The Ethereum Foundation has started to stake part of its treasury, in accordance with its treasury policy announced last year.
Around 70,000 ETH is staked with rewards going to the EF treasury.
Architecture and configuration
After evaluating many good staking software options, the Ethereum Foundation chose to use the open source Dirk and Vouch software options:
- Dirk serves as a distributed signer, distributing signers across multiple geographic regions. This design eliminates a single point of failure and improves resiliency.
- Vouch supports the use of multiple Beacon Client and Execution Client pairs with a variety of configurable policies that can be used to protect against client diversity risks.
The Ethereum Foundation setup employs minority clients and a mix of hosted infrastructure and self-managed hardware across multiple jurisdictions.
Validators use type 2 withdrawal identifiers (0x02), which provide several advantages:
- Transferability: Validator balances can be moved between accounts via consolidations, allowing for faster changes in signing key retention.
- Reduced key management: With a maximum effective balance of 2048 ETH per validator, the number of required signing keys drops to around 35.
- Flexible outputs: Like 0x01 credentials, outputs can be triggered by the withdrawal address even if validators are offline.
The configuration will be made up of building blocks locally rather than using proponent-builder separation sidecars.
A wider impact
By directly participating in consensus through solo staking, the Ethereum Foundation generates native ETH-denominated yield to help fund its management of the ecosystem. It does this by using Ethereum’s own economic rails and thereby subjecting itself to the friction, risks, and operational realities of staking while setting a standard for both transparency and operational management of validators.
Deposits
The first of these validators can be found here. The rest of the deposits will follow in the coming weeks.
