By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 26th, 2024
Ethereum now has more than 1 million validators, with more than 26% of Ether’s total supply currently staked in pools.
The number of validators on the Ethereum network has hit 1 million, a new high for the blockchain. In total, the validators have staked 32 million Ether, worth around $114 billion at current market prices.
According to data from Dune Analytics on Thursday, the validator count is exactly 1,002,400, with precisely 32,076,797 ETH staked. This translates to 26.74% of the entire ETH supply.
Lido Has the Highest Number of Validators
The Dune Analytics dashboard also displays further information, including showing Lido as the Ethereum staking pool with the highest volume of staked tokens, at 30%, with more than 9.6 million ETH staked, and 302,000 validators. Coinbase is in the second position with 14%, 4.5 ETH and 141,000 validators, while Binance is the third-largest but well below Coinbase. Binance has 39,000 validators who have staked 1.24 million ETH, 3.9% of the total supply.
Validators are necessary for the function of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. Essentially, they validate transactions, create new blocks, and are responsible for network security and consensus. Each validator must stake a minimum of 32 ETH. Unsurprisingly, Lido has the largest market share because it allows users to participate collectively instead of each one single-handedly meeting the 32 ETH minimum.
Ideally, the number of validators suggests an increase in blockchain security. However, venture investor and former Ethereum Chief Decentralization Officer, Evan Van Ness believes that there is “already too much staked”.
Last September, Ethereum developers decided to change a Dencun upgrade code relating to validator set size growth. They considered this necessary because over time, there have been issues and warnings about the effect of a large volume of the validator set size. For instance, when developers were testing the Holesky testnet, they discovered that at 2.1 million active validators, the testnet could not finalize.
According to Ethereum Foundation DevOps Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi, network attestations were between 40% and 50% even when block proposals hit 80%. Jayanthi said attestations only grew to the 82% to 84% range when developers reduced the testnet size from 2.1 million to 1.4 million.
Restaking Spikes Volume of New Ethereum Validators
Last month, the number of validators on queue hit 7,045, the highest since October 6. At the time, the backlog was for 225,000 ETH, about $562 million. The backlog resulted from Ethereum’s restriction of the number of validators allowed to join the network per epoch – the block creation duration, which is about 6.4 minutes. The number on the queue later increased to 9,000.
The large number of validators on the queue may be because of restaking, which allows staking already-staked ETH to boost rewards. The staked ETH in one pool, like Lido, can be restaked on another platform for additional yield.
While staking increases network security, concerns about validator control were recently raised after a large number of validators made a heavy ETH withdrawal amounting to about $320 million.
