Vitalik Buterin stated the importance of solo staking to maintain Ethereum’s decentralization

What’s new? Ethereum blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin has stated the importance of solo staking for the security and decentralization of a project. Solo stakers are individuals who independently stake their coins without relying on third-party services, centralized organizations, or staking pools.

Material by Cointelegraph

What else is known? During his speech at the Ethereum Singapore 2024 conference, Buterin emphasized the vital role of individual participants in decentralization, explaining that they are an uncoordinated and diverse group that reduces reliance on centralized structures.

From Buterin’s perspective, even a small percentage of individual players can add an important decentralized layer of protection to Ethereum.

The developer also voiced a proposal to improve protection against threats known as the “51% attack,” in which an attacker takes control of a large portion of the blockchain’s processing power.

According to Buterin, in such a scenario, the key difference is whether the attacker controls 50-56% or 57% of the network and above. So, in the latter case, it could finalize the creation of blocks, potentially causing the chain to break.

To prevent such a scenario, Buterin suggested considering raising the quorum threshold for block processing from 2/3 to 3/4 or even higher.

Next year, the Ethereum mainnet will see the Pectra hardfork, which will increase the maximum coin staking limit for an individual validator from 32 to 2048 ETH.

According to analytics platform Dune, over 34,5 million ETH, or 28,2% of the total supply is blocked in staking. The largest player is liquid staking protocol Lido with a 28,1% market share, followed by US-based centralized crypto exchange (CEX) Coinbase with 11,9%, liquid restaking protocol EtherFi with 4,7% and the world’s largest CEX Binance with 4,6%.

Also in the top 10 are the staking pools Kiln and Figment, the American CEX Kraken, and the protocols Rocket Pool and Renzo.

Ethereum developers will vote on splitting the Pectra hardfork into two parts on September 19

The first part of the upgrade could be implemented in Q1 of next year

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Earlier, the Ethereum-based Starknet Layer 2 (L2) network community approved the introduction of STRK native token staking. The feature will be available on the mainnet from Q4 of this year.

In June, Buterin invested in the development of scalable EVM blockchain MegaETH, which raised a total of $20 million from several investors in a seed round of funding. The same month, Buterin-backed privacy protocol Nocturne announced it was shutting down; the reasons for the decision were not specified.

In May, Buterin donated $120 000 to the lawyers of the developers of sanctions-listed crypto mixer Tornado Cash, Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev.