Claiming root rewards

Root rewards are never claimed automatically. They wait in the validator's basket until you claim them, and their value moves with the market until then.

When you claim, your share of every holding in the basket is sold, and the TAO is added to your root stake. To get it into your free balance, you then unstake from root as usual. A claim covers your whole share at once, with no partial claims.

Unstaking returns your original TAO. Rewards you have not claimed stay owed to you on that validator until you do.

Claiming has a fee, and it grows with the number of different subnet tokens in the basket. On a large basket it is a fraction of a TAO. If your rewards are small, the fee can be more than the rewards, so check what a claim would pay first. Payouts below a small threshold, currently about 0.0005 TAO, are skipped and keep building until they clear. Nothing expires.

The network can also set a short waiting period after a claim before you can unstake that root stake.