How do the Staking Rewards payouts work?

Question

I've added Staking to substrate-node-template and just explored the feature. I've managed to add validators and nominators and it looks like everything is working well.

One thing I'm not able to figure out is how the rewards are being distributed. I've been watching the events at the end of every era and it looks like only Staking.EraPaid is being fired.

From what I understand from the discussion here, What does the Staking.EraPaid event mean? , I should be getting the events Staking.PayoutStarted and Staking.Rewarded as well.

I guess I'm trying to figure out the following

1. Which pallet is actually distributing the rewards? pallet_election_provider_multi_phase or pallet_staking
2. Is there anything I need to define for the Payouts to happen?

Answer 1

So, validators are paid proportionally to the amount of era points they have collected. Payments occur at the end of every era.

• end_era triggers the payout for the finished era.

• do_payout_stakers for checking out how the payment calculation starts so validators get fraction of the era reward that belongs to the validator and which part of the reward goes to its nominators, between other things.

• make_payout where the payments to stakers are done.

If you check those methods you will see that the interesting events to follow, and very well pointed out in the linked discussion are PayoutStarted and Rewarded

Now, nominators, as @Purple_Turtle mentions, need to call payout_stakers so all nominators behind a specific validator get their rewards. This can be called by anyone, and triggers do_payout_stakers mentioned above.