On 2 November 2026, a proposal on the Aztec governance forum set out a contract that would stop paying sequencer checkpoint rewards to sequencers staked through Aztec Token Positions (ATPs) from two registries, one for investors and one for employees. The payload contract is already deployed on Ethereum mainnet. Deploying it does not change anything yet. The change takes effect only if sequencers signal for it and Aztec governance then approves and executes it.
What the payload does
The payload, ZeroRegistryRewardsPayload, is at 0x8e1ae43beC950Ea0E02F2Ed43101797c5A8dbfCD. According to the forum post, it would do three things:
- Set the sequencer checkpoint reward to zero for the investor ATP registry, 0x667d2641cb96734f386adA6A9afCF07B1815fB8b.
- Do the same for the employee ATP registry, 0xD938bE4A2cB41105Bc2FbE707dca124A2e5d0c80.
- Point the canonical rollup's sequencer reward calculator at a new
RegistryReductionCalculator.
The post says this changes only the checkpoint reward. Sequencers staked through those registries would still earn transaction fees. All other sequencers would keep the default checkpoint reward.
The source is pinned to commit 6c317259f3cf2303e183c5980da27d57e047a811 (PR #25726). The author says the payload is source-verified on Sourcify and was tested against a mainnet fork. In a reply the same day, Aztec Labs said it had checked that the deployed bytecode matches that commit. Its reply added that this is not a recommendation to signal or vote either way.
What happens next
The post gives no dates and no reward figures, and it does not explain why the change is proposed. The next step is sequencer signalling for the payload. If enough sequencers signal, the payload goes through Aztec's governance process, where token holders can approve it before it is executed.
What it means
- Sequencers staked from the investor or employee ATP registries: if the payload is executed, they would earn no checkpoint rewards, only transaction fees.
- Other sequencers and their delegators: their checkpoint reward stays the same.
- Sequencer operators: the next decision is whether to signal for the payload.
The sequencer set and current epochs are on the Aztec dashboard. For background on the current rollup, see BitBasic's earlier post on Aztec v6 going live.
