How to Vote on Aquarius: Rewards Zone, Boosts, Incentives

Aquarius voting by the numbers (25 October 2026)

Measure	Value	Source
Votes committed to liquidity voting	52.99B	Aquarius voting tracker
Of which delegated (dICE)	10.9B	Aquarius voting tracker
Markets with any votes	537	Aquarius voting tracker
Markets at or above 0.5% / eligible for rewards	23 / 22	Aquarius voting tracker
Largest market's share of votes	31.6% (rewards capped at 10%)	Aquarius voting tracker
Daily SDEX and AMM rewards	7M AQUA, about $2,000	Aquarius docs; CoinGecko

The 0.5% threshold works out to about 265M votes at these totals. One market above it was not eligible, because it contains an asset not approved in the Asset Registry.

What voting does

ICE votes decide which Stellar markets receive Aquarius' daily AQUA emissions. Liquidity providers in those markets' AMM pools, and market makers on their Stellar DEX order books, share the AQUA. Voters do not receive the emissions; they steer them, and earn voting incentives for doing so.

A market is a trading pair, such as XLM/USDC. It can have several AMM pools plus an order book, and its rewards are split among them by liquidity. Votes are cast as claimable balances on Stellar, so every vote is visible and verifiable on-chain, and you get the ICE back by reclaiming the balance. For the history of the vote market and why projects pay for votes, see ICE voting and bribes.

How the reward zone is decided

Three rules decide where emissions go. A market needs at least 0.5% of all liquidity votes; every asset in it must be approved in the Asset Registry; and its share of the daily allocation is proportional to its votes, up to 10% per market.

• The threshold. 0.5% of all votes. At that level up to 200 markets could earn at once; on 25 October 2026, 23 cleared it.
• The registry. Since June 2026, every asset in the market must be on the Asset Registry, a governance-run whitelist. XLM, AQUA and USDC are approved by default. One non-approved asset makes the whole market ineligible. Details: the Asset Registry explained.
• The split. Eligible markets share by vote rank: 5% of votes earns twice what 2.5% earns.
• The cap. No market gets more than 10% of the daily 7M AQUA, so 700,000 AQUA. Votes above the cap are not redistributed. The top market's 31.6% share on 25 October therefore earned it the same as 10%.

Markets can also lose rewards. If an asset is removed from the registry, its pools stop earning AQUA, though they keep trading. WhaleHub's own BLUB-AQUA pool has earned no AQUA emissions since June 2026, when the registry rule took effect.

Pair boosts

Markets paired with AQUA get a 50% voting boost and markets paired with XLM or USDC get 30%. The boosts multiply a market's votes, raising its share of rewards, until it reaches 10% of adjusted votes.

The boosts are cumulative, so an AQUA/XLM market gets both. They benefit the market's liquidity providers, not the voters. This is why the tracker shows "adjusted" votes (78.2B on 25 October) well above the raw total of 52.99B.

How to vote, step by step

1. Get ICE. Lock AQUA at aqua.network/locker. Longer locks give more ICE, up to 10 per AQUA for three years. See how to get ICE.
2. Open the voting page. At aqua.network/vote, browse Popular, Top Voted or With Voting Incentives, or search for a pair.
3. Add markets. Click Add To Vote. A pair nobody has voted for shows Create Pair, which costs up to 5 XLM to set up its voting wallets.
4. Allocate. Open Chosen Pairs, set how much ICE to commit in total and how to split it.
5. Sign. The votes confirm in the next ledger, usually within five seconds.
6. Collect incentives. Add trustlines for the incentive assets of the markets you voted for, so daily payouts can reach you.

To add more later, press the market's upvote button. To withdraw, go to My Aquarius, open My Liquidity Votes, choose Manage unlocked votes and claim the markets you want back.

Earning voting incentives

Voting incentives are rewards attached to a market and paid daily to its voters. Protocol incentives are funded from AMM trading fees on high-volume markets; external incentives are posted by projects or anyone else who wants votes on a market.

External incentives run in weekly rounds. They must be submitted by Sunday 18:00 UTC, are validated at 19:00 UTC, and pay out in equal daily parts from Monday to Sunday. The minimum is 100,000 AQUA a week. To prove an incentive token has real value, Aquarius buys 100,000 AQUA with part of it through a path payment at collection, and pays voters that AQUA plus the rest of the tokens.

Each market takes its payout snapshot at a random time every day. If you move your votes during the day you can miss that day's payout, so keep them in place for the whole week. Since June 2026, incentives on a market with a non-approved asset still pay voters, but they do not bring that market any AQUA emissions.

When things happen

When (UTC)	What happens
Continuously	Votes are counted; AMM rewards accrue every block
Hourly	SDEX rewards calculated, then paid around half past
Once a day, unannounced	Reward allocations resync from vote standings
Once a day, random	Each incentivised market snapshots voters and pays
Sunday 18:00 / 19:00	Incentive deadline / collection for the next week

Source: Aquarius reward cycle. Because allocations resync daily, a vote changes a market's rewards within a day, not within minutes.

Delegating instead

If you will not vote every week, you can delegate. Aquarius lets you assign upvoteICE, governICE or both to whitelisted delegates, split across several, and change your choice with a 24-hour cooldown. Market voting rewards always go to you, not the delegate. On 25 October 2026 about 10.9B of the 52.99B votes, roughly a fifth, came from delegated ICE. Delegates vary: some chase incentives, some vote for ecosystem growth, some are inactive, so check their record.

What changed in 2026

• No more downvotes. downvoteICE, once used to vote against markets, was deprecated in June 2026.
• The Asset Registry. Also June 2026: emissions only go to markets whose assets are all approved.
• Concentrated pools. Liquidity in Aquarius' concentrated pools counts toward a market's AMM side like any other pool; see how to provide liquidity on Aquarius.

A simple voting strategy

• For income: vote for markets with the largest incentives per vote, keep votes in place all week, and hold the reward-asset trustlines.
• For a pool you provide liquidity to: votes on its market raise its share of emissions, which your LP position collects, as long as the market stays under the 10% cap.
• Avoid wasted votes: votes on a market above 10%, or on one with a non-approved asset, direct no extra emissions.

If tracking this weekly is not for you, pooled voting is the alternative. WhaleHub, which publishes this blog, stakes AQUA, votes the pooled ICE toward the best-paying markets and pays stakers in AQUA; see how to stake AQUA.