I’m a solo staker since Ethereum staking began in December 2020, and I’m very active in the community, helping where I can and engaging with fellow stakers. I’d tend to agree that storage isn’t a major issue for most participants. However, CPU and bandwidth are a different matter—both can be expensive to upgrade, and in the case of bandwidth, often impossible to improve due to local infrastructure constraints.
In many parts of Europe, particularly in rural regions like where I’m based in Germany—connectivity bottlenecks remain a significant concern. Many connections don’t even reach 100 Mbit/s. Although there are national plans to expand fiber coverage, the rollout is slow, and in areas where it’s not economically viable, service may never arrive.
The second point I want to highlight is resilience - something that’s absolutely essential when running an operation with this level of personal and financial commitment. For private individuals, it’s a lot to manage alone. There should be greater attention on ensuring robust failsafe mechanisms are in place, so that in the event of disasters, both individual stakers and the network as a whole can recover quickly and securely.
I’ve shared some more detailed thoughts on this here: Emergency exit for compromised validator withdrawal address - 2FA - #10 by noe
Vitalik, I’d really value your thoughts specifically on the resilience part. Your perspective could help bring more awareness to how we can better support solo stakers in the long term, especially in light of EIP-7251’s current cl client implementation phase.