Understand how the vault works

Locking GAT into the vault gives you the right to participate in Shamans’ reward payouts starting from the next epoch. The “eligible starting epoch” tells you from which epoch on you are eligible for rewards. Of course, you need to have at least some GAT locked to participate in the rewards.

If you request a payout all reward shares from all your past eligible epochs are paid out to your account. The “eligible starting epoch” is set to the current one (so you can request your share for it in the next epoch).

 Changing locks changes the eligibility epoch!

If you add more GAT, the eligible epoch is set to the current epoch + 1.

Example: you added 100 GAT in epoch #1. This makes you eligible for payouts from epoch #2. If you add more GAT in epoch #2, it will change your eligibility to epoch #3. Hence, when the epoch #3 comes and the rewards for past epochs become available, you will not get any for epoch #2.

This is a technical limitation. As a workaround, you can use another address and lock GAT separately.

Unlocking removes all your GAT from the vault and bumps the epoch to the next one, forfeiting any rewards for the current epoch.

Example: you added 100 GAT in epoch #1. In epoch #3 you unlock your GAT. All the GAT is credited back to you and all outstanding rewards for past epochs are paid out automatically (in this case for epoch #2, if you did not request the payout before unlocking). However, in the epoch #4 you will not get any rewards for epoch #3, independently at what point in time during the epoch you unlocked your share from the vault.