I use a smart contract to claim, swap and forward my Gnosis chain validator rewards directly onto my Gnosis Pay account. With this I get a weekly top up into my account in EURe. As soon as I receive the card I will be able to directly spend these funds. Basic Functionality At the core of the setup sits a smart contract, which claims the Gnosis chain validator rewards. It then transfers these rewards to its own address and swaps it to EURe using a combination of Balancer and curve. And as a last step it transfers the EURe to the address stored for the given claim address. This smart contract is then automatically executed in regular intervals using PowerPools infrastructure. Powerpool allows anyone to create jobs and let them execute them under specific conditions. I run the job once a week. The source code of the contract can be found on github. Details for Each Step

At the beginning, every solo staker must decide which execution and consensus client to pick to become a validator. For newcomers, there is no obvious difference between all theses clients. One might only know that one needs to pick a consensus client and execution client. Fortunately, pretty much no matter what you choose the clients will work well. Nevertheless, there are some small differences between them which can make a your life as a staker easier or harder. I personally ran Teku, Lighthouse, Prysm and Nimbus on the consensus side and Geth, Nethermind, Besu and Erigon on the execution side. The following is a collection of my experiences as a solo staker on Ethereum mainnet and Gnosis chain. Software Stack I run my nodes using Dappnode, ethdocker and Ethereum on ARM. Dappnode and ethdocker cover the opposite ends of the usability vs customizability spectrum. Dappnode uses a graphical user interface, simplifying maintenance with auto-updates. If you want a special configuration though, it might take some time to get it right if it is even possible. Conversely, eth-docker is command line based. It is highly configurable and lets you spin up nodes in a few minutes. These two extremes perfectly cover all my needs in the last 3 years. Ethereum on ARM is obviously for ARM based minicomputers and a bit more involved to set up, but great once it runs. Consensus Client At the end of 2020 there were speed and efficiency comparisons done for all the consensus clients. Now, several years later these comparisons are not that relevant anymore, as all the consensus clients work well. There still are small differences between them though. Teku, is more resource hungry (RAM and CPU) than other clients, but it can run on slightly slower SSDs. Not sure how much slower, but it was enough to keep my validators up and attesting at near perfect efficiency when lighthouse missed a lot of attestations. After exchanging my ssd to a recommended one I switched back to lighthouse and CPU/RAM usage came back down.

Written by haurog, improved with suggestion by austonst (March 2023) Background Since the merge, the burden of block proposals falls on the shoulder of validators. They make a decision how much they want to interfere with block production. In other words, a node operator chooses what kind of block production methods are ethical in their view. MEV relays generally give a higher reward than local block production. Almost 90% of blocks are relayed through an MEV relay, and choosing a relay influences what kind of transactions end up on chain and how they are ordered. Some relays censor certain transactions, whereas other relays allow any transactions in blocks they produce. The focus is mostly on OFAC compliant transactions, which, to the best of my knowledge, only concerns Tornado Cash transactions. In the last few days (end of February beginning of March 2023) there have only been about a dozens tornado cash transactions per day which had been delayed more than 3 blocks. Ultrasound money mentions about 1200 OFAC transactions per week and a third of them being censored (subject to delay). Censorship therefore affects a small portion of all transactions on the Ethereum main chain only. Shortly after the merge, Flashbots was the biggest relay, many of the newer non OFAC compliant relays had to prove themselves first in production. Flashbots also promised the highest rewards at the beginning. This is why at the beginning if MEV Boost was enabled it was mainly Flashbots which was used. Now, there is a multitude of different relays for a user to choose from. It also needs to be mentioned that, to the best of my knowledge there is no clear law that node operators have to censor certain transaction in any of the large jurisdictions. Nevertheless, some node operators want to be on the save side and choose an OFAC compliant relay.

All models are wrong but some are useful. George Box All flight emission estimators have to simplify the complexity of the real world in order to estimate a carbon footprint incurred by air travel. Some make more assumptions, some less. In this post, we discuss how these assumptions influence the usability, accuracy and perceived precision of some readily available flight emission estimators. disCarbon Our flight emission estimator has an offset function which allows users to compensate their flight emission immediately and directly on-chain. This has the advantage that it is transparent, verifiable and taps into the first liquid and, therefore, efficient market for carbon credits. The emission estimation implemented is based on the model by myclimate. myclimate myclimate is one of most well-established flight emission estimators and is integrated in many airline websites. The model itself is explained in very high detail and is accessible on the myclimate website. The actual model used by the interactive estimator on their website is slightly different than the one documented which leads to small deviations on long range flights. We assume that this is due to unpublished changes in their calculation parameters. In a master thesis from 2009 it has been deemed to be the best emissions calculator from a wide range of European carbon compensation retail providers, see page 86 in the linked report (only available in German).