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AEVO.XYZ/PRODUCTS/AEVO-STAKING
staking explained: tiers, epochs, the lottery and every reward
Stake AEVO ↗
OCT 4, 2026
47 MIN READ
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Four reward streams, a standing fee discount and a governance vote run off one staked position, with a monthly buyback and burn underneath them. This page covers what each pays, how the tier system decides your share, the arithmetic behind the year-end distribution, why most staking guides still describe a retired tier system, and the consolidation rule that quietly costs people a year’s rewards.
USDC projected year-end Mega Reward pool for 2026, paid in December
AEVO distributed each week in the trading epoch
Maximum standing trading fee discount for stakers
AEVO permanently burned so far, against about 917M circulating
TL;DR
Staking AEVO gets you sAEVO. It isn’t a separate token or a receipt, it’s simply the staked status of your AEVO.
Your tier is two things at once: an amount tier (LUNAR, MARTIAN, STELLARIS, CELESTIAL) and a duration tier (CADET, EXPLORER, COMMANDER, LEGEND).
If you have read about Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond tiers anywhere else, that system is retired. A large share of currently-ranking guides still describe it. There’s a section below on the three ways acting on the old model costs you money.
Duration tier is set by lock length, and you get it the day you lock, not when the lock matures.
Four streams pay off one stake: the weekly AEVO trading epoch, weekly USDC cashback, LP NFT distributions, and the year-end USDC Mega Reward.
On top of those, every staker gets a standing trading fee discount of up to 20%, set by the same tier matrix. It does not apply to options fees.
And a governance vote. The buyback that’s burned 74 million AEVO exists because a proposal passed, so the votes are a real lever rather than a decoration.
The weekly epoch distributes 1,000,000 AEVO from the DAO Treasury, split by trading volume, and split by product first. At Epoch 20 it went out as 700,000 AEVO to perps markets and 300,000 to options.
The product buckets themselves move between epochs. At Epoch 17 the same 300,000 went to hedge perps with options users rather than to options markets. Read the current epoch’s terms, not last quarter’s.
USDC cashback comes straight out of exchange trading fees, every epoch.
LP NFTs are minted on the 15th of each month, pairing your accrued AEVO with an equal amount of USDC into a Uniswap V3 position. They vest faster the higher your tier: 7 weeks at LUNAR CADET down to 1 week at CELESTIAL LEGEND.
One fill is counted four different ways by four different rules. There’s a section below on why your volume is really four numbers, and which of them your next trade actually moves.
The four streams pay in three different assets on three different schedules, and what you do with each as it arrives is a separate decision from how you staked. There’s a section on that below, including the one where restaking your own rewards can demote you.
The distribution schedule changed. A ~674,000 USDC treasury LP payout was originally scheduled for late August 2026. It was superseded by an annual payment at the end of December, projected at roughly 808,800 USDC, a 20% increase for the wait.
There’s now a permanent leaderboard showing your live qualifying volume, your staking tier and your projected year-end USDC reward in real time. It turns most of the arithmetic on this page into a number you can just read.
Only COMMANDER and LEGEND stakes qualify for that year-end distribution. LEGEND takes 70% of the pool, COMMANDER 30%.
Inside your tier, your score is your share of the tier pool. The maths is below, and it’s simpler than it looks.
Options volume counts delta-weighted, not at notional. A far out-of-the-money option contributes a fraction of its face value towards your qualifying total.
The lottery element is a probabilistic boost on trading rewards rather than a prize draw you enter. Staking raises your odds; it doesn’t buy you a ticket.
Separately from all of it, a monthly buyback and burn removes AEVO from circulation. Roughly 74 million tokens are gone so far against a circulating supply of about 917 million, which is a little over 8%.
Locked means locked. There is no published early-exit route, so treat the lock length as a decision you cannot revisit.
Adding to a stake re-derives your duration tier from the new lock’s remaining length, so topping up can demote you even though your unlock date moves further out. This is the mistake that catches people, and it is not the one most articles describe.
Staking AEVO is not one decision, it’s two: how much, and for how long. Those two answers set two different tiers, and the tiers feed four different reward streams on different schedules with different rules, plus a fee discount that applies to every trade you make in between.
That’s more moving parts than most staking programs, and the complexity is where the value hides. Traders who understand the duration tier consistently out-earn traders staking more capital for less time.
01
What is sAEVO?
Your AEVO, in a staked state.
There’s no wrapper contract, no receipt token to keep track of, and nothing to swap back at the end. You stake AEVO on the exchange and it becomes sAEVO, which is the same tokens flagged as locked. Your rewards are calculated from your sAEVO balance and your tier.
Practically, that means there’s nothing to lose, bridge or forget about. There’s also nothing to sell in a hurry: locked is locked until the unlock date.
02
How do I actually stake?
Short version, because the interesting decisions are the two inputs rather than the process.
Go to the staking page at app.aevo.xyz/aevo with AEVO in your Aevo account.
Choose the amount. This sets your amount tier, LUNAR through CELESTIAL, and feeds the size half of every calculation below.
Choose the lock duration. Two, five, eight or twelve months, mapping to CADET, EXPLORER, COMMANDER and LEGEND. This is the decision that matters, and it’s the one you cannot revisit.
Check the tier the interface shows you before you confirm. Both halves. This takes five seconds and it prevents the most expensive mistake on this page.
Diary the unlock date immediately, a month before it rather than the week of. The section on maturity below explains why that month is worth having.
Two things to know before step 2. The AEVO amounts that define each amount tier are set in the interface and are subject to periodic review by the Treasury and Revenues Management Committee, so read the current thresholds on the staking page rather than from any article, including this one. And the duration choice is worth more than the amount choice for most people, for reasons the tier tables below make concrete: eligibility for the largest single payout in the program is decided by duration alone.
03
How do the staking tiers work?
Two tiers, assigned independently, both derived from the same stake.
Duration tier comes from how long you lock:
Lock duration
Duration tier
Year-end distribution
2 months (8 epochs)
CADET
Not eligible
5 months (22 epochs)
EXPLORER
Not eligible
8 months (36 epochs)
COMMANDER
30% of pool
12 months (51 epochs)
LEGEND
70% of pool
You get the tier on the day you lock, not after the lock runs its course. Lock for twelve months and you’re LEGEND from day one.
There’s a second half to that which catches people later. Your duration tier tracks the lock, and the lock is re-evaluated whenever you stake again. Nothing erodes while you sit still, but the moment you add to the position, the tier is recalculated from the remaining lock period rather than from the tier you used to hold. The section near the end of this page is entirely about that rule, and it’s the one worth reading twice.
Amount tier comes from how much you stake: LUNAR, MARTIAN, STELLARIS, CELESTIAL, smallest to largest.
Your full tier name combines them, which is why you see labels like Stellaris Legend or Lunar Commander on the leaderboard. The two halves do different jobs. Duration decides what you’re eligible for. Amount feeds how large your share is.
The system is weighted towards duration deliberately. A long lock is a harder commitment than a large one, and the rewards are structured to say so. You can see the weighting in the vesting schedule: a small holder committing for twelve months (LUNAR LEGEND, 4 weeks) gets the same acceleration as a large holder committing for two (CELESTIAL CADET, 4 weeks). Size and time are traded off against each other explicitly, and time is worth more per unit.
Why most Aevo staking guides you’ll find are describing a system that no longer exists
If you have read about Aevo staking anywhere else, there is a good chance you read about Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond tiers, with sAEVO thresholds starting at 1 and topping out above 101,000, airdrop multipliers up to 5x, a dedicated account manager and a 60% referral rebate.
That is the retired system. It is still what a large share of currently-ranking staking guides describe, because they were written against the 2024 documentation and never revised. The tiers on Aevo today are the two-axis system above: LUNAR / MARTIAN / STELLARIS / CELESTIAL for amount, CADET / EXPLORER / COMMANDER / LEGEND for duration.
The difference is not cosmetic, and acting on the old model will cost you money in three specific ways.
The old system had no duration axis at all. Bronze-to-Diamond was purely a function of how much sAEVO you held. Today, how long you lock is the more heavily weighted of the two variables, and it is the one that decides eligibility for the largest single payout of the year. A holder optimizing purely for stake size under the old mental model can hold a very large position and still be ineligible for the year-end distribution, because that gate is CADET-versus-LEGEND, not LUNAR-versus-CELESTIAL.
The old rewards were mostly airdrop multipliers. The headline benefit of Diamond was a 5x multiplier on pre-launch airdrops. The headline benefits now are four live reward streams paying in AEVO and USDC, plus a standing fee discount. Someone staking today because they read about airdrop multipliers is holding the position for a reason that is no longer the main reason.
The thresholds don’t map. There is no clean translation from “I was aiming for Gold” to a current tier, because the axes are different. If you set a staking target from an older guide, the target itself needs rebuilding rather than converting.
The practical test: if a page describing Aevo staking does not mention lock duration as a tier input, it is out of date, whatever else it gets right. Check the number of reward streams too: four, plus the fee discount, because a guide written against the old system typically describes one.
What each tier combination gets you
The three tables on this page (fee discount, vesting, year-end eligibility) describe the same grid from three angles, and it’s easier to decide with them side by side. Reading across a row tells you what a lock length is worth before you commit to it.
Duration tier
Lock
Year-end pool
Fee discount range (LUNAR to CELESTIAL)
CADET
2 months
Not eligible
0% to 12%
EXPLORER
5 months
Not eligible
2% to 14%
COMMANDER
8 months
30%
4% to 16%
LEGEND
12 months
70%
8% to 20%
Two things read straight off that.
The step from EXPLORER to COMMANDER is the largest single jump in the program, and it has nothing to do with the fee discount, which moves only two percentage points. It is the step from not eligible to a 30% share of the year-end pool. Three months of extra lock buys entry to the biggest payout on the page.
The step from COMMANDER to LEGEND more than doubles your pool share, from 30% to 70%, for another four months. On the fee discount it is worth another 4 percentage points at every amount tier. If you are already committing eight months, the marginal cost of committing twelve is four months of liquidity for well over twice the distribution weight.
Which is the honest summary of the whole tier system: the amount tier scales what you get, and the duration tier decides whether you get it at all.
04
The fee discount nobody mentions
Before the four streams, here’s the benefit that pays on every single trade you make.
All stakers receive trading fee discounts of up to 20%, set by the same two-dimensional tier matrix. Unlike the reward streams, this one doesn’t arrive on a schedule. It just quietly reduces what you pay, every fill, for the whole length of your lock.
Fee discount
CADET
EXPLORER
COMMANDER
LEGEND
LUNAR
0%
2%
4%
8%
MARTIAN
4%
6%
8%
12%
STELLARIS
8%
10%
12%
16%
CELESTIAL
12%
14%
16%
20%
Two things to read off that grid.
The discount is weighted more heavily towards amount than lock duration, which is the opposite of the rest of the program. Moving up one amount tier is worth 4 percentage points at every duration; moving up one duration tier is worth 2 to 4. This is the one place where staking size does more work than staking time.
LUNAR CADET earns 0%. The minimum stake at the minimum lock gets nothing here. If a fee discount is part of your reason for staking, the bottom-left cell of that table is worth avoiding.
The important exclusion changes the calculation for a lot of traders: the discount does not apply to option fees. It’s a perps discount in practice. If most of your volume is options, this stream is worth close to nothing to you and you should weigh the lock on the other four alone.
All proposed amounts are subject to periodic review by the Treasury and Revenues Management Committee, so treat the grid as current rather than permanent.
05
The four reward streams
One stake, four sources of income, all running at once. You’re not choosing between them.
1. Weekly trading epoch
1,000,000 AEVO every week from the DAO Treasury, split proportionally among active traders by volume.
This is volume-driven rather than stake-driven, so it pays whether or not you’re staked. It shows on the Weekly tab. If you trade regularly, this is the stream that pays most often.
The detail almost nobody accounts for: the million is split by product before it’s split by volume. At the Epoch 20 launch on 20 April 2026, the allocation went out as 700,000 AEVO across perpetual futures on the major cryptos, meaning BTC, ETH, SOL and the rest, and 300,000 AEVO across options markets.
That changes how you should read your own share. You are not competing against every trader on the exchange for one pool; you are competing against the traders in your product’s pool for that product’s slice. A given dollar of volume is worth more or less depending on which side of that split it lands on, and the answer depends entirely on how much volume the rest of the field is doing there in that epoch. Options are the smaller pool by allocation, but they are also the thinner market by participation.
And the buckets are not fixed either. This only shows up if you read several epochs side by side. At Epoch 17 the split was also 700,000 / 300,000, but the smaller slice went to PERPS+ users, not to options markets. Same headline million, same 70/30 shape, an entirely different definition of who was in the second bucket.
So the thing to check each epoch is not just the numbers but the categories. “Am I in the 30% bucket this week?” is a question whose answer can change without the allocation changing at all, and a strategy built around being in it needs re-reading rather than assuming.
Two further caveats. The split is set per epoch rather than fixed forever, so work from the current epoch’s announcement rather than any figure quoted here; the epochs named above are documented historical examples rather than the live one. And this is a separate calculation from the year-end distribution below, which has its own qualifying rules and its own volume definition.
2. Weekly USDC cashback
Paid straight out of exchange trading fees, every epoch, in USDC.
Effectively a rebate on what you’ve paid to trade. It’s real cash rather than emissions, which makes it the most predictable stream of the four. Note that it stacks with the fee discount above: you pay less, and then you get some of what you did pay back.
3. LP NFT distributions
Stakers receive Uniswap V3 liquidity positions in the AEVO/USDC pool, minted as NFTs and boosted by both staking tier and weekly trading volume.
The mechanic is unusual enough to be worth understanding. On the 15th of each month, your accrued AEVO rewards are paired with an equivalent amount of USDC and minted into a Uniswap V3 liquidity position NFT. That NFT then generates liquidity-provider fees. After a vesting period, it transfers to you.
So the reward isn’t a token balance, it’s a productive asset. It earns while it vests, and it keeps earning afterwards. It also means your reward is half denominated in USDC, since the pairing is funded rather than taken out of your AEVO.
Your share is based on your weighted stake, where the weight multiplier comes from combining your duration tier and your amount tier, weighted towards duration. A trading volume multiplier stacks on top of the staking tier multiplier.
Vesting is where the tiers bite hardest:
Same reward, seven times the wait at the bottom tier. NFTs are minted monthly and can be tracked in the Governance Portal.
4. Year-end Mega Reward
The big one, and the one with real conditions attached.
A USDC distribution funded by the protocol treasury’s Uniswap V3 LP fee income, meaning fees that have accumulated without allocation, roughly 977,000 USDC collected to date.
The schedule changed, and if you staked on the old one it’s the first thing to check. The distribution was originally set to pay approximately 674,000 USDC in late August 2026. That payment was superseded: accumulated LP fees now go out once annually at the end of December, with the 2026 pool projected at roughly 808,800 USDC. The stated trade-off is a 20% larger pool in exchange for the later date.
Two things follow, and they matter more than the headline number. There is no August payment to collect. And your stake now has to still be active in December to collect anything at all, so a stake sized and timed around the original date may no longer reach the one that counts. Qualifying volume accumulated since 1 January 2026 carries over unchanged, so the volume you built ahead of the original date is not lost.
The pool splits by duration tier before anything else: LEGEND takes 70%, COMMANDER takes 30%. CADET and EXPLORER get nothing here regardless of size.
Three conditions, all required at once:
An active COMMANDER or LEGEND stake on the day of the snapshot. Taken at the end of December, exact epoch to be announced. A stake is active if its unlock time falls after the snapshot. It’s a single point-in-time check: unlock in November after eleven months of qualifying and you get nothing.
A staked amount at least equal to your largest qualifying stake this year. Coming back smaller after a lapse doesn’t qualify. Stake 1M AEVO for twelve months, let it expire, and you must re-stake at least 1M for 8 or 12 months to stay eligible.
10M in global trading volume. Perps and options combined, built from 1 January 2026 while an active COMMANDER or LEGEND stake was in place.
Volume only accrues while an active COMMANDER or LEGEND stake is in place. Let it lapse and the counter pauses rather than resets, but everything you trade during the gap is lost to this calculation.
Because the schedule has already moved once, treat the December date as the current plan rather than a guarantee. The governing rules are in the Treasury LP Revenue Distribution docs, which is where a further change would appear first.
Read your own position off the leaderboard
Aevo now runs a permanent leaderboard that answers most of this section directly, and it removes the need to reconstruct any of it by hand.
For your account it shows your live qualifying volume, your current staking tier, and your projected year-end USDC reward, updating in real time rather than at a settlement date. Three things are easier to check than to calculate:
Whether a market type counts. The rule counts perps and options. Rather than inferring how any newly-listed market is treated, trade a clip and watch whether the counter moves. That is a definitive answer in one epoch.
How far off 10M you actually are. The delta weighting on options means your fill history and your qualifying total diverge, sometimes substantially. The leaderboard shows the number that counts.
What the projection is worth. A projected figure makes the marginal question, whether another million of volume is worth the fees, a comparison rather than a guess.
Treat the projection as what it is: an estimate against a pool that is itself projected, on a field of participants that changes until the snapshot. It moves as other people trade and stake. But it is a considerably better starting point than an article’s worked example, including the one below.
It’s at app.aevo.xyz/leaderboard.
06
One fill, four different rules
This is the source of most confusion about the program, and it isn’t stated anywhere as a single idea.
You do not have a volume number. You have four of them, and a single trade contributes to each on different terms. The same 50,000 USDC fill can be worth a great deal in one calculation and literally nothing in another.
Take one options trade and follow it through every rule that touches it:
The weekly epoch counts it if options are in a funded bucket this epoch, which they were at Epoch 20 and were not at Epoch 17, where the second bucket went to PERPS+ users instead. Same trade, same size, in or out depending on the week.
USDC cashback counts the fees you paid on it, not the notional. A cheap fill contributes little here however large the position behind it.
The LP NFT multiplier counts it as trading volume stacked on top of your staking tier multiplier, so it’s a boost to your share of the monthly mint rather than a payment in itself.
The year-end Mega Reward counts it delta-weighted: contracts × underlying spot × absolute delta. A far out-of-the-money option contributes a fraction of its face value, and it counts only if you held an active COMMANDER or LEGEND stake at the time.
Three practical consequences:
“Am I trading enough?” is not one question. If you’re 2M short of the 10M year-end threshold, the trades that close that gap are near-the-money options and perps, not the cheap far-out-of-the-money options that would look identical on a fill report.
The cheapest volume is not the most useful volume. A stack of low-delta options is efficient in premium and nearly worthless against the qualifying total. The delta weighting exists to stop face value being the metric.
Where you trade changes which streams you touch. Options fills reach the year-end calculation and not the fee discount. Perps fills reach both. None of that is a reason to change what you trade, but it is a reason to know which counter your next trade moves before you assume it moved all four.
The leaderboard resolves the most important of the four directly, which is why it’s the number to check rather than reconstruct. For the other three, the rule is the same one that runs through this whole page: read the current epoch’s terms, because the categories are governed and they move.
07
How is qualifying volume measured?
Not the way most people assume, and the difference matters if you trade options.
Volume = PerpVolume + OptionsVolume
PerpVolume = Σ (contracts × execution price)
OptionsVolume = Σ (contracts × underlying spot price × |delta|)
Perps volume is what you’d expect: contracts times price. Options volume is delta-weighted, so each trade contributes in proportion to its actual market exposure rather than its face value.
The practical consequence is significant. A deep in-the-money option with a delta near 1 contributes close to full notional. A far out-of-the-money option with a delta of 0.1 contributes a tenth of it. If your plan for reaching 10M runs through cheap out-of-the-money options, the number on your fill history and the number that qualifies are going to be very different, and the gap is not in your favor.
Volume identified as wash trading or self-matched activity is discounted or excluded at the protocol’s discretion. Accounts determined to belong to the same entity may also be aggregated for allocation and cap purposes, so splitting across wallets doesn’t multiply your allocation or evade the cap.
09
What is a stake actually worth? A worked example
The four streams and the discount are each described in isolation above, which is how the documentation presents them and also why almost nobody has a sense of the total. So here is one account, followed through a year, with every line added up.
Every number below is illustrative. The APR moves, the pool is projected, the field of participants changes until the snapshot, and your own volume is yours. The point is the relative size of the lines, which is stable and surprising. Most people expect the ranking to run in a different order.
The account. A LEGEND stake at the STELLARIS amount tier, locked for twelve months in January. The trader does 12M USDC of qualifying volume across the year, mostly perps, at an average taker fee of 0.08%. Their stake is 0.5% of all LEGEND stake and their volume is 1.0% of all LEGEND volume.
Line 1, the fee discount. 12M of perps volume at 0.08% is roughly 9,600 USDC in fees before any discount. STELLARIS LEGEND is a 16% discount, so about 1,500 USDC saved, arriving invisibly, one fill at a time, with no schedule and no claim.
Line 2, the year-end Mega Reward. Using the score from the section above: 0.30 × 0.005 + 0.70 × 0.010 = 0.0085, or 0.85% of a LEGEND pool of roughly 566,000 USDC. That’s about 4,800 USDC, paid once, in December, contingent on all three conditions holding on the snapshot day.
Line 3, the weekly AEVO epoch. Volume-driven and shared across everyone trading in your product bucket, so this varies more than any other line. It pays weekly and in AEVO, which means the value of what you received depends on the token when you received it and when you sold it. It’s the one line here that carries price risk on top of participation risk.
Line 4, weekly USDC cashback. A share of exchange trading fees, in cash, every epoch. Modest per week and steady, and it stacks on top of line 1: you paid less because of the discount, and then some of what you did pay comes back.
Line 5, LP NFT distributions. Minted monthly on the 15th, half denominated in USDC because the pairing is funded rather than taken from your AEVO, and vesting in 3 weeks at STELLARIS COMMANDER or 1 week at CELESTIAL LEGEND. It arrives as a productive asset that earns LP fees rather than as a balance.
Line 6, the lucky boost. Variance on top of line 3. Not a line you can plan around. See the lottery section below.
Three things fall out of stacking them, and they’re the reason the exercise is worth ten minutes with your own numbers.
The fee discount is not the small line people assume. At 1,500 USDC illustratively, it is the same order of magnitude as a mid-sized year-end distribution, and it is the most certain line on the list. It requires no snapshot, no threshold, no comparison against other participants, and no view on the AEVO price. It is arithmetic on trades you were making anyway. For an active perps trader it is frequently the best-behaved return in the program.
The year-end reward is the largest single number and the most conditional one. Three conditions must hold simultaneously on one day in December, one of which is a 10M volume threshold that the delta weighting can put further away than your fill history suggests. It is worth a great deal and it is the line most easily lost by accident. See the maturity and top-up sections below.
The emissions lines are real income denominated in a token. Lines 3 and 5 pay in AEVO or in AEVO paired with USDC, so a headline APR describes what you received rather than what it was worth by the time you could use it. That isn’t a criticism; it’s a reason to hold the cash lines and the token lines in separate mental columns when you decide whether the lock is worth it.
The general shape: if you trade actively, the discount and the year-end distribution are the two lines that decide whether staking pays, and they reward completely different behaviors. One rewards volume continuously and quietly. The other rewards being in the right state on one specific day. Optimizing for either alone leaves the other on the table.
10
What do you do with the rewards as they arrive?
Nobody plans for this, because the tier tables are all about the moment you stake and none of them mention the fifty-two weeks afterwards.
The four streams don’t pay in one asset on one schedule. They pay in three different assets on three different cadences, and each arrival is a small decision. Left alone, the default outcome is a drift of unmanaged AEVO, unvested NFTs and idle USDC sitting in an account doing nothing, which is a perfectly common way to earn a headline APR and realize considerably less than it.
Stream
Arrives as
Cadence
The decision it hands you
Weekly trading epoch
AEVO
Weekly
Hold, sell, or restake, see the warning below
USDC cashback
USDC
Weekly
Leave as collateral, or withdraw
LP NFT
A Uniswap V3 position
Monthly, on the 15th
Hold the position, or close it out
Year-end Mega Reward
USDC
Once, in December
The only one with no ongoing decision
Four notes, in the order they’ll come up.
The AEVO epoch rewards: restaking is not free of consequences. This is the trap at the intersection of two rules, and it is the most avoidable mistake on this page. Rewards arrive weekly in AEVO, and the instinct is to compound them by adding to your stake. But every top-up re-derives your duration tier from the remaining lock, so adding 200 AEVO of rewards in month nine of a twelve-month lock, on anything shorter than a twelve-month lock, demotes you out of LEGEND. The consolidation section below has the full mechanic. The short version: if you’re going to compound your rewards into your stake, add them on a lock at least as long as the tier you want to keep, or let them accumulate unstaked and add them all at once when you re-lock. Accumulating and adding once is usually the better habit, because it turns fifty-two chances to make a mistake into one.
The USDC cashback: it doesn’t have to sit still. It arrives in your Aevo account, where it is already positioned to be trading collateral. Aevo’s collateral framework accepts aeUSD, a yield-bearing collateral asset, at a full collateral factor, so cash that would otherwise be idle can back positions and earn at the same time. On a weekly rebate that’s small; over a year of weekly rebates on an active account it isn’t.
The LP NFT: it’s a position, not a payout. After vesting, you hold a Uniswap V3 liquidity position in AEVO/USDC. Holding it keeps earning LP fees and keeps you exposed to both sides of the pair, with the impermanent-loss profile any concentrated LP position carries. Closing it converts to the two underlying assets. Neither is obviously right, but the decision should be a decision. An unmanaged V3 position that has drifted out of its range is earning nothing while you assume it’s working.
The year-end USDC: the one clean line. It arrives once, in cash, with nothing to manage. Which makes it the easiest line to compare against everything else: no token price, no vesting, no range.
Two habits make the whole thing simpler:
Batch the small decisions. Weekly arrivals invite weekly fiddling, and weekly fiddling around the top-up rule is how a LEGEND becomes an EXPLORER. Pick one date a month to handle everything that arrived.
Keep the token lines and the cash lines separate in your own accounting. Two of the streams pay in AEVO, two in USDC. Adding them into one APR figure hides the fact that half your return is denominated in the thing you’ve also locked up for a year.
11
What about the staking lottery?
It exists, and the first thing to get right is what shape it takes. It is not a raffle you buy into, and there is no ticket, no draw date and no prize table to check.
The lottery element in Aevo’s rewards is a probabilistic multiplier applied to trading rewards, a lucky boost. You trade as normal, and individual trades can hit a boost that multiplies what that activity earns. Your stake doesn’t buy entries; it raises the probability that a boost lands.
Three properties follow from that design, and they’re what matter:
Participation is automatic. If you’re staked and trading, you’re in it. There is nothing to opt into, claim or enter, and no action that improves your position beyond staking more and trading more.
Staking changes the odds, not the prize. Aevo’s documented versions of this mechanic have given sAEVO holders roughly double the chance of hitting a rare boost compared with unstaked traders. The boost is the same size either way; you just hit it more often.
It scales with stake size, continuously. The more AEVO you have staked, the higher your probability. It’s a slope rather than a tier threshold, which makes it one of the few benefits here that doesn’t jump in steps.
Historically the multipliers have been substantial and the odds correspondingly long. Documented campaigns have run a linear lucky boost capped at 2x, alongside rarer tiers reaching 10x, 50x and 100x at probabilities in the region of 10%, 2.5% and 1% respectively for unstaked traders, with stakers at roughly double those odds. Treat those specific numbers as illustrative of the shape rather than as current terms. The boost structure has changed between campaigns more often than any other part of the program, and several of the published tables belong to incentive programs that have since ended.
The practical guidance is short. Don’t model it as income. The four scheduled streams and the fee discount are the return on staking, they’re calculable, and you can plan around them. The lucky boost is variance layered on top of the trading rewards you were already earning. It’s a reason to be pleased when it lands, not a reason to stake.
Current mechanics, odds and multipliers are in the staking documentation at docs.aevo.xyz, and they’re worth checking directly before you make any decision based on them, because this is the part of the program most likely to have changed since it was last written down.
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What does staking get me in governance?
The benefit with no schedule and no number attached, which is why it goes unmentioned, and the one that has changed the most money on this page.
AEVO is a governance token, and proposals decide real parameters of the program described here. The monthly buyback and burn exists because AGP-3 passed. That one proposal set the 50/50 split between burning and treasury reserves, the 100%-burn branch below $500M of monthly volume, and the one-time 69 million token burn that started it. Every number in the buyback section below traces back to a vote.
Three things are worth understanding about how that sits against the rest of the program.
The things governance decides are the things this article keeps telling you to re-check. Reward allocations, the split between streams, the fee discount grid, the treasury’s distribution schedule: these are program parameters, subject to review by the Treasury and Revenues Management Committee and to the proposal process. The reason “read the current epoch’s terms” appears repeatedly on this page is that the terms are governed rather than fixed.
A long lock and a governance stake want the same thing from you. Locking for twelve months is a bet on where the program goes, and the vote is the one lever you hold over that. If you’re a LEGEND, you have already accepted the outcome of every proposal that will pass in the next year, so participating is the cheap part of a decision you’ve made anyway.
Watch it as an information source even if you never vote. Proposals are where a change to the schedule, the split or the discount grid appears first, in advance and with reasoning attached. The August-to-December move on the year-end distribution is exactly the kind of thing that shows up in governance before it shows up in your balance. Minted LP NFTs and monthly burn totals are both tracked in the Governance Portal, so it’s the same place you’d already be looking.
Read that as a reason to check the portal periodically rather than as a reason to stake. Governance weight is a benefit of holding rather than a reward stream. Nobody pays you for it, and it doesn’t appear in any APR.
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Can I unstake early?
No, and it’s worth being blunt about that before the tier tables tempt anyone into a longer lock than they can live with.
There is no published early-exit route, no unbonding queue that runs faster if you accept a penalty, and no partial withdrawal. A lock runs to its unlock date. The only mechanism that changes an unlock date is staking again, and that only ever pushes it further out, since the system won’t accept a stake whose unlock time is sooner than your current one.
Two consequences follow, and both are decisions to make before you commit rather than afterwards.
The lock length is a liquidity decision, not a rewards decision. LEGEND pays the most and asks for twelve months of not changing your mind. If there’s a realistic chance you need that capital inside a year, the tier maths is answering a question you haven’t actually asked yet.
Price the volatility, not just the yield. Twelve months is a long time in this market, and your position is denominated in AEVO throughout. A headline APR is calculated on the token, and the token moves.
That’s the honest framing of the trade-off. The program pays you well for duration precisely because duration is the thing it can’t get any other way.
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What happens when my lock matures?
This question arrives twelve months after the interesting decision, and it’s where a year of accumulated standing is easiest to drop by accident.
At the unlock date your sAEVO becomes ordinary AEVO again. Nothing is forfeited, nothing auto-renews, and nothing warns you. Which is the problem: an expired stake is not a neutral state, it’s a lapsed one, and three things stop happening the moment it lapses.
Your duration tier is gone. You are not a LEGEND with an expired lock. You are unstaked, and unstaked is not eligible for the year-end distribution at all.
Your qualifying volume counter pauses. Volume only accrues while an active COMMANDER or LEGEND stake is in place. Everything you trade during a gap is lost to that calculation. It doesn’t reset your total, but it doesn’t add to it either.
Your fee discount stops. Every fill in the gap is at full freight, and this is the one you’ll never notice, because nothing announces it.
Then there’s the rule that turns a short gap into a lasting problem. The year-end distribution requires a staked amount at least equal to your largest qualifying stake this year. So if you let 1M AEVO lapse and re-stake 600,000, you are not a smaller qualifying participant. You are not a qualifying participant. Coming back requires coming back at your own high-water mark.
Three things to do about it, in order of how much they save you:
Diary the unlock date the day you stake. Not the week of. A month before, so you have time to decide rather than react.
Re-lock before it matures, not after. Staking again while the position is live extends it, keeps the tier continuous and never creates a gap. Waiting until after expiry means an unstaked window, and the length of that window is entirely wasted for the year-end calculation.
Re-lock at or above your high-water mark, on a duration that holds your tier. Both conditions, not either. The consolidation rule in the next section is how people get the amount right and the duration wrong.
The whole point of the December snapshot is that it’s a single point-in-time check. A lock that matures in November after eleven excellent months pays nothing, and nothing about that outcome is retrievable in December.
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The sixth thing, which isn't a reward stream: buyback and burn
Worth understanding because it acts on every AEVO you hold, staked or not.
Aevo runs a monthly buyback and burn funded by real exchange revenue, authorized by the AGP-3 governance proposal. It began with a one-time burn of 69 million AEVO, 6.9% of total supply, in January 2026. On the governance dashboard’s own count, roughly 74 million tokens have been permanently removed from circulation in total, and some third-party trackers now report the figure at around 75 million.
That discrepancy is worth a sentence rather than a shrug. The two numbers differ because the monthly burns are ongoing, so any published total is a snapshot with a date attached. If a source quotes a burn total without saying when it was measured, it is telling you less than it appears to. Read the governance dashboard for the current figure.
The arithmetic underneath is the part worth holding onto. Total supply is 1,000,000,000 AEVO. Circulating supply sits at roughly 917,139,416. Against that circulating figure, the 69 million January burn was around 7.5%, and the cumulative ~74 to 75 million is a little over 8%.
Note carefully which denominator any claim uses. The commonly quoted “6.9%” is against total supply of one billion, which is the flattering framing. Against circulating supply the same burn is a larger number. Both are true; they answer different questions. If you are reasoning about scarcity for a token you hold, circulating supply is the denominator that describes your position, and the figures above are the ones to use.
The split on each monthly buyback:
50% is burned immediately, permanently reducing circulating supply.
50% goes to DAO Treasury reserves, split equally between staking rewards and trading rewards.
In months where exchange volume comes in under $500M, 100% is burned instead of split.
Two things follow from that structure. First, half of every buyback can flow back into the reward streams above, so exchange volume feeds your staking income by a second route on top of the fee cashback. Second, the mechanism is pro-cyclical in an unusual direction: quiet months burn harder, busy months fund rewards harder. Neither outcome is bad for a staker, which is presumably the point.
There’s a third observation that matters more than either, and nobody makes it. That $500M threshold is a high bar against recent activity. Third-party trackers have put Aevo’s monthly trading volume in the tens of millions rather than the hundreds through mid-2026. If those figures are broadly right, the 100%-burn branch is the live one and the treasury top-up branch is the exception rather than the other way round, which means the buyback is currently working for the token’s supply rather than for the reward pools.
Read that as a reason to check the dashboard rather than a reason to change your plan. Monthly burn totals and the buyback split in force are both published, and they’re the kind of number worth reading directly rather than inferring from an article. But if you have been assuming that half of every buyback quietly boosts your staking rewards each month, confirm that assumption against what has actually been executed.
This is not something you opt into and not something you can size. It’s context for what your staked position is denominated in, and, per the governance section above, it’s a set of parameters a vote could change.
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What APR does staking pay?
It moves, and anyone quoting you a fixed number is quoting a snapshot.
For scale: at the Rewards Epoch 20 launch on 20 April 2026, Aevo posted staking APRs of up to 271.6%, and it drifted through the high 260s and low 270s across the weekly updates that followed. Those are historical figures rather than a forecast, and they are several months old by the time you’re reading this.
The direction of travel depends on how much AEVO is staked and how much volume the exchange does. More of the first pushes the rate down, more of the second pushes it up. Neither is predictable. Check the staking page at app.aevo.xyz/aevo for what it’s paying today rather than working from a number in an article, including this one.
A headline APR generally doesn’t include the fee discount, and for an active trader that can be the more reliable of the two. Emissions vary with participation. A 20% cut on every perp fee you pay is arithmetic.
The same point applies to your trading collateral, which is a separate pool from your stake and easy to leave idle. Aevo’s collateral framework accepts aeUSD, a yield-bearing asset, at a full collateral factor, so the capital backing your positions can earn while it sits there. That has nothing to do with your staking tier, and it’s the one line of return in this whole system that doesn’t depend on emissions, volume or a snapshot date.
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The mistake that costs people a year
Read this section before you top up a stake, because the rule is not the one most people assume and the damage is done at the moment you add.
When you stake again, Aevo does not run two positions side by side. All your stakes consolidate into a single position, and the two tiers are then re-derived from that consolidated position:
Your amount tier becomes the sum of everything staked. This part only ever moves up.
Your unlock time becomes the longest remaining lock across your positions. A new stake can never pull your unlock date earlier, since the system won’t accept a stake whose unlock time is sooner than your current one.
Your duration tier is then reassessed against that remaining lock period, and this is the part that can move down.
The third bullet is the trap, and it’s worth being slow about, because the first two make topping up sound entirely safe. Your duration tier is keyed to the length of the lock you’re now sitting on, not to how long you have already been staked or to the tier you held yesterday.
The worked example
Take a LEGEND position and top it up ten months in.
In January you stake 100 AEVO for twelve months. You’re LEGEND from day one, unlocking in December.
In October, month ten, you add another 100 AEVO on a five-month lock. Your original stake has two months left to run; the new one has five.
The consolidated position takes the longer of the two, so your unlock moves later, from December to the following March.
But your duration tier is now derived from five months remaining. Five months is EXPLORER.
You have just added capital, extended your unlock by three months, and dropped from LEGEND to EXPLORER. LEGEND is 70% of the year-end pool. EXPLORER is not eligible for it at all.
Read that sequence again, because every individual step looks like an improvement. More staked. Longer commitment. Later unlock date. And the outcome is losing the single benefit the whole position was built around.
What to do instead
The rule that keeps you safe is short: the lock you add must be at least as long as the tier you want to keep. Not longer than your remaining time, longer than your tier threshold.
To stay LEGEND, add on a twelve-month lock. Anything shorter re-derives your tier downwards, however much capital you’re adding and however far out it pushes your unlock.
Check the resulting duration tier before you confirm, every time. The interface shows you what you’ll end up with. The consolidation is not reversible by unstaking, because you can’t unstake before the unlock date you just extended.
Extending beats adding. If the goal is a better position rather than more exposure, re-locking for longer moves you up a tier without needing new capital. Going from COMMANDER to LEGEND shifts you from the 30% pool to the 70% pool and more than doubles your ceiling on the year-end distribution.
This applies to compounding your own rewards. Weekly AEVO emissions are exactly the kind of small, frequent top-up that triggers the rule without anyone thinking of it as a decision. Batch them and add them on a full-length lock, per the rewards section above.
People get caught by this while topping up ahead of a snapshot, which is the worst possible time. They’re adding capital specifically to improve their standing, and they demote themselves doing it. With the distribution now landing in December, the top-up season and the snapshot are the same few weeks. That makes this the most expensive mechanic on the page to get wrong.
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Which tier should I choose?
Depends entirely on whether you trade.
You trade regularly and do real volume. LEGEND, if you can commit for twelve months. The 70% pool, the fastest LP NFT vesting, the highest cap and the biggest fee discount at any given size. The volume component carries 70% of the weight inside a tier, so a trader on a long lock is the best-positioned account in the system.
You trade occasionally. COMMANDER at minimum, if the year-end distribution is in scope. Below eight months you’re not eligible for it at all. If you can’t reach 10M in volume, weigh whether the lock is worth it for the other streams alone, and check whether your volume is mostly options, because the fee discount won’t touch it.
You hold and don’t trade. CADET or EXPLORER still earn LP NFT distributions and governance weight, just with the slowest vesting and no year-end distribution. That’s a legitimate choice, as long as it’s a deliberate one. Note that LUNAR CADET is the one combination that earns no fee discount at all.
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A checklist before the December snapshot
Your unlock date. Falls before the snapshot, even by a fortnight? Extend now. The distribution is annual and in December, and the August payment it replaced is not coming, so there is no earlier date to fall back on.
The length of any lock you’re about to add. Adding on a short lock re-derives your duration tier downwards even as it pushes your unlock date out. If you’re LEGEND and want to stay LEGEND, add on twelve months, and that includes topping up with your own accumulated epoch rewards.
Your staked amount against your high-water mark for the year. It has to match your largest qualifying stake.
Your volume against 10M. The leaderboard shows your cumulative qualifying total and your projected reward. Remember options count delta-weighted rather than at notional.
Which markets your volume is landing in. The weekly epoch splits its million by product before it splits by volume, and the product categories themselves have changed between epochs. The year-end calculation counts some market types and not others. Two different rules, same fills.
Whether you’re capped. 15% of your tier pool, which is 10.5% of the total distribution as a LEGEND and 4.5% as a COMMANDER. Past it, more volume does nothing for this distribution.
Whether LEGEND is worth it. Eight months to twelve is the highest-leverage change available to most stakers, and it is twelve months you cannot get back early.
Which cell of the fee grid you’re in. If you’re paying full freight on perps while holding a stake, you’re leaving a standing discount on the table.
What’s sitting unmanaged. Vested LP NFTs, accumulated AEVO rewards and idle USDC cashback are all real value doing nothing in particular. One pass through them is worth more than most of the optimization above.
Anything live in governance. A proposal is where a change to the schedule, the split or the discount grid appears first, and this page’s most expensive fact, the August-to-December move, is exactly that kind of change.
With the payout landing in December, the months between here and then are the ones where qualifying volume is still cheap to build. If you’re short of 10M, that’s the number to work on, since it carries more than twice the weight of your stake size in the final score.
Stake at app.aevo.xyz/aevo, track your position at app.aevo.xyz/leaderboard, and the full rules are in the staking docs.
WHERE TO GO NEXT
Every cost of a trade, from maker and taker fees to funding and liquidation, is in the fees lesson. Trading leveraged contracts with no expiry? Aevo runs a perps dex with on-chain settlement and 20x on BTC and ETH. If you want the option itself, Aevo is an options dex. Browse every crypto perpetual markets on Aevo with live mark and index prices.
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Quick answers
What is sAEVO?
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Are the Aevo staking tiers still Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond?
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How much of the AEVO supply has been burned?
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What are the Aevo staking tiers?
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What rewards does Aevo staking pay?
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Which Aevo staking reward is worth the most?
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Should I restake my Aevo staking rewards?
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How much is the Aevo staking fee discount?
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Who qualifies for the year-end Mega Reward distribution?
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How do I check my projected Aevo year-end reward?
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How is Aevo qualifying volume calculated?
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Does the same trade count towards every Aevo reward?
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Can I unstake AEVO early?
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What is the Aevo staking lottery?
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Why did topping up my stake lower my tier?
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What is the AEVO buyback and burn?
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What APR does Aevo staking pay?
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Stake and check your tier
Read both tiers before you confirm.
Stake AEVO ↗
TIERS
LUNAR TO CELESTIAL, CADET TO LEGEND
STREAMS
4 PLUS FEE DISCOUNT
FEE DISCOUNT
UP TO 20%
YEAR-END POOL
~808,800 USDC PROJECTED
PRODUCT / STAKING / REWARDS
This page is for information only and isn’t financial advice. Options and perpetual futures are high-risk products and you can lose your full position.