After VeChainThor’s Hayabusa upgrade, holders of unstaked VeChain Token (VET) stopped receiving automatic VeThor (VTHO) rewards, shifting new issuance to validators and holders who stake and delegate.
The December 2025 change means holding VET alone no longer generates VTHO. VeChain says the new rules direct issuance toward participants who help secure its public blockchain. Holders who leave their VET unstaked lose the automatic rewards they previously received.
VeChain scheduled Hayabusa for Dec. 2, 2025. StarGate’s documentation records a pause in reward generation from Dec. 2 through Dec. 9 during the transition. Under the new rules, the network calculates VTHO issuance for each block using the total VET staked. VTHO is the token used to pay for transactions and smart contract activity.
Holders who want to delegate can stake VET through StarGate, which issues a nonfungible token (NFT) representing their stake. After the position matures, they can assign it to an active or queued validator. A VTHO payment allows them to skip the waiting period.
For an active validator, a delegation begins accruing rewards with its next cycle. A delegation to a queued validator must wait until that validator becomes active. Cycles last seven, 15 or 30 days, and rewards accrued during a cycle become claimable when it ends.
Hayabusa also changed block production. VeChainThor has 101 active validators, each required to stake 25 million VET. A validator with delegators receives 30% of its protocol block rewards, while the delegators share 70%. A validator without delegators keeps the full block reward.
Transaction fees follow a different arrangement, introduced with the earlier Galactica upgrade. The network removes the base fee from circulation and gives any priority fee to the validator that proposes the block. VET’s staking role and VTHO’s payment role are separate, but transaction charges still operate through a fee market rather than a fixed dollar price.
