# The Epoch Rewards Upgrade is Live on Espresso Mainnet

*A change in reward distribution, plus upgrades to security, reliability, and lower operator costs across the network.*

By [Espresso Foundation](https://paragraph.com/@espressofndn) · 2026-07-22

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Espresso's validators successfully upgraded mainnet yesterday, July 21. We're calling this the Epoch Rewards upgrade, since the major protocol change in this release is a revision of how rewards get distributed. It also strengthens network resilience and security and lowers the cost of running an Espresso node.

Here's a full breakdown:

**Per-epoch rewards**
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*   Reward distribution moves from per-block to per-epoch cadence.
    
*   Removes reward computation and reward merkle tree updates from the per-block validation path, previously a throughput bottleneck when hitting a few thousand delegators.
    
*   Higher sustainable throughput; opens the door to further resource reductions in later releases. Reduces compute requirements for nodes.
    

**Light client catchup**
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*   The Espresso light client, which verifies Espresso’s consensus protocol, can now serve as a catchup provider. The light client verifies consensus certificates itself, so nodes can fetch historical data by block height without already knowing its hash.
    

**Security and liveness hardening**
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*   The stake table contract now rejects invalid BLS and x25519 keys, and nodes tolerate invalid on-chain keys, hardening Espresso's stake table contracts.
    

**More resilient networking**
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*   Nodes now advertise their network identity and correctly drop peers from other networks. Peer discovery is more reliable and cross-network gossip bandwidth is eliminated.
    

**Node telemetry**
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*   Built-in telemetry reporting with process memory gauges. Simplifies configuration and maintenance burden for node operators, reducing cost.
    

**Pruning and query node storage cost**
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*   Removal of historical data from the database no longer negatively affects consensus or query performance.
    
*   Repeated hashes, which uniquely identify transactions, blocks, and more, are stored once and referenced by id, shrinking the query node database, alongside broader query performance improvements that reduce compute costs.
    
*   Additional query performance improvements, reducing database compute requirements (cost) for query nodes.
    

**Operator cost & quality of life improvements**
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*   Database reliability: automatic retry on transient Postgres errors, migration queries no longer stall busy nodes.
    
*   Memory soak testing to catch memory leaks before release.
    
*   Log hygiene: no raw merkle proofs or trees in logs, actionable network diagnostics, less noise. Reduces maintenance burden and cost for logs processing for operators, which can be substantial.
    
*   Binary upgrade tests to catch incompatibilities between version earlier. Reduces risk and maintenance burden when deploying software upgrades.
    

The code behind this upgrade is public. Review the [GitHub repo](https://github.com/EspressoSystems/espresso-network), or check out the specific [release branch](https://github.com/EspressoSystems/espresso-network/tree/release-mainnet-1.2.0-rc).

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*Originally published on [Espresso Foundation](https://paragraph.com/@espressofndn/epoch-rewards-mainnet-upgrade)*