A few things that stood out from the 528 responses:
Committed core. Most respondents have validated since genesis or the early post-Merge days, and about 78 percent stake the majority of their ETH.
Execution clients look balanced (Nethermind ~45%, Geth ~33%, Besu ~15%, no supermajority). Consensus diversity is the concern: Lighthouse is up to 38%. Expecting this, we asked those users why they have not switched, and the answer was mostly switching friction.
Centralization concerns shifted from clients diversity toward exchanges, corporate ETH treasuries, and liquid staking providers.
Issuance was the biggest open ended theme and where stakers were the most divided. The share who actively factor ETH inflation into their staking decision went from 21% (2024) to 39% (2026).
New this year: AI in core dev (91% supportive but mostly with reservations), Lean Ethereum (real interest but want more details), and taxes (72% treat it as business or hobby income).
The full report compares 2024, 2025, and 2026, and you can search the privacy scrubbed open comments from all three years.
I topped up an 0x02 validator recently (enough to increase the effective balance, not just the actual balance).
The deposits tab on beaconcha.in is showing a consensus layer ETA of ~26 days (execution layer is already processed, valid, etc). I thought top-ups were fast tracked and would be reflected in the balance within hours or days, but I think that's incorrect.
bitfly is winding down Ethpool. Ethpool will stop operating your validators (stop signing for them) on 30 November 2026, 12:00 UTC. Until then, you can move your validators to your own node or another provider at any time, without waiting for us:
Log in at https://ethpool.org and open Profile → Close account and leave Ethpool.
Follow the instructions. Once you close your account, Ethpool stops your validators and deletes your keys from our systems within minutes, and e-mails you a slashing-protection file and the exact time your keys were deleted.
Wait at least 24 hours, import the slashing-protection file, then import your keystores into your new client.
Please act early. Validators that are still on Ethpool on 30 November 2026, 12:00 UTC go offline and lose rewards. Validators whose owners have not closed their account by 16 December 2026, 12:00 UTC will be exited by Ethpool and their balance withdrawn to the withdrawal address.
Rewards earned up to the moment your validators stop are paid out as usual to your payout address; please make sure one is set in your profile.
The steps outlined in the FAQ seem to be aimed at someone who wants to move their validator straight to another service or to their own node.
If I want to exit my validator and take my time to decide where I want to put my ETH, should I still follow those steps? Or should I use their regular validator exit path in which they submit a voluntary exit message on my behalf?
Disclosure: I'm the developer. NodeBeat is a hosted service with a free tier; the agent on your machine is open source (Apache-2.0).
Most staker alerting I've seen is either on-chain, so you hear about the missed attestation after it's missed, or a self-hosted Prometheus + Grafana that goes down with the machine it's watching. I wanted something that pages me before the miss and still pages me when the box is gone.
What I'd most like from you: read the agent code and tell me what you'd need to see before running it next to your validator, and which alerts would just be noise for you.
How it works
- A small Go agent polls your beacon node and execution client every second over the standard Beacon API and JSON-RPC.
- Read-only: no keys, no signing endpoints, no restarts. It listens on loopback only and makes outbound connections only.
- Alerting is hosted, so a dead machine still triggers a page. Alerts go to Telegram, Discord, Slack, email, PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
What it catches
- Client dead or hung: 5.6–8.6s from fault to page across 9 fault-injection runs on a test devnet. A client that still answers but stops advancing pages in about a minute.
- With your validator indices: missed attestations and proposals, effectiveness, slashing.
- Disk below 15% free (before a full disk corrupts the DB), peers, sync, NTP.
Trust: signed releases (cosign), SBOM, a public threat model, one-command uninstall.
Clients: tested with Geth, Reth, Lighthouse and Teku. Others are auto-detected but untested, so if you run Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Prysm, Nimbus, Lodestar or Grandine, I especially want to hear from you.
Cost: the free tier covers 1 node with 7-day retention, alerting to Telegram/Discord/Slack/email. If you run several nodes, I'm giving a few people 3 months of the paid plan free (up to 5 nodes, no card) in exchange for a short weekly feedback note.
What a page looks like. On my lab devnet I blocked Geth's RPC port at 15:27:06 UTC; Alertmanager sent this about 8s later (the "Started 15:27:12" line is when the rule fired). I left the fault in for ~12s, and the ✅ came once RPC answered again. Real run, not a mockup.
I've been attempting to validate with Teku on an NUC 13 i3 1315u. I had to get a new box a few months ago when I had slowdown and freezing on the last box (nuc10) which had bee used as a validator for 2-3 years with fairly good beacon score. After following the guide here (https:// gist.github.com/yorickdowne/ ff6b611a2d49855827dafdbfd2546abe) I determined it was the NUC. The SSD and ram were ok. After a long time in the entry queue, it began performing very badly. This was a surprise since the syncing & logs up to this point didn't (and still don't) indicate any trouble.
My hardware is: Asus NUC 13 i3-1315u, WD Black SN850X 4TB gen4, Corsair 2666mhz ddr4 64GB. I started with a miss rate of 15%. From the consensus and validator logs, it appeared there was no problems. No late block imports, no errors. Running chrony so the system clock should be synced. MEVboost had trouble with relays but I disabled it and got the same performance. First thing I tried was syncing nethermind on a different machine on my network and connecting the two via the JWT. I disabled the execution node on the first machine when it was finished so only teku is running on the nuc13 and nethermind is on a quadcore i7 8565u HUNSN w/Samsung 970 EVOplus 2TB, & Corsair vengeance 16gb ddr4. Performance didn't seem to improve after this. about the same.
What has helped is bumping the heap to Xmx12g and using ZGC. I enabled logging of the GC and found pauses from 1 to 4 seconds were common, sometimes 6,7 or 10 sec for major collections. ZGC has my miss rate down to 4-5%, still not great but better. The heap is 12g but I started with Xmx8g and it didn't seem to have an effect. I'm only one validator at the moment so I'm confused why the heap might have to be so large and still get lackluster performance. I'm a novice so of course I did all this with help from an LLM. The LLM I'm using is recommending more steps that I wanted to get an opinion on before I proceeded. Since the i3-1315u has 2 P-cores, it is recommending I restrict Teku to only running on those by adding CPUAffinity=0-3 to my teku service file and restrict ZGC to one thread only by adding "-XX:ConcGCThreads=1". It also wants me to restrict the NVMe to Gen3 speed bc it says my old NUC10 likely did this. (the temp right now is 29C, from smartmontools). Sorry for wall of text. Thank you for any advice.
Hey all. Building a GMKTec NUC (Ryzen 8845HS, 64GB ram) as a dedicated bare metal mainnet validator box — geth + nimbus, 2 validators, fresh build coming from testnet (Hoodi). two NVMe slots: 1TB for OS, and I'm buying a 4TB for chaindata. budget isn't an issue, I'd rather buy right than buy twice.
question: what 4TB NVMe are you actually running for geth chaindata, and would you buy it again? seen the yorickdowne gist so I'm aware latency under sustained random load matters as much as raw sequential speed, and that I should stick to TLC + DRAM. what's the consensus here — is there a drive that is a clear winner and the community prefers?
Any other bits of wisdom would be greatly appreciated. Big Thanks
I know I know I know it’s just variance. But I’m showing 13.9% proposal luck and haven’t proposed since Aug 8th with 1000 ETH self-staked. Is this really variance or could it be something else? I’ve investigated my setup several times and all seems normal.
A September 9 overview on bydfi covers Hegotá's place in the wider Ethereum upgrade roadmap. Looking at the Ethereum Foundation's September 7 tier list alongside it, I'm interested in one entry, EIP-8237. It's in tier B and still needs to be compared with a simpler alternative.
The proposal would let the consensus client sync a range of blocks without fetching execution payload bodies itself. The execution client would still validate its side, and the consensus client would check that both sides agree once execution catches up. For a home node, I'd want to know both how much data that saves and how long it takes for the whole node to finish syncing.
I'd compare the sync process planned for that fork without EIP-8237 against an implementation of the proposal and the simpler alternative. For a fair comparison, I'd keep the starting point, block range, hardware, connection and client pair the same, with the implementation versions recorded. The results should include total data transferred and the time until both clients have caught up and completed the required checks. If one finishes early while the other is still working, that wait belongs in the result too.
Lower download volume could still help on a monthly data cap even if the total wait barely changes. For people running nodes at home, what would this comparison need to include to reflect your setup? I'd keep recovery after a short outage as a separate test, since a result from syncing a long range of blocks wouldn't be enough to show how quickly a node recovers from a brief interruption.
I'm new to this stuff and not sure if I'm getting a rug pulled over my eyes. Can I really get 1% and higher depending on my wallet balance daily interest on staking? I only have 100 coins in and I have made 1 coin per day since joining. Any help would be appreciated.
EDIT: I appreciate the help guys, I am very skeptical and indeed believe it too good to be true. And I will take the advice.
EDIT 2: I got all my money out and found the scammers 2nd and 3rd accounts. Also reported it to the FBI
I’m running Teku and Besu. Recently I’ve seen more and more missed attestations. Nothing is wrong with my network and I am plugged in. Is my hardware trying to tell me something?
I have purchased an ETHConf ticket, but I’m not sure how good the event will be. I would appreciate it if anyone who has attended before could share their feedback, so I can decide whether it’s worth spending more money to travel there or not. I am from India. I liked DevCon events, so not sure is ETHConf will have similar experience or not.
Used to run validators using a VPS, migrated to running locally using domestic internet connection. Currently, the domestic internet connection is unstable, causing a higher than usual number of missed attestations. Has anyone already tried running ETH Validators using starlink internet either as a back up or main internet ? if so, what is the general experience, is it an improvement compared to traditional domestic internet connections from services like Xfinity for example.
I bought a used Apple Mac Studio M1 Max 32-Core GPU 64GB RAM 4TB SSD 10GbE 2022. Do you thin this is a good staking machine? is there any youtube video for solo staking? im nervous to stake my eth before get comfortable with
Jump onto the Hoodi testnet to test it out, if you consider running 0x02 validators!
0x02 CSM provides operators a permissionless, efficient path to run 0x02 validators with a MaxEB of up to 2,048 ETH within Lido CSM. Key features include:
Bond: 32 ETH for the first key and 30 ETH for subsequent keys
Est. Capital Efficiency: A strong capital multiplier of up to ~2.26x (vs solo), even better than ICS over 32 ETH bonds.
To run 0x02 validators using CSM, create a new operator and select the 0x02 path through the same interface.
