Democratizing Home Staking
The idea of Ethereum staking sounds enticing for many tech savvy folks who want to contribute to the Web3 infrastructure.
However, the reality is that running a validator can be prohibitive. Including the minimum requirement of 32 ETH (~$50k at the time of this post), the need to buy, configure, and maintain hardware, and a stable internet connection.
You might be #hodling Liquid Staking Tokens, which are convenient but not always decentralized, without realizing that true home staking might already be within your reach:
In this post, we explore the potential of solutions like Diva Staking, which lowers the minimum amount of ETH needed to run a node while preserving true decentralization.
The question is: how many new people can we onboard to Ethereum staking as a result of these improvements?
- Ethereum Staking requires 32 ETH
- Rocketpool requires a minumum of 10 ETH (8 ETH + 2.4 ETH in RPL)
- Diva Staking uses Distributed Validation to effectively lower the minimum requirement to only 1 ETH, or the cost of a Macbook
Reducing the financial entry point by 10x or more means a much more inclusive way to join the Ethereum network. Every Diva node is also a full Ethereum node containing a resilient copy of the entire blockchain!
Diva Staking also contributes improvements to Liquid Staking, including increased resiliency by using truly Distributed Validation and reward smoothing, making it a no-brainer for both professional and home stakers!
The potential to democratize Ethereum staking
If we look at the accounts with over 1 ETH that can potentially join the validator game, most of them have less than 10 ETH. This means that they wouldn’t be able to afford a classic Ethereum Validator(32 ETH), or even a Rocketpool minipool (10 ETH).
Diva Staking allows anyone to run an Operator node with fully integrated Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) for as low as 1 ETH, opening the door for a whopping 1.4M new users who were not eligible before.
That’s 5x more wallets that can currently afford to stake!
Existing solo stakers might also consider switching to Diva, as its DVT achieves a much better uptime due to sharing the Ethereum node with 15 other network participants, providing fallbacks in case some nodes are offline or faulty. This can result in uptime improvements of up to 500x.
Another benefit of Diva is integrated reward smoothing, which minimizes rewards variability. Small validators suffer a “lottery ticket” effect because their rewards are sporadic and unpredictable. Large staking pools (>512 ETH) benefit from economies of scale that smooths out the difference. Current solo stakers simply don’t have this luxury. With Diva or Rocketpool, this benefit is available to their participants.
The impact is clear — lowering the bond to 1 ETH has immense value in enabling accessibility, democratizing for home stakers the full benefits that have been typically the privilege of larger players:
As the Ethereum community continues to evolve and innovate, we should do our best to democratize access to staking to a wider range of participants, if we want to achieve true decentralization and security of the blockchain ecosystem.
- 📗 Learn more about Diva Staking
- 👩🏻💻 Run a testnet node from home, no ETH required for testnet
- 🌱 Participate in the Early Staker initiative for Diva
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