What is Hermes?

The IoTeX Network utilizes Roll-DPoS consensus, where community-elected Delegates manage consensus on behalf of the network. Delegates receive IOTX rewards for their services (e.g., producing blocks), which they then share with their voters. Hermes is designed to bring reliability and transparency to the rewards distribution process for both Delegates and voters. With Hermes, Delegates can auto-distribute rewards every day, while their voters can easily track their reward payments. Delegates that currently use Hermes have a ‘Hermes’ badge on the voting website.

Hermes for Voters

Hermes uses smart contracts to automate the rewards distribution process — this means all of the individual transactions are open and transparent to everyone! We have created services that make viewing and managing your rewards simple:

Personal rewards history

Enter your IoTeX address to see your full history of Hermes rewards payment transactions; you can also enter a Delegate’s name to see a paginated list of all of their transactions

Rewards forwarding service

If you would like your rewards to go to a different IoTeX address than the one you used to stake/vote, you can use our service to forward rewards to another account.

Other feature requests? Let us know on Telegram or email zhefeng@iotex.io.

Hermes for Delegates

By registering with Hermes, Delegates can automatically claim, calculate, and distribute rewards to all voters on a daily basis (see below for technical details). Delegates that use Hermes can also access a full history of all of their reward distributions. Hermes is available for free for all IoTeX Delegates — register today by following the simple instructions below:

Step 1. Set Portions

Set your reward percentages here.

Step 2. Set Reward Address

Set your Delegate “Reward Address” to: “io12mgttmfa2ffn9uqvn0yn37f4nz43d248l2ga85”

Step 3. You Are All Set

After 24 hours, your rewards will be auto-distributed on a daily basis.

Technology Overview

Daily Rewards Distribution

Hermes is a cron job that is triggered daily, which automates the claiming and distributing of rewards for Delegates. Every time Hermes starts, the system first claims all applicable rewards from the blockchain. Then it checks the status of past distributions stored inside the Hermes smart contract to ensure there are no missing distributions or recipients. After the check, the system calculates the next appropriate distribution by querying iotex-analytics for bookkeeping data of each Hermes Delegate within the distribution period. Finally, the Hermes smart contract invokes an underlying multi-send smart contract to distribute the correct amount of rewards to all voters.

Rewards Distribution History

Rewards Distribution History: As the entire rewards distribution process is managed by smart contract, the history of Hermes distributions is viewable by anyone. To create the distribution history, iotex-analytics reads receipts of the Hermes smart contract, recording the action hash and Delegate information. This information is joined with the ‘balance_history’ table to create a full Hermes distribution history, which is query-able by Delegate name or voter’s IoTeX address.

Daily Rewards Distribution

Hermes is a cron job that is triggered daily, which automates the claiming and distributing of rewards for Delegates. Every time Hermes starts, the system first claims all applicable rewards from the blockchain. Then it checks the status of past distributions stored inside the Hermes smart contract to ensure there are no missing distributions or recipients. After the check, the system calculates the next appropriate distribution by querying iotex-analytics for bookkeeping data of each Hermes Delegate within the distribution period. Finally, the Hermes smart contract invokes an underlying multi-send smart contract to distribute the correct amount of rewards to all voters.

For more details, see the open source Hermes Github and join the discussion on Telegram.