The State of Staking in August 2022
This month’s staking update is spectacularly brief.
The Merge – it’s happening.
That’s it. 😀
The Bellatrix fork for the consensus layer went live on September 6th, 11:34:47 UTC – this prepares this layer for the Merge.
The Merge is now scheduled for ~ September 15, 2022. The many years of collaboration and hard work reaches its conclusion – one block on the consensus layer will have no transactions, and the next one will. Merge, done.
At Codefi Staking, we went through the Goerli Merge smoothly and those of our customers who had staked validators in our test environments successfully received priority fees when their validators were nominated for proposing a block.
One key decision change we have made since the last newsletter: We will not go live through the Merge with MEV enabled. The key reasons are that different customers have different requirements regarding MEV, and so we require Flashbots to deliver the individual validator-relay mapping into the MEV-Boost sidecar. Furthermore, given the size of the change for the Merge, it made sense to keep our Merge infrastructure as simple as possible in the first instance. We will enable MEV for customers soon after.
We are deliberately not talking about the big topics crowding the ecosystem surrounding the Merge: any impact of OFAC on staking and, of course, EthPOW. The former is really a matter for lawyers and regulators – the latter is of little interest. ConsenSys backs the Ethereum roadmap and a vital part of that roadmap is the transition to Proof of Stake that will make Ethereum truly sustainable. This reduction of the environmental impact is a key motivator for us and will move the conversation around this technology towards utility rather than providing fuel for the naysayers, pun intended.
We’ll see you all on the other side.
Other References
There are so many great places to get detailed information on what’s happening with the Ethereum roadmap. A good place to start is Ben’s fortnightly update. Anthony Sassano’s Daily Gwei is also a fun daily update on all things Ethereum: https://thedailygwei.substack.com/
Our staking refresher, which is a comprehensive guide to various ways that Ethereum users can stake, makes for an interesting read. If you want to know about the opportunities the Merge will create for institutions, you can read some great analysis from the folks at MetaMask Institutional and our Cryptoeconomic team in their latest report, The Impact of the Merge on Institutions, here.
