Staking rewards compared by real yield, not headline APR

Every staking rewards comparison you will find ranks assets by nominal APR. That ranking is close to meaningless, because staking rewards on most proof-of-stake networks are newly minted tokens. If the network issues supply faster than it pays you, your balance grows while your share of the network shrinks. The number that survives that adjustment is real yield, and it reorders the table dramatically.

Below is every asset we could source consistently, with nominal APR, token inflation, real yield, staking participation, minimum stake, unbonding period, whether slashing exists and whether you keep custody. All rows are from Staking Rewards asset pages fetched 16 September 2026 unless stated. Three of the rows carry a data dispute we have not been able to resolve, and we print those disputes rather than picking a side.

The full table

The formula, and why the shortcut fails

Staking rewards are newly minted tokens. Your balance rises by the nominal rate; the total supply rises by the inflation rate. What you actually keep is the ratio between the two:

real yield = (1 + nominal) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1

Subtracting is close enough when both numbers are small. Cardano at 2.14% and 1.5% gives 0.63% either way, to the basis point. It fails badly when the numbers are large. Cosmos at 19.64% and 12.67% gives 6.97% by subtraction and 6.19% by the correct formula — an overstatement of 78 basis points, or about an eighth of the true figure. That is the difference between two assets in the middle of this table.

The three disputed rows

We could not reconcile three data points, and each one materially changes the conclusion for that asset. Rather than choosing a side, here is the disagreement in full.

Polkadot inflation. Staking Rewards reports 1.48%, which produces the +1.28% real yield in the table. But Polkadot executed a tokenomics change on 14 March 2026, following OpenGov referenda 1710 and 1828 which passed with 81% support. That change cut issuance from about 120M DOT a year to about 56.88M — a 53.6% reduction — introduced a 2.1bn DOT hard cap, and is reported elsewhere as dropping inflation from about 10% toabout 3.11%. If 3.11% is the correct current figure, then DOT's real yield against a 2.78% nominal rate is roughly −0.32%, and Polkadot belongs in the same category as Sui rather than in the upper half of the table. We cannot tell which figure is stale. Treat the DOT row as the least reliable one here.

Cosmos inflation. Staking Rewards reports 12.67%. Cosmos Hub governance voted in 2023 to bring ATOM inflation down and cap it at 10%. Those two facts do not sit together and we could not establish which reflects the live parameter. If inflation were in fact capped at 10%, the same 19.64% nominal rate would produce a real yield of about+8.76% rather than +6.19% — which would make Cosmos more attractive, not less. The dispute cuts in ATOM's favour, which is a reason to state it rather than to bury it.

Polygon. Staking Rewards explicitly returns "LIMITED DATA — reward_rate not collected" for POL. There is no published reward rate, no inflation figure and no staking ratio. What is documented is the emissions structure: 2% annual POL emissions, split 1% to validators and 1% to the community treasury, plus transaction fees. Any POL APR you see quoted elsewhere is unverified as far as we can tell, and we have left the row empty rather than filling it. POL replaced MATIC one-for-one on 4 September 2024.

Fees reorder the table

Commission does not scale with real yield; it scales with nominal. That means a high-inflation asset loses proportionally far more of its real return to a given fee than a low-inflation one. The following are our own calculations, applying commission levels observed in the market to the network figures above.

Take Solana at 6.12% nominal against 4.51% inflation. Before any fee, the real yield is +1.54%. At a 10% fee it is +0.95%; at 25% it is +0.08%; at 30% it is −0.22%; at 35% it is −0.51%. Somewhere around a quarter of the reward, staking SOL through an intermediary stops beating simply holding it.

Now Ethereum, at 2.46% nominal against 0.88% net issuance. Real yield is +1.57% before any fee, +1.32% at a 10% fee, +0.96% at 25% and +0.71% at 35%. A 35% commission — the standard Coinbase rate — costs roughly 89 basis points and takes more than half the real return, but it never turns it negative.

The conclusion is not that Ethereum is better. It is that the fee question matters most precisely where the headline rate looks most impressive. Observed commissions across the market run from 0% at Revolut to 5% at P2P.org, 10% at Lido and Binance for ETH, 15% at OKX, 25–30% at Kraken, about 35% at Coinbase, up to 50% at Uphold and 90% on Binance.US Soft-Staking. The full spread is on crypto interest rates, and the mechanics of how commission is taken are oncrypto staking.

Against the risk-free rate

One comparison is missing from almost every staking table, and it is the one that decides whether any of this is worth doing. A three-month US Treasury bill yielded 3.97% on 15 September 2026. Fed funds sat at 3.63% and a one-year bill at 4.16%.

On that benchmark, exactly one asset in this table — Cosmos at about +6.19% real — pays more than a government bill, and it does so while asking for 21 days of illiquidity, exposure to a token that can fall by any amount, and slashing risk of up to 5% for double-signing. Every other row pays less in real terms than short-dated US government debt. That is not an argument against staking, because most people staking are not choosing between ATOM and a T-bill; they already hold the token and the alternative is holding it unstaked. But it does explain why a 6% or 19% headline should not feel like a high return, and why the comparison most content invites you to make is the wrong one. The same benchmark logic runs throughstablecoin yield andtokenised treasuries, where the gap is narrower and the risk profile is different again.

Liquidity: a second table with a different question

Real yield tells you what the position pays. It says nothing about how long you are committed to it, which for most readers is the more consequential variable. The following looks only at the exit.

Set the two tables side by side and the trade being offered becomes visible. Cosmos pays the best real yield in the set and asks for 21 days of illiquidity and real slashing exposure. Cardano pays 0.63% and asks for nothing at all. Avalanche pays a strong +3.53% and asks you to pick a lock-up length in advance with no way to change your mind. None of those is wrong; they are different products wearing the same word.

Notes on individual rows

A few assets have moving parts that a static table cannot capture.Tezos uses Adaptive Issuance, which targets a 50% staking ratio — issuance rises when participation is below it and falls when above — and the Quebec upgrade set the staker-to-delegator reward ratio at 3:1, up from 2:1. Aptos began at a 7% reward rate that decays by 1.5% of its current value each year toward a 3.25% floor, so its 2.60% is a point on a known path rather than a stable level. Solana's schedule changed materially in August 2026 under SIMD-0550, covered in detail onSolana staking. Ethereum's inflation is the only demand-dependent figure in the table, because the 0.88% is net of the EIP-1559 burn and can go negative in high-activity periods — see Ethereum staking.

On slashing, the table corrects a common impression. Eight of the thirteen assets here — Cardano, Avalanche, NEAR, Tron, Sui, Aptos, Algorand and Polygon — have no slashing at all. Where it does exist it is rare in practice: fewer than 500 Ethereum validators have been slashed out of more than 1.2 million since December 2020, and essentially all historical cases trace to operator error rather than attack. Illiquidity and price movement are the risks that actually cost stakers money, which is the ordering we use oncrypto earn risks. Readers choosing between native staking and a receipt token should also read liquid staking, where the fee spread rather than the underlying performance explains almost all of the difference.