The Ethereum Foundation has started staking a portion of its treasury, in line with the financial policy announced last year.
Approximately 70,000 ETH has been staked and the rewards will be returned to the EF Treasury.
Architecture and configuration
After evaluating many excellent staking software options, the Ethereum Foundation chose to use open source software options Dirk and Vouch.
- Dirk acts as a distributed signer, distributing signers across multiple geographic regions. This design eliminates single points of failure and increases resiliency.
- Vouch supports the use of multiple beacon client and execution client pairs with various configurable strategies that can be used to protect against client diversity risks.
The Ethereum Foundation’s setup employs a small number of clients and uses a combination of hosted infrastructure and self-managed hardware in several jurisdictions.
Validators use Type 2 (0x02) withdrawal credentials, which has several benefits.
- Transferability: Validator balances can be moved between accounts through integration, allowing you to more quickly change where your signing keys are stored.
- Reduced key management: With a maximum active balance of 2048 ETH per validator, the number of required signing keys is reduced to approximately 35.
- Flexible Termination: Similar to 0x01 credentials, withdrawal addresses can trigger termination even if the validator is offline.
This setup builds blocks locally rather than using a separate proposer and builder sidecar.
wider impact
The Ethereum Foundation generates native ETH-denominated yield and funds ecosystem management by directly participating in consensus through solo staking. It does this using Ethereum’s unique economic rails, which exposes it to the frictions, risks, and operational realities of staking, while setting the standard in both transparency and validator operational management.
deposit
The first of these validators can be found here. The remaining deposits will be made in the coming weeks.
