)
• low competition (in general)
• low project complexity (in general)

Also, project database size is a good indicator of cost

Node Operator Rewards FAQs

How can I attract more indexing & RPC requests?

The public gateway will allocate requests based on your:

• Reliability: Improve your uptime to increase queries.
• Block height: Keep your nodes fully synced to receive queries.
• Latency: Reduce latency by keeping your Node CPU usage healthy with good network connection.
• Price: Lower pricing can receive more requests.

Should I run all projects or focus on a select few

For indexer projects, use the stake APY and the cost of running the project to determine the viability of running a project.

For RPC projects, if you are already running RPC nodes for other networks and have capacity to serve more requests, it may be beneficial to add SubQuery as an extra source of requests to maximise your return from the node with very little added cost.

Do I need to allocate stake to earn query rewards?

No. Your query rewards are only slightly impacted by your total stake, but are not impacted by which project you allocate the stake to, unlike indexer projects. For example, you can allocate 1 SQT to an RPC project and still receive query rewards.

So when would I allocate stake to my RPC projects?

RPC Projects do also earn stake APY. You should allocate stake if it makes competitive stake APY compared to your other projects.

Can you add support for the other RPCs I run?

We are planning to expand our RPC projects. Letting us know which other nodes you run can help us to onboard new networks faster.

Why did I get 0 query rewards last era?

Projects may receive 0 or low query rewards if:

• Your project is not competitive at price v performance (see How can I attract more RPC requests?)
• Your project was offline
• Your project was unhealthy
• Your project is not fully synced
• You did not have Flex Plan pricing enabled
• Your indexer version does not automatically claim query rewards (must be v2.2.1 or later)
• Your indexer controller account does not have balance to claim query rewards

How can I attract more Delegators

Understand what Delegators are looking for in Node Operators

My delegation increased. Is it more profitable to add more projects, or to increase stake in my existing projects?

If your current projects continue to earn competitive stake APY after adding additional stake, you may just continue to serve a smaller number of projects.

However, if you don't increase your APY after allocating new delegation to an existing project, you may want to consider expanding operations with the new Delegation and adding other new projects that are returning higher stake APY and rebalancing your stake.

Why do some Node Operators have >100% APY

Node Operator APY compares their total returns to the amount they have personally staked (self stake)

Node Operators can achieve high Node Operator APY when:

• They have large delegation relative to their own self stake, meaning they earn extra rewards in commission off somebody else's delegation.
• They prioritise projects with high query rewards so are less dependent on the size of their stake.

High node operator APY does not necessarily mean that they make more overall rewards or profit.