By Daniel Luca

<aside> 💡 Ethereum Staking Scenarios: What the Future Might Hold

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Motivation

The proposed change aims to slow down the growth in the number of validators, providing time to implement essential adjustments. Preliminary tests indicate that the validator client software starts to falter when handling around 2.1 million validators.

Given that the current validator count is over 800,000, as indicated by beaconcha.in, there's an urgent need to address this issue.

There are several ways to make these adjustments:

• Enhance the validator client software to coordinate more than 2.1 million validators successfully.
• Permit validators to stake more than the current limit of 32 Ether, enabling larger players to woperate fewer clients.

By limiting the number of new validators joining each epoch, we extend the window of opportunity to make these changes. This provides time to both increase the staking limit beyond 32 Ether and optimize the client software to manage more than 2.1 million validators efficiently.

Objective

The aim is to transition from an unbounded epoch churn rate to a capped rate of 8, effectively shifting the validator growth rate from exponential to linear. This will be implemented through a new protocol constant named MAX_PER_EPOCH_CHURN_LIMIT.

Description

The table below provides estimates of Ether staking scenarios if this constant is introduced on December 1, 2023.

Note that these estimates are based on the total supply of Ether. The table suggests that, without a churn limit, all existing Ether could be staked by the end of 2024. However, this projection likely overstates the case, assuming that current staking behavior will remain consistent over an extended period.

Process

This EIP is quickly pushed by the developers to be included in Dencun. It’s unusually quick to draft, discuss, accept and implement to enter the Ethereum network.

The process is clearly described in EIP-1