What problems does Dencun's new proposal EIP-7514 want to solve?

Author/Compiler: Karen, Foresight News

If the Ethereum validator deposit queue remains full, it is expected that 50% of all ETH will be pledged by May 2024, and may reach 100% by December 2024. In the context of the surge in Ethereum validators and pledges, what is the new EIP-7514 proposal in the Dencun upgrade?

In the last Ethereum executive layer meeting, Ethereum core developers designated EIP-7514 as part of the Dencun upgrade, aiming to slow down the growth rate of validators and reserve more time to study the future of Ethereum staking and solution.

According to data from beaconcha.in, the current pledged amount of Ethereum has reached 25.84 million, an increase of more than 90% compared to about 13.5 million before the merger a year ago (September 15, 2022). At the same time, active verification The number of registered users has increased from 490,000 to over 800,000 currently.

Source: beaconcha.in

It is also worth noting that there are currently more than 28,000 validators in the queue, and an additional 621 validators are waiting to exit.

**What is EIP-7514? Why was it proposed? **

As Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist said, the Ethereum validator set is exploding. Additionally, as of now, Lido dominates the liquidity staking space, holding nearly 1/3 of all staked ETH, and has no desire to limit itself, which could pose a risk to Ethereum’s decentralization. In addition, a governance attack on Lido could also cause serious problems for the Ethereum network.

Source: Dune

To this end, Dankrad Feist believes that the Ethereum community needs some time to figure out the future of Ethereum staking. As a temporary solution, reducing the validator Churn (each Epoch will limit the number of active validators that can enter) may be beneficial. .

EIP-7514 proposed by Ethereum developers daapplion .eth and Tim Beiko hopes to slow down the growth of the number of validators by limiting the Max Epoch Churn Limit and updating the maximum validator growth rate from exponential growth to linear growth.

If the Ethereum deposit queue remains full, it is expected that by May 2024, 50% of all ETH will be pledged, by September 2024, this proportion will rise to 75%, and by December 2024, it may reach 100%. In addition, as the size of the validator set increases, the rewards will also decrease, coupled with the promotion of liquid staking tokens, the consensus layer will be under greater pressure. An increase in the number of validators will lead to an increase in the size of gossip messages and Beacon states. And it's unclear how much of the marginal safety gain comes from the additional economic weight.

The result of comprehensive measurement by developers is that it is recommended to limit the Max Epoch Churn Limit to 8. Assuming that the next fork will occur as early as the beginning of the third quarter of 2024, the expected scale can be significantly reduced without causing the expected Dencun fork. The Churn of the day dropped significantly. Even if the dencun fork is delayed, a limit of 8 would prevent ETH staking levels from reaching 50% for at least 1 full year.

EIP-7514 is intended to give the community more time to discuss the development of Ethereum staking and the handling of liquidity staking. By now limiting the Epoch Churn limit, the time to reach the critical point of total staked ETH supply is significantly delayed.

**What are the Ethereum validator lifecycle and Churn limits? **

When talking about validators and Churn limitations, we have to talk about the Ethereum validator life cycle. In the Ethereum 2.0 phase 0 validator life cycle, validators will be dynamically restricted from activating or exiting the queue. The verifier joining process is as follows:

• The verifier first deposits 32 ETH into the deposit contract. The first step will check whether it is qualified to enter the activation queue. If so, it will enter the activation queue in the next Epoch;
• The second step checks whether the verifier is eligible for activation and is within the Churn limit. If the conditions are met, it will be activated after 4 Epochs;
• After activation, the validator becomes an active validator and will be assigned to perform certification, proposal and other responsibilities in each Epoch. and get rewarded.
• After activation, active validators can voluntarily exit after experiencing 2 to the 11th power Epoch (about 9 hours). In any voluntary or forced withdrawal, there will be a delay of four Epochs before the staker can withdraw. If the validator is slashed, it will take 2 to the 13th power Epoch (about 36 days) to withdraw. If the verifier withdraws on his own, he will need to wait for 2 to the 11th power Epoch (about 9 hours) before withdrawing money.

In order to ensure the stability of the Ethereum consensus mechanism to a greater extent, each Epoch (an Epoch is 6.4 minutes) will limit the number of active validators that can enter, which is the Churn limit, and changes according to the number of active validators. When the number of active validators increases to a certain critical point as shown below, the Churn limit of each Epoch will increase.

Source: Validator Queue

The current Churn limit for each Epoch of more than 800,000 validators is 12, and the daily Churn limit is 2,700. This means that if no new validators come in, it will take more than 10 days for the more than 28,000 validators currently in queue to become active validators. In June this year, the number of validators in the queue reached more than 96,000, and the waiting time to join the queue was as high as 45 days.

What to think about EIP-7514?

The essence of EIP-7514 is to slow down the increase in the ETH pledge rate and gain more time to research solutions before reaching the critical point of the pledge rate. In my opinion, it is more important to take preventive measures. However, some community users are opposed to EIP-7514, believing that it will further increase the concentration of validators.

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