The stacking needs to get 32 ETH blocked and thus become a validator. The pools allow staking with amounts much less than the 32 ETH required.
The staking of Ethereum 2.0 is creating a particular behavior: More than 60% of the validators are unknown users.
According to data provided by the Beaconcha to the portal, which collects information related to the Ethereum 2.0 network, more than 176 thousand user addresses are working as independent validators (not linked to a staking pool), which means at least 64% of the total percentage of the network.
Pools like Kraken or Lido own at least 11.09% of the entire set of validators. To become a particular ‘miner,’ 32 ETH must get blocked until Ethereum 2.0 is fully operational, which might happen in 2023.
Each validator must have this amount to validate transactions on the network. This figure amounts to more than USD 120 thousand and is not accessible to most users.
Validator pools like Kraken, Binance, among others, allow users to invest in Ethereum 2.0 staking without blocking a high amount of money or waiting for the network to go live to withdraw their profits. The latter only applies in pools like Binance and Lido, since other pools do not allow the withdrawal of liquidity while ETH 2.0 is not active.
Pools such as Lido and Binance charge 10% of commissions to the total invested funds, which counts on a minimum limit of 0.1 ETH, approximately USD 400. The returns, currently, are around 5% per year.
Despite the facilities that these pools currently bring, they have not yet achieved a good share, as most remain anonymous validators.
Unknown Validators, but not Necessarily Independent
With 64% of total validators controlled by unknown users, there is a general assumption that these are independent. However, nothing prevents that all these could fall under the control of a single entity.
To collect the data, Beaconcha. Do a check on the Ethereum profiles that are active in staking. It counts each profile individually, of which it is impossible to know who is the owner of each one if it does not declare it publicly.
If the total of 64% (or, at least, 51%) were at a single entity’s hands, the network could enter into conflict. It could make decisions about the other validators, totally compromising the reliability of the net.
This type of scenario received various critics from Hugo Nguyen, who recently spoke about the centralization that Ethereum would face. According to that specialist, the co-creator of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and other programmers took these problems too lightly.
Ethereum 2.0 network is not fully operational yet, which means that new validators would probably get added over the months. The number of validators has increased exponentially by more than 1,000% this last year. This growth can get perceived as a true sign of decentralization.
By: Jenson Nuñez
