Surveying Stakers: What We Learned About Stakers and Why It Matters | Jonathan Meyer - EthStaker

[Music] hey eth Denver I'm Jonathan Meyer and I'm here with e Staker and today we're going to talk with you about uh surveys that we've done for stakers and specifically what we've learned some interesting findings over the last year but also why it matters um so yeah like I said I'm Jonathan Meer I'm the executive director of East Staker and just to give you a little of an overview um of what East Staker is we're a nonprofit in the community that serves to support advocate for and um create resources for independent stakers and uh solo stakers and our whole mission is to support the uh health and decentralization of the the ethereum staking ecosystem and the beacon chain so let's get into it um come meet me after too if there's any stakers in the audience I love meeting you you all and um let's talk I think one of the themes that I think about for this that was just Dawning on me as I Was preparing for this talk was that this this topic is really about creating positive feedback loops and this whole theme of this conference is about regeneration so it just feels cool to talk about it and share with you what we've done and what we've learned and what's coming next so I promise you there's more than one slide there we go so just a a little bit of an outline of what we're going to do um first I'm actually start with why it matters so that you're like okay I get it um let's get into that and then there's two surveys that I want to go over one is a larger survey that we did in the spring of last year and this covered a whole wide range of topics from uh who stakers are to their sentiments to where they get information where they're learning and um you know what you know help us understand more about them so we could advocate for them better uh the second survey is from the fall which was much more limited and actually came was born out of prot call and research discussions that were happening at the time around uh discussing updates to bandwidth usage that would be required if we went forward with things like uh blob Target increases gas increases and also things related to like the peered ass protocol upgrades so that's from the fall I'll overview some insights from both and um also give you the links to the full survey with the outline with the full information that we did so you can kind of check that out uh there are a lot of QR codes in this I figured so uh yeah feel free to Snap photos of those and and take a look at things afterwards too and then we'll also talk about positive outcomes things that happen Downstream of these surveys and then what's what's look out for in the future because we're going to do it again and we're excited about that oh and stick around because if you stay told the end we're going to do this cool po app that we uh have powered by arbitrum so we mint them on arbitrum uh you can't get it yet and actually it's not even live yet because it's on like a Secret website so you got to stick around for at least like 10 more minutes to get that thing but it's cool we love po apps so let's talk about why these surveys matter um maybe this is stay in the obvious but just to like emphasize this point sakers are really important independent sakers especially to the decentralization of ethereum and uh this is a talk on why uh nixo who's around here somewhere uh this is a talk she gave like over a year ago but it's a really great talk on like all the different reasons about why stakers and independent stakers are so important to the decentralization of ethereum and some of the reasons that it goes into are like they're not controlled by anyone's entity or service like you're not going to be able to influence them because you know big giant corporate entity X said so not to pick on X but um you know it's it's not they're they're very truly independent and they have all the different levers under their own control about you know jurisdictionally where they're located geographically you know what rules they have um what their bandwidth is what their uh client choices like what their execution and consent client choices are for how they set up their machine if they do any other software on the machine so the thing is it it creates like a environment of resilience for the network to have this very like independently Chosen and self- selected set of of people uh validating and supporting the network and so that's why it's one of ethereum's magic powers I think is is that this exists and it's been growing in network effect over time over many years now uh but the thing is is they're also kind of historically hard to understand and opaque because at the end of the day every validator is just a public Key address on the beacon chain what can we tell about them nobody's like taking you know you're attesting and you're proposing blocks but like beyond that it's hard to know what's going on unless people speak up in a Discord um which we do encourage people to do come participate and that'll be a theme I I H hamper on you know during this talk also is to engage um but so they're historically opaque and and a little bit privacy or very privacy conscious and at the same time we want their needs to be represented accurately uh and and in detail because we want to advocate for them and if if they're not being ad advocated for then the health of the network can suffer and if we in fact neglect them so much that uh stakers leave because they're just like not having a good experience for example well then it's really suffering and you would see that in in like a you know a lower decentralization profile of of ethereum so the idea for these surveys then is to help illuminate that shine light on that and also um you know help us onboard more stakers in a healthy decentralized way independent stakers so we want to spot adoption barriers like what is it from a hardware software or um other requirement standpoint that we could do to help either surface those concerns or create resources educational resources to uh to better that and then the other thing is protocol research like a lot of the stuff we can get in front of with protocol research that's happening literally as we speak and then upgrades literally happening as we speak with the the Petra upgrade going you know through test Nets and into main net not too not too long so uh lastly we want to be able to empower sakers because the more they have the ability to speak up the more uh their needs will be heard and then the community can organize them around creating resources and support and advocacy for them so these surveys are important and we're looking forward to continuing to collect that data and so one thing I'll also point out is that uh this GitHub Link at the bottom is where all the open source data is stored so we have uh everything stored this is an eth Staker uh it's called eth Educators but it's something we run at eth Staker that houses all of the data sets and the analysis sets that we did so you can take a look at that build on it we're always open source um and also there's no QR code for this one but if you look at the QR codes for each of the survey reports that I'll have in the the uh presentation here they're within those uh URLs so check it out so let's dive into the first one the first one being the uh let's see if I can H we'll leave it the first one was the larger spring survey and um first I just want to touch on like who are these stakers anyway um and some of this is not too surprising but it was interesting to put some numbers behind it for the first time over 90% of them see themselves as somewhat Technical and we know there is a spectrum of you know technicality from you know can you uh you know some some people may feel very technical when you're you know working on a computer and helping someone you know fix their computer uh who may not be comfortable with computers at all but then there's people who are comfortable with command lines and then there's people who are comfortable writing software and then debugging software and then uh protocol research and Beyond like it's just a huge spectrum and so there is some level like you're you're sort of on that like technical range if you're if you're doing it but then there's also 10% that don't see themselves as technical so what we what we want to do is help uh this be open and available to everyone you know our motto at e Staker is welcoming first knowledge second and so it's kind of like staking is for everyone and we want to emphasize that point so um and then the other thing was interesting here is like actually most of the stakers by 2third Mar or two-thirds of them are not employed in crypto and so I mean you would think that maybe there would be you they'd have some kind of like focus on the industry and everything like that but it was interesting to see that stat Point come out and so people may not be fully paying attention to everything happening with staking in the protocol research all the time and so uh to have their needs heard uh is important because we're they may not be having their uh concerns voiced otherwise you know if they're like focus on their day job you know and then lastly uh this is something that I think we already had some idea of but also interest put numbers behind is that there is a concentration in North America and Europe and so there's a lot of opportunity to support the rest of the world I mean there's um many many people that are very good candidates and great operators for running stake staking nodes uh around the world and the more we have outside of um you know just North America and Europe the better for decentralization so um work to be done on that and also it's you know great to see the conferences going to places like uh Thailand for Devcon and and other places that are you know representing different areas of the world that we can all help support navigate for another one just getting deeper into who are these stakers is that uh they see themselves as committed these two pie charts on the left are talking about you know they view the work they're doing as a Staker as important for ethereum and 89% in fact feel like it's at least as or more important than when they first started staking um but on the flip side the the pie chart on the right is showing that it's actually not as it some of them more of them feel like it's not as valuable for them as an individual to be staking so there's kind of like a a little bit of a discrepancy there and so we were like okay well what's that about the the range of concerns that they have are very wide- ranging uh you know something like super majority client risks is very uh you know internal to the industry but affects the entire industry and we want you know it's something that if you're tuned in uh to the staking ethereum staking industry you you're familiar probably with um having any one client have too much control of the network is dangerous for the the health of the network and so that's one of them but there's also many others that are just very practical and all deserve attention in in support so some things like Hardware uh tax policy Key Management like just internet issues um these are things that all could be helped with guides or you know Public Service efforts um there's a whole list of things we could be doing and are doing to to help out with these things and I know like e Saker in the past we've done efforts with the rest of the community to help with a super majority client issues I know that has improved over the last uh 6 to 12 months so like these things work when we know about issues and we do things to correct they do work so um it's great to have this surface and surveys and one of the things I'll talk about towards the end is that we're doing another survey this year uh coming soon and very soon actually and I'm very interested to see the year-over-year data set comparison that we'll have with this one because the questions will be very similar and we'll be able to start to draw a trend line around how staker's uh sentiments are changing and all these different data points that you're seeing here uh but at the at the same time all of this solo sers have felt uh sidelined or not represented in the research and development process and in fact 52% so over half of them feel uh ignored or as if it's ineffective in supporting them and that's as of mid 2024 so again my feeling anecdotal is that that is probably changing I think I think there's a lot of things underway that are making that improve but it's interesting to see this snapshot in time um where you know this is just immediately a little bit post Denon when this survey was done and so it's it's a very changing environment and now we're going to have another one um right on the you know on the eve of pectra here so it's always a very there's a lot of context around the data happening in these surveys and you can see that with the chart on the right the bar chart it's like there's a sense that you know some of them feel most of them feel it's kind of like meh in the middle are my are my needs represented um there's some that yeah it's kind of like an even Bell chart there right so I think it just shows that we have room to improve and I think there's people doing that I mean from when I listen to the ACD calls um there's definitely more representation of validated requirements I mean just in the last couple weeks um Hardware requirements things that bring these conversations to AE in the form where it happens so it's great to see and I think uh it'll be interesting to see how the data Bears it out when we get the next next one uh all all finished up so there have been resources and there there always are resources for stakers uh these this was interesting to see that it's also ranging the Discord Twitter uh GitHub like those are all places can we see that okay I think so it's a little blurry right but uh the the ones that are broken out though are more of like the social Community Resources so you've got things like individual Community groups uh you've got uh discords Twitter you've got you know things like daily guay YouTube pod other podcasts um smaller communities but these are communities that people rely on like they're answering this survey to say yeah I relied on that source to learn about staking or to keep up to date with current current uh requirements that I have to to use um to to Be an Effective Staker and continue evolving with the network because yeah contrary to popular belief or maybe some belief uh staking is not passive at all it requires an active engagement uh to stay stay up with things update your software and and keep performing those duties so here's the this the link this is a pretty long article so I I really pulled out some of the most interesting insights that we wanted you all to to find and uh but this is if you want to go deeper you know read this and it's it's really interesting um this was published last summer and it was a spring survey I'll give you a second to get that hopefully everyone got it uh the second survey and this one's a little bit shorter because it was a shorter survey but it was more focused on the bandwidth uh question the question of are you worried about bandwidth if we require more resources or more internet usage um for your staking node for your independent node your solo staking node and so interestingly I just want to call out only 56% in the survey said they track bandwidth usage so that's that's an opportunity right there for not not to you know throw our staking Community under the bus but like it's good to be tracking and um it's cool to see how they're tracking within that 56% there's all these different ways uh grafana is obviously a big winner because I know a lot of the guides show how to do that and it's it's a really effective tool for monitoring all kinds of things but there's other things people are doing tooo like ISP monitoring uh looking at their modem app that was an interesting one for me to see and then a whole bunch of other combinations of of tools and firewalls auntu queries um so it's a diverse group I think to my point earlier and one thing we're able to do in this survey is collect people's internet upload download speeds so we integrated the the data into range buckets so it was a little bit easier to see here this is download speed so we actually uh collected upload and download speed the upload speed is the one that is a little bit more an issue because uh across the world and especially in in really any country upload speed is more more of a constraining factor and so what we did is and just to maybe this is a better one to look at this because the upload speed is on the bottom and the download speed is on the top so when it's the the pink yeah it's pink there that's where people are concerned or unsure if they're concerned about uh an adverse effect on their staking node setup if there was an increase in bandwidth requirements to run that node and keep up with a chain so with the download speeds uh you have a little bit more of a smoothed out effect um let's see here let me no yeah so you have the people are concerned um but it's more spread out uh and especially with the higher ones they're not as concerned but with the upload speed they're very concerned especially in the lower range you can see how this coales is around lower lower range especially that giant bar and the 11 to 50 megabits per second range uh that's that's a pretty common range across many places in the world um North America and Europe both considered and it's really only when you get to the people that have you know 100 or 500 plus megabits per second where they're less concerned but you can see it really Trails off so like this this data was just not something we had and we wanted to collect it and so that's some of the insights we were able to get and this was very early pulse check information that we did in the moment um so it's something that you know now is part of the conversation uh and there's also efforts I'm going to speed through here this is the Pres uh this is the file that we published in the fall for that survey but I want to get to some of in the last couple minutes here some of the things that are coming out of this Downstream impacts so have a chance to snap the QR so Downstream outcomes are that like I said this this impacts issuance curve changes discussions around scaling blob targets gas limits um one thing that I have found really cool in the last couple weeks is that um it's I think there's more engagement happening when we've got surveys like this going on and so um this is a little bit tangential to the survey specific thing but it it comes to the idea of like a positive feedback loop that you as a Staker can can do uh with your with your node and with your your own actions yourself by engaging and working with the eth panda Ops uh contributor service they call it and it's a really simple oneline command that you would set up and you can actually programmatically provide feedback from your node into this service in a data privacy oriented way and um so I encourage sers to do it you know if you if you can go to the eth Pand ops website um it's pretty easy to do and they're pretty supportive team yeah um and then let's see I think I've said these things already that you we understand the impact of the community better and help identify issues that we can go after and it helps groups Like Us East Staker Advocate better for independent stakers and solo stakers uh you can see here we've tried to promote this on Twitter when it's happening this was the a tweet from Hanny retweet East Saker from the fall on the targeted survey on bandwidth so this is just a view of that I just find it so cool it's it's actually like more of a live thing that Pand Ops has done um but that's something to go check out this is a public page you can go view uh future call to action take the 2025 survey I'm going to give you a QR code in a second to get on a a list where we can notify you of that so that I think it's going to be in a week or two that that survey will be out and engage with the community go go to the uh Discord go to Reddit uh find eaker on X or any of the other communities there's many different guides and communities that are supporting stakers out there and engage you know there's this we talk about independence and solo staking but there there is a community and you can engage and it's you don't you don't go with this alone so that's an important thing I think to remember finally as promised there's a PO app and that's the the form to get on so collect the PO app on the left it should be working yeah it's been live for like 10 minutes now it's a very temporary website so this is like hopefully it's working someone give me a thumbs up if you're able to Mint it if you're not if it for whatever reason doesn't work send your info email okay awesome awesome so this the POA work it's only going to be live for like another 60 maybe 50 minutes and uh thanks for the listening thanks for coming to the talk