EIP-8363 is fundamentally an anti home staker change. Compared to professional node operators, home stakers can’t achieve the same level of performance and uptime. Empirically, this can be seen by looking at https://beaconcha.in/entities :
- Rocket Pool is heavily relying on home stakers and has a beaconscore of ~96.1% over the last 90 days.
- Similarly, entities tagged as “solo stakers” in hildobby’s dune dashboard have an average beaconscore < 96.5%.
- Entities relying on professional operators like Lido, Binance and Etherfi achieve significantly higher beaconscores (above 99.5%).
Because staking yield is directly linked to performance, even today Ethereum is offering a higher yield to pros than to home stakers: Someone that’s online 96.5% of the time receives 94.7% of the rewards someone with 99.5% uptime gets. To evaluate an issuance curve proposal’s impact on home stakers, it is key to examine this yield differential.
Unfortunately, EIP-8363 is moving completely in the wrong direction. At 0% staked and no burn, the tapered curve is equivalent to status quo. For any positive burn, the relative gap is strictly larger than today, and it grows as burn increases with the staking ratio. Some concrete values (using 96.5% uptime for home and 99.5% uptime for pro):
- at today’s staking ratio (35%), the representative home staker only gets 87.1% of the yield of the representative pro (down from 94.7% today)
- if staking ratio rises to 40%, this drops further to 81.1%
- at 45% staked, the home staker’s yield is only 62% of the pro’s
If one of our goals is to reduce risk of capture and preserve decentralization, we should be extremely wary of a proposal whose mechanical effect is to ramp up yield discrimination between home stakers and professional node operators. This selection effect needs to be treated as a first-order cost of EIP-8363, not an afterthought.