I’m firmly opposed to MVI as a direction, and think the impact of this change would be very negative for the health of the Ethereum network. This would:
- Favour enterprise staking operations
- Favour non-contributing speculators
- Harm marginal staking service providers
- Make home stakers non-viable
As a counterproposal, if the problem to be solved is LSTs becoming the base asset for the network, I think we should fix the primary downside of native staking, by allowing a mechanism for someone to exit their stake at finality for an escalating basefee. There is a large amount of risk-averse delegators that currently hold >32 eth worth of LSTs and do nothing with it, purely so they have the optionality to exit promptly if they so choose. The idea that the exit queue could become months long is unacceptable to this group, and so they hold derivatives.
Modifying EIP7002 to process forced-exits independently from the free queue would make native staking a viable option for this risk averse part of the market. They would no longer be exposed to smart contract upgrade risk, nor the oracle risk of LSPs. This could become the safest way to delegate stake. LSTs would then be primarily needed for fractional stake (<32 eth), and for those that legitimately want to put their collateral to use, e.g. in DeFi. (LSPs can benefit from this feature too for that matter). I think this modification should be adopted for Electra/Pectra as opposed to the 7002 design as currently specified. Happy to work with the original authors on getting this proposal to technically complete to make that happen. 