Ethereum

Following @vitalik.eth’s EthResearch post yesterday (https://ethresear.ch/t/sticking-to-8192-signatures-per-slot-post-ssf-how-and-why/17989) on what comes after single-slot finality, I have two questions for the experts:

PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Aviator, diver, ETH maxi, nexialist | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

1/ Why not first increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE as previously proposed and assess the consolidating effect on validator count down to a more manageable number of signatures?

So we have ~900k validators today, how much do you think increasing the max balance would reduce it? Hard to imagine it dropping <10k let alone <100k.

I do agree that's the first step (I think the post aligns with that too).

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

That limit was mainly there to reduce the security surface on launch (in case there were bugs/exploits related to non uniform stakes), so I'm sure it'll get raised as soon as the new math is sufficiently vetted. Haven't seen any contention around it.

It’s a great question.

Solo stakers are not many and whales among them are even fewer, so I don’t imagine that group would move the needle much.

But among LST pools, it may make a difference. With MEB set to 4,096, they could reduce their validator count by 128x and thus lower their hardware requirements