Project Description and why it’s classified as a Public Good
EthStaker is a non-profit entity dedicated to decentralizing the Ethereum Beaconchain. This benefits the users, the app-builders, the Layer 2s, and anyone who interacts with Ethereum in any way. The decentralization of the Beaconchain is the fundamental value of Ethereum and keeping it healthy is imperative to maintaining the value of everything built on top of it.
Supporting decentralization means that, when possible, we encourage users to stake from home and we support and draw attention to projects that make the solo staking user experience easier and/or better incentivized. We also encourage liquid staking diversification for those who choose to stake with a provider.
Main Project Funding Sources
The Ethereum Foundation
Gitcoin Grants
Octant Epoch 0
Seeking project-specific funding or funding for general operations
General operations
Educational content
Rhino Review is a biweekly staking updates newsletter that EthStaker supports
The Knowledge Base, built by Eridian Alpha and Spacesider, is an EthStaker community effort that we’re proud to support
ethstaker.cc aims to create a one-stop shop for people looking for a comprehensive place for staking resources and content
EthStaker hosts community calls with staking-related projects to help the community engage with them, ask questions, and get answers on how these projects function
Live events
Devconnect Istanbul Staking Gathering: last year’s staking gathering at Devconnect 2022 was livestreamed and hosted individual and project speakers, roundtables, and a hackathon - it cost in excess of $240k to put on. This year, we’re running the event again at Devconnect 2023 and aim to run it at cost.
Software and resources that makes solo staking an easy choice
Wagyu installer by EthStaker: This is in the concept-phase at the moment. It would create a graphical user interface for eth-docker
eth-docker by EthStaker: This is a well-documented text user interface that needs better marketing - it is a robust tool that containerizes and automates node setup - we feel that stakers could benefit from more educational content about eth-docker
Smoothly: Smoothly is creating a way for solo staking to be competitive with large staking pools that are able to pool MEV rewards and capture more stability in proposal payouts. EthStaker is helping to test their infrastructure and also supporting them through their audit process
EthStaker maintains a faucet-like service that assists stakers in making their deposit to run validators on testnet while they learn how to stake. The service makes the deposit for the user in an effort to mitigate the hoarding issues that testnet ETH deals with while making sure that running a validator on a testnet is always available to new stakers
Decentralization efforts
EthStaker assisted ether.fi with their solo staking initiative that aimed to increase the geographic diversity of solo stakers. ether.fi provided ETH and hardware to people in countries underrepresented in staking, helping provide a way for these stakers to earn a portion of staking rewards while also becoming knowledgeable on running a validator
EthStaker is a partner with Rocket Pool’s many community-led initiatives to increase the validator set on decentralized smart contracts
EthStaker is published a data-driven blog post to highlight the available options for large-scale operators to diversify into minority execution clients in an effort to push for execution client diversity
Ethereum network support
EthStaker currently runs 40,000 validators on the Holešky testnet and has provided financial support for some small home stakers who altruistically run thousands of validators for the testnet.
Team Information, including backgrounds and roles
EthStaker is a 50k member community and would not function without its community. Its core activities are spearheaded and actively maintained by seven members who receive small stipends for their continued involvement - viewable on EthStaker’s public address. When those members can no longer dedicate a significant portion of their time to EthStaker projects, they may step down to retired status and may or may not continue to provide advice without any expectation of time commitment and no compensation.
There are other members who dedicate their time to a specific project but not EthStaker as a whole - these members currently include the Knowledge Base maintainers who receive a very small stipend for their work.
Do you have a commitment to open-source (i.e. every open-source license accepted by the Open-Source Initiative) technology and sharing results publicly?
Absolutely yes! We, first and foremost, support open source and permissionless software, protocols, and projects. Our own community-created software, all our resources, and our website are all open source.
Have you provided transparency about how exactly funding will be used?
Yes. Funds reside in our onchain treasury and are transparently spent
Are you advancing values of freedom and privacy (no surveillance and handling of personal data)?
Yes! These values are at the core of our mission. We support protocols and projects that embody these same values and any of our community-created software doesn’t collect user data at all (ethdocker, Wagyu Installer).
Are you supporting decentralization in various fields (for example building Web3 projects)?
Most definitely - maximum decentralization of the Ethereum Beaconchain is EthStaker’s explicit goal
Have you provided social media channels to the extent that we can confirm social proof of your project?
Last month, we hosted the Devconnect Staking Gathering with 60 speakers in 51 sessions over two days in Istanbul, Türkiye. The talks were livestreamed on both Youtube and StreamETH, and each talk was then subsequently separately posted to the EthStaker youtube channel. Funds from Epoch 0 were used for this endeavor and we’re very grateful because we got incredible feedback on the entire event and look forward to hosting it again at the next Devconnect!
We’re now spearheading the DVT Home Staker Program in a 10-week pilot program to create new node operators and subsidize their hardware. Ethereum has plenty of validators - we’re reaching 900k validators after a sharp uptick post-Shapella - but we don’t have enough operators. One entity can come online and drop 1000 validators, but it’s a lot more valuable to the value of the network if 1000 operators come online with 1 validator each. It’s better for resilience, censorship resistance, and decentralization. So I don’t think we’ll ever be done trying to create new node operators so that the stake isn’t solely operated by large staking operations.
For Epoch 2, we plan on using funds for general new-year operational details - getting things up-to-date, some accounting, and new-year software subscriptions.
And as for other funding - we do not take VC money (haha why would they?) or do any sponsored content. Our funding since Epoch 0 has been the Ethereum Foundation, Gitcoin, and Octant. We had sponsors at the Devconnect Staking Gathering but we intentionally ran the event at cost because we thought that would bring the most value to the community
Thanks a ton for providing the update @nixo !! I saw the announcement of the DVT home staker program and its f’ing awesome! Highly encourage anyone who might be interested to check it out.
EthStaker is unable to give a formal update for the time being due to the fact that they’re officially transitioning from a nonprofit LLC to a nonprofit 501(c)(6).
Hello! We’re back to being able to provide an update and we’re excited to participate in Epoch 4!
EthStaker is currently waiting to wrap up the first DVT Home Staker program cohort as we wait for Divastaking to go live on mainnet so that our students can deploy their validators using its software. Students have run vanilla testnet validators, learned the fundamentals of staking, deployed Diva validators on testnet, and submitted weekly milestones that test their understanding. They’re now just ready at the starting line, waiting for the starting gun to be fired to allow them to deposit on mainnet!
We’re curating the staking track at EthCC and brainstorming a node-running event at Devcon in Bangkok. We also ran a survey last month of stakers to create a snapshot of opinion, pain points, needs, intentions, and opinions that can act as firsthand accounts from stakers in their consideration by researchers and projects that aim to target their participation.
In addition to that, we’ve done a fair bit of supporting ecosystem projects that benefit solo stakers, including more tooling, solo staker lists, smoothing pools, educational efforts, and awareness campaigns. And, as always, we continue to support the core mission of always being available for troubleshooting support.
And! Exciting update - we’re now a 501(c)(6), which is a trade organization (awaiting tax-exempt status). We’re committed to supporting stakers, and specifically independent operators, as a whole.
Thanks for having us, Octant! We consider what we’re doing absolutely integral to the health of Ethereum and we’re grateful for the support.
Epoch 0: 42.6 ETH Epoch 1: 6.8 ETH Epoch 2: 18.3 ETH Epoch 3: N/A Epoch 4: 10.4 ETH
Funds spent:
90%
Overview and context
Ethstaker’s core mission continues to be support solo staking and the health of the Beacon Chain. We are a 50k+ member community led by a small core team which pursues this mission through a variety of efforts including:
Providing world-class, free technical support and staking education
Organizing and hosting live and virtual events
Stewardship of grants for beneficial ecosystem contributors
Providing industry research and communication for the most critical topics
Developing open source staking software
We a non-profit organization that relies on grants to continue our mission.
Milestone 2
Staking Track at EthCC 2024 - The EthStaker team worked with the EthCC organizers to curate and host a set of staking talks at EthCC 2024 in Brussels. The set of 8 talks was extremely well attended and standing room only for most speakers. We also live-streamed these talks for community members that were unable to attend in-person.
The immediate outcome of the staking track at EthCC 2024 was education, discussion and community engagement about the most relevant staking topics to the community today such as the effect of staking issuance on the ethereum network.
Funding used ~ 10k in funding to cover flights and accommodations for the core team to be present for the staking track.
Milestone 3
Audit for EthStaker-deposit-CLI - The staking-deposit-cli is a core piece of open source software used for generating keys for solo validators. This tool which has been used solo stakers across and network participants since the beginning of the Beacon Chain has now become ossified - it is too important and critical of a piece of infrastructure to risk modernizing. The EthStaker team worked with the original developers of the staking-deposit-cli to fork the staking-deposit-cli and develop several new features that greatly simplify the full set of requirements for creating validator keys. Since the original version is ossified, EthStaker is one of the only trusted organizations in a position to develop a newly modernized, open source version that is free and available to all solo stakers and network participants. We used funding from the most recent Octant round to contract auditing services to perform a full, fresh audit of this modified version of the staking-deposit-cli.
The immediate outcome of the EthStaker-deposit-cli is that solo stakers everywhere will soon have a fully modernized, open source, audited version of the staking-deposit-cli which works with a wider variety of operating systems and versions of Python and includes several quality-of-life improvements for solo stakers.
Milestone 4
Staker Survey - The EthStaker team designed and executed a broad survey of staking participants across the ecosystem. The survey’s 900 respondents answered a variety of survey questions providing important data about the state of solo staking in the Ethereum ecosystem. The EthStaker team then published a detailed report of all of the findings freely available on the internet. Given that there are very few broad, trustworthy surveys of stakers available today, this survey represents an important snapshot of the state of the solo staking participation.
The immediate outcome of the Staker Survey is to make the data and report publicly available for anyone online that would like to use the data in some way for research or analysis. One example of how the EthStaker team uses the data from the survey is to more closely tailor educational content and focuses based on survey responses.
Funding used ~ roughly 10k worth of salaried survey development, execution and analysis
One upcoming challenge that we have as a team is the depth of our support team. We have one member of our team in particular that will be taking an extended vacation and it is important that we think carefully about how to ensure that there is no gap in the world-class, free support that we provide to the staking community; this free support is the cornerstone of the services that the EthStaker team provides to the community.
We will be working closely over the next few months to ensure that we have a good plan in place to backfill this skillset with our other technical members and volunteers and ensure that our social channels (especially Discord) continue to be the most trusted community for expert staking support and advice.
Long-term outcomes:
While we continue to focus on our core mission of advocating for and supporting the solo staking community, we have recently identified some additional opportunities that we feel could benefit from our focus.
These opportunities include developing and maintaining more open-source solo staking software, providing in-person workshops to help individuals set up staking nodes and providing digestible staking topic summaries broadly to the community.
Metrics:
Audit for ethstaker-deposit-cli completed
Continued troubleshooting support in Discord (could be # of messages)
Continued troubleshooting support in Subreddit
Short-term outcomes:
We also are looking forward to hosting a community event in Thailand for Devconnect and also staffing a booth to discuss solo staking with in-person community members.
Metrics
Devcon community hub (could be # of participants / mini workshops)
Happy hour to connect solo stakers / client teams / researchers
Plans for potential funds
Cover Devcon staker happy hour
Cover housing costs surround Devcon
Payments to sustain the people who often spend 6-12+ hours per day helping stakers troubleshoot / keeping up-to-date with development / advocating for solo stakers in research
Other funding
None since last epoch
Plans for future sustainability
POAP sales during events (usually only generates a few hundred dollars)
Staking Gathering (potentially could generate revenue if not ran at cost as before)
In general, this is difficult because we do not want to take funds from projects who will attempt to coerce our work into directions they want to see. It keeps us credibly neutral and working to help sustain solo stakers in a way that they can trust
Hi @nixo Appreciate the update, but I notice there’s no karmaGAP included and it’s a bit different from the new long-term update in the new reporting requirements.
Relevant links:
Continued advocating for stakers and maintaining high-quality spaces for support through Discord, Reddit, and social platforms.
Held seven livestreamed Community Calls featuring participants from the staking ecosystem, including Lido CSM, NodeSet, Puffer, Stereum, Ephemery testnet, Commit-Boost, and Rocketpool’s Saturn Zero Upgrade Livesteram. Upcoming calls include NodeBridge Africa in December and more in 2025.
Educational Content
Added new educational pages to ethstaker.cc focusing on hardware, research, and incentives, alongside other resources.
Preparing to expand survey activities with the publication of Fall 2024 Bandwidth Usage Survey results in Q4 and the launch of a refreshed 2025 Stakers Survey in Q1.
Live Event Participation
Spearheaded the Node Operators Community Hub at Devcon 7 in Bangkok for all four conference days in partnership with Dappnode and Ethereum on ARM:
Provided real-time node troubleshooting and consultative discussions for operators ranging from beginners to advanced users.
Held a daily raffle based on recipients of a POAP for those actively testing hardware or live SSH connections. Raffle partnership with GridPlus and their Lattice1 devices as rewards.
Funded and hosted a Node Operator Happy Hour, which brought together 120+ attendees.
Managed a two-day Impact Space booth at Devcon to engage with attendees and answer staking-related questions.
Organizational Milestones
Confirmed nonprofit status as a 501(c)(4) organization.
Advanced operations around managing and supporting open-source software, including:
Completed and administered necessary updates to the ethstaker-deposit-cli tool following a comprehensive audit.
Began supporting the general backend administration of Rescue Node, providing additional value to the Ethereum staking ecosystem and take load from the maintainers.
Looking Ahead
2025 Event Planning:
Preparing for live events such as EthCC and Devconnect, focusing on early development of conference plans, sponsorships, and increased revenue generation.
Support for Independent Stakers:
Continuing to support newcomers, new partners, and emerging staking client and teams as the staking landscape evolves.
Finding new ways for stakers to communicate and signal support or opposition to industry social issues such as proposed EIPs, network upgrades, Gas limit changes, etc.
Challenges and Lessons
Sustainability of Operations: Efforts remain ongoing to diversify funding sources while maintaining an unbiased role in the industry and supporting solo stakers and decentralization.
Plans for Epoch 6
Updated Milestone 1: Community Support and Growth
Goal: Sustain and grow user engagement across Discord, Reddit, and other platforms while continuing to provide high-quality support.
Funding Needed: 2 ETH
Updated Milestone 2: Content Development
Goal: Expand ethstaker.cc resources and survey activities, including publishing Fall 2024 Bandwidth Usage Survey results in Q4 and launching the 2025 Stakers Survey in Q1.
Funding Needed: 2 ETH
Updated Milestone 3: Decentralization Advocacy and Tools Support
Goal: Expand support for decentralized staking tools and related software management operations and security.
Funding Needed: 4 ETH
Total Requested: 8 ETH
Other Funding
Grant Funding Received Since the Last Epoch: Gitcoin Grant Round 22 OSS Rounds
Other Non-Grant Funding Sources: None
Future Plans for Financial Sustainability
Staking Gathering 2025 plans are underway, with a focus on improving sponsorship opportunities and revenue generation.
Exploring new concepts such as:
Auction or sell POAPs or badges that signal solo staker support from organizations or individuals.
A potential merch store.
Continuing to research and develop funding avenues that uphold EthStaker’s core principles and mission.
Team Information
Active Members:
Jonathan Meyer (Operations)
Nixo (Community Lead)
Rémy Roy (Technical Advocate)
Nolan Ross (Content Strategist)
Sam Coffey (Events Coordinator)
Thorsten Behrens (Infrastructure Support)
Butta (Beaconcha.in Liaison)
Hanniabu (Knowledge Base Lead)
Social Proof
Recognitions: Featured on ethereum.org as a key staking resource.
Note: we are working to consolidate these into one and leverage KarmaGAP’s merge profile feature and new add editor feature they just rolled out a few days ago to streamline how we manage our updates for purposes of Octant and other grant ecosystems.
