On 30 June 2026, the validator election for Era 2220 stalled on Polkadot Asset Hub. Following the enactment of Referendum 1909, permissionless chill_other calls removed 67 under-bonded but heavily nominated validators from the candidate set. This reduced the best achievable election score below the unchanged MinimumScore.minimal_stake threshold. Consequently, every signed and unsigned election solution was rejected with ScoreTooLow, preventing a new validator set from being queued and extending Era 2219 to approximately 3.33 days. Referendum 1914 subsequently lowered the binding score threshold and restored normal era progression. A detailed technical explanation is available in the staking election stall post-mortem.

Although Era 2219 accrued its full emission, it was the transition era for the new validator self-stake incentive mechanism and had zero aggregate incentive weight. Its approximately 115,350 DOT incentive budget therefore cannot be paid through the standard mechanism and would otherwise return to the DAP buffer when Era 2219 is pruned.

This referendum proposes distributing 115,349 DOT from the pallet-owned Era 2219 incentive account directly to the 595 validators that earned non-zero Era 2219 points. The five active validators with zero era points are excluded from payment but remain documented in the audit dataset. Each eligible validator receives an equal allocation through an atomic batch of balances.transferKeepAlive calls dispatched as the incentive-pot account.

The complete rationale, payout schedule, verification procedure and encoded execution call are published in the Era 2219 incentive-pot redistribution technical proposal.

Thans to Paulo for preparing the staking-election stall post-mortem and for helping develop the proposed redistribution approach, and to Ankan for reviewing the solution and providing guidance on the Whitelisted Caller process.

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