Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that lowering the solo staking requirement from 32 ETH could make the network more decentralized and accessible.
In a recent discussion on X, the Ethereum community discussed safeguarding solo staking as it leads to “true decentralization.” In response, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin suggests temporarily reducing staking requirements to make it more accessible.
Currently, solo staking requires significant financial investment. However, reducing it to 1 ETH will require network changes. To safeguard Ethereum’s decentralization changes with orbit SSF could further optimize validator participation.
Vitalik says Ethereum may reduce staking requirement
The Ethereum network allows participating via home staking with a deposit requirement of 32 ETH. To run an Ethereum node, a home staker has to run the client software on their computer. If an individual runs their own validator node it is called solo staking. Since PoS consensus requires the staked crypto to be locked up as a security deposit, solo stakers might not have the resources that pool stakers have.
At the market price of $2,300, the value of 32 ETH comes to $73,600. Buterin thinks that money could be a bigger barrier than technical requirements for node bandwidth. As a counter, he suggested that the network increase the bandwidth requirements but lower the validator deposit to 16 or 24 ETH. Buterin believes it is a win-win for both accessibility and network operation.
I think there's a sane version of this where we recognize that 32 ETH is much more of a barrier than bandwidth reqs, and temporarily do a trade where we up the bandwidth reqs a bit and in exchange drop the staking deposit minimum to eg. 16 or 24 ETH.
It's net-good for both…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 3, 2024
Reducing ETH staking to 1 ETH needs SSF
In the future, Buterin even sees the staking requirement falling to 1 ETH if they establish orbit SSF or single slot finality. Orbit SSF is a proposed mechanism for Ethereum staking to improve validator set management. It aims to improve economic security while increasing the speed of finality.
According to Ethereum research, “The shorter the time allowed to reach finalization, the more computing power is required at each node because the attestation processing has to be done faster.”
Just like the minimum stake is floored at 32 ETH, the time to finality on Ethereum was set at ~15 minutes. Orbit SSF was reportedly proposed to limit active validators and introduce validator rotation to prevent centralization. A smaller validator set while reducing staking requirements is proposed in an attempt to scale Ethereum, improve efficiency, and reduce decentralization.
In a blog two years ago, Buterin explained that the speed and validator changes could allow transactions to be validated in a single slot of 12 seconds. However, the developer acknowledged that SSF will likely involve changing some current system guarantees, like how many people can participate or how rewards are calculated.
At press time, the total Ethereum staked on the Beacon chain amounts to 34,456,696 ETH, from a total of 1,077,689 validators.
