- Can I be slashed for being offline?
- Can I stop running my validator for a few days and then start it back up again?
- Can I withdraw my ETH at any time?
- How are validators incentivized to stay active and honest?
- How long do pre-signed exit messages remain valid?
- How much ETH do I need to stake to become a validator?
- I am overwhelmed and don't know where to start - what can I do?
- I proposed a block! What did I earn?
- Is the deposit/source address shown anywhere?
- Is there a penalty for missing a block proposal?
- Is there a penalty for missing an attestation?
- Is there any advantage to having more than 32 ETH at stake?
- Should I set a withdrawal address when setting up my solo staking validator?
- What exactly is a validator?
- What happens if I lose my validator keys?
- What happens if I lose my validator seed phrase / mnemonic?
- What if I want to stop staking?
- What is a node operator?
- What is a validator client?
- What is the deposit contract?
- What is the easiest way to Solo Home Staking?
- What is the time commitment for running a validator?
- When should I top up my validator’s balance?
- Why do I need to have funds at stake?
- Why the 32 ETH maximum?
No. Realistically, the only condition that can cause a slashing event is if you run your validator's keys on two nodes at the same time (such as a failover / redundancy setup, where your backup node accidentally turns on while your main node is still running). Don't let this happen, and you won't get slashed. Slashing cannot occur from being offline for maintenance.
Yes, but with small penalties. See I'm worried about downtime.
Withdrawals are not currently enabled on the beacon chain. This means that any ETH deposited will be locked in the staking contract until a future time (expected to be in 2023 but this time frame is an estimate) when an upgrade to the network allows withdrawals.
Ethereum Foundation Withdrawals FAQ: https://notes.ethereum.org/@launchpad/withdrawals-faq
If your validator proposes a block, then some of those rewards are immediately available to you in the form of priority fees and MEV (if you are using an MEV-Boost relay).
In future, when withdrawals have been enabled, you will be able to withdraw your ETH by exiting your validator and waiting in the withdrawal queue.
As a validator you are rewarded for proposing / attesting to blocks that are included in the chain. On the other hand, you can be penalized for being offline and behaving maliciously—for example attesting to invalid or contradicting blocks.
The key concept is the following:
- Rewards are given for actions that help the network reach consensus.
- Minor penalties are given for inadvertent actions (or inactions) that hinder consensus.
- And major penalties (or slashings) are given for malicious actions.
In other words, you maximize your rewards by providing the greatest benefit to the network as a whole.
Pre-signed exit messages only remain valid for two hard forks. After that, you will need to generate new ones.
This comes from https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/blob/dev/specs/phase0/beacon-chain.md#get_domain and specifically the line:
fork_version = state.fork.previous_version if epoch < state.fork.epoch else state.fork.current_version
An exit message signed at any epoch less than the last hard fork is lumped into a "previous version" bucket and given its fork version. That means that if your operation was signed two fork versions ago the verification function has the wrong fork version, hence the wrong domain, hence the wrong signing root, hence the wrong signature, hence it fails to verify.
Each key-pair associated with a validator requires locking 32 ETH to be activated, which represents your initial balance as well as your initial and maximum voting power for any validator.
Staking on Ethereum gives you many options to participate. This can be overwhelming - no doubt. We all have been there!
Take it step by step. First learn about the options you have and choose what you are most comfortable with. There is no need to rush things and risk your precious sleep while doing so.
If you choose "Solo Home Staking" and want to run your own validator, decide between the different hardware options (f.e. Intel NUC) and follow a staking guide on testnet first. Search for Goerli Testnet Staking Guides. Take notes, find out what happens when you disconnect the power cable of your validator, how to update, etc. All in all - get confident with your node before staking on Ethereum Mainnet.
And - You don't have to face problems on your own.
Feel free to ask us any question and join our community on Discord.
Validators that participate in securing the beacon chain and execute "duties" get rewarded for this by new issuance of ETH. In addition, validators receive priority fees paid by users, and optionally MEV, Maximal Extractable Value.
You can view a validator's reward for proposed blocks by looking at the fee recipient address on etherscan.io↗ under Produced Blocks.
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See a detailed explanation here: How does my validator earn ETH?
Yes, the deposit/source address is shown on the validator. It’s not used for anything in the protocol though. The consensus layer actually has no record of which address a validator's deposit was made from but it is in the history of the execution layer as all transactions are.
The deposit/source address can be seen on beaconcha.in under Deposits -> Ethereum Deposits -> From Address.
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No. If you miss your block proposal, the slot that should have contained your block will be empty. Other than the lost rewards from missing the block proposal, there are no penalties or slashing that occurs from a missed block proposal.
Missing some attestations is completely normal and extremely low-cost. The penalty for missing an attestation is exactly the same as the reward for a successful one. So, with around 240 attestations per day per validator, missing one or two is still a successful attestation rate of over 99%!
No. There is no advantage to having more than 32 ETH staked.
Depositing more than 32 ETH to a single set of keys does not increase rewards potential, nor does accumulating rewards above 32 ETH, as each validator is limited to an effective balance of 32. This means that staking is done in 32 ETH increments, each with its own set of keys and balance.
Setting a withdrawal address when creating your validator keys can be useful as you won't need to set it again when withdrawals are enabled.
The Staking Deposit CLI can set a withdrawal address during deposit json creation. If a user opts not to do this - usually simply by omission - then it sets the hash of the withdrawal pub key instead. Sometime in the future - possibly with Shanghai/Capella hard fork - there will be a tool that takes the mnemonic and signs a message to effect a one-time change from v0 credentials - withdrawal key - to v1 credentials: Withdrawal address.
And that’s it. Once your validator uses v1 credentials the withdrawal address is fixed and can’t be changed. In the current design, skimming is automatic, and so are full withdrawals: Full withdrawal just happens after exit is completed.
A tool to export the withdrawal key will likely not be created, and it’d also not be very useful. You need the withdrawal key at most twice:
- Once to generate the signing key (only if no withdrawal address was set at that time).
- Once more to sign a message to set one.
In both cases the key can be generated inside the CLI tool, be used for its purpose, and then be discarded again without ever being written to disk.
However, there are some cases to be aware of that make it beneficial to not set a withdrawal address at the start:
- If you plan to migrate your validator to a pool e.g. (Rocketpool) in the future, then you won't be able to perform this migration if you set a withdrawal address when you created your validator keys. You would have to wait for withdrawals to be enabled, potentially wait in the withdrawal queue, then re-stake your ETH, potentially waiting in the activation queue as well!
A validator is a virtual entity that lives on the Beacon Chain, represented by a balance, public key, and other properties, and participates in consensus of the Ethereum network.
If there's a catastrophic failure of your validator and you lose your validator keys, don't panic! These can be easily recovered as long as you still have your validator seed phrase / mnemonic. Simply follow the same steps you used when you first generated your validator keys, and install them on a new validator machine.
Be 100% certain that any previous machines will not come back online as this will lead to a slashing event.
If you lose your seed phrase, the one used to generate the validator keys, then unfortunately your staked ETH is most likely unrecoverable.
However, if you had set a withdrawal address, then the validator keys are enough to sign a voluntary-exit, which causes a withdrawal to that address. There is also a special case if you have a pre-signed voluntary-exit message, but that's likely only used by staking services and only noted here for completeness.
In the event that you can't recover your validator or you decide you want to stop staking, you have the option to exit your validator. Even though withdrawals are not currently enabled, you can still exit your validator from the network. This means that, while you won't be able to get your validator balance back right away (until withdrawals are enabled), you won't receive any penalties for being offline once the validator exits the withdrawal queue. Exiting a validator is currently a one way process. For details on how to exit your validator, check out our guide.
A node operator is the human being who makes sure the client software is running appropriately, maintaining hardware as needed.
A validator client is the software that acts on behalf of the validator by holding and using its private key to make attestations about the state of the chain. A single validator client can hold many key pairs, controlling many validators.
You can think of the deposit contract as a transfer of funds from an Ethereum account to a proof-of-stake validator account. It specifies who is staking, who is validating, how much is being staked, and who can withdraw the funds.
Setting up your own validator for "Solo Home Staking" is not difficult.
You can follow step-by-step staking guides, which don't take much time at all. See also time commitment.
Nonetheless there are pre-configured hardware options like Dappnode↗ or Avado↗ which can make things easier and eliminate the need to interact with the command line interface or Linux in general. You can also install the open source Dappnode software ↗ on your own hardware to have a more intuitive staking experience.
The majority of the time commitment for staking is the initial learning and setup. It will probably take a day or two of tinkering to get it all figured out (maybe more, and that's okay!). Once you get going you're looking at updating once a month or so (ten minutes) and responding to outages, which are rare.
The answer to this question very much depends on how much ETH you have at your disposal. You should certainly top up if your balance is close to 16 ETH. This is to ensure you don’t get exited out of the validator set (which automatically happens if your balance falls below 16 ETH). At the other end of the spectrum, if your balance is closer to 31 ETH, it’s probably not worth adding the extra ETH required to get back to 32.
As a validator, you'll need to have funds at stake so you can be penalized for behaving dishonestly. In other words, to keep you honest, your actions need to have financial consequences.
Each 32 ETH deposit activates one set of validator keys. These keys are used to sign off on the state of the network. The lower the ETH requirement, the more resulting signatures must be saved by the network. 32 ETH was chosen as a balance between enabling as many people as possible to stake without inhibiting decentralization by bloating the size of each block with signatures.
Limiting the maximum stake to 32 ETH per validator encourages decentralization of power as it prevents any single validator from having an excessively large vote on the state of the chain. It also limits the amount of ETH that can be exited from staking at any given time, as the number of validator that can exit in a given time period is limited. This helps protect the network against certain attacks.
Although a validator's vote is weighted by the amount it has at stake, each validators voting weight starts at, and is capped at 32. It is possible to drop below this with poor node performance, but it is not possible to raise above it. Do not deposit more than 32 ETH for a single validator. It will not add to your rewards and will be locked until withdrawals are enabled.