# Staking Survey 2023

Before we dig into the data. This quote from the survey gives an indication of the excitement, fear and unknown that staking has had on people - and they do it all anyway because they care.

> "I had almost a heart attack because some interface did not update. Needed to explain to my gf that money is gone but then things turned out fine. She was cool though and said, "As long as we are healthy all other things can be sorted out."
SoloStaking rocks. Thanks."

**TL;DR**

- The number one barrier to solo staking is the technical setup. Solo stakers are more familiar with Linux than all the other groups. Most users unfamiliar with Linux had 'analysis paralysis' and were understandably worried about the financial implications of not getting it correct.

- Solo staking was the most popular choice that respondents would like to migrate to after withdrawals are enabled (despite no liquid staking token being available).

- 82% of users bought the hardware precisely to stake. Buying the hardware is likely a significant barrier to entry.

- Non-technical reasons that acted as deterrents to staking were how staking rewards, penalties, and slashing worked. Almost all respondents had some level of fear of slashing risks.

- Many users felt resources were lacking when their validator didn't work as expected. ETHStaker's new Gitbook is starting to address this concern.

- Solo stakers were more likely to oppose the use of MEV vs. other groups (service users, RP node operators).

- Ethstaker and Rocketpool were the two most frequent places where potential stakers asked questions and learned

- Withdrawal enablement could attract even more total Ethereum to the beacon chain.
In the previous Survey (October 2021). 25% of answers included ‘ I don’t want to lock up my eth.’ which could indicate a lot of ETH waiting for withdrawals will come into the deposit contract.

- Rocketpool mini node operators were most likely to hold their Ethereum or only withdraw the rewards (86%). 83% of solo stakers agreed. Staking service users are least likely to keep staking their Ethereum (59%), although 26% said they would move to an alternative staking solution - which would mean the Ether would remain staked.

- 26% of those using a staking service are planning to withdraw and move to a better staking solution. 59% intend to stay. The remaining are undecided or intend to withdraw everything (this is noteworthy because LSDs have liquid markets today)

# Introduction
How are you Staking?


What percentage of your Eth are you staking?


The purpose of this survey was to gain insight into various aspects of the staking ecosystem, identify obstacles that may impede participation, and determine ways in which the community can work together to increase accessibility.

We are grateful to all those who participated and took the time to provide their input. While there were many open-ended responses, we have taken the time to read and consider each one. We welcome any additional thoughts or perspectives on the data provided. The raw data from the survey is available for review at the conclusion of this report

Method

The methodology of this survey involved categorizing participants based on their reported staking method.

- Solo Staking
- Staking Pool Service
- Mini node operator (Rocketpool)
- Not yet staking

While the majority of staked ETH is held with staking pool services, the majority of responses came from solo stakers or mini node operators. This suggests that solo stakers are particularly active in providing feedback. Some survey results are presented in tables that can be easily navigated to view individual responses.

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# # SOLO STAKERS
> "Each client team has docs on how to get their working, but none of them contained step-by-step information on how to make a combination of them work together. Somer Esat / coincashew guides helped me a lot in the beginning."

> "How the client software worked. I could follow a guide and set it up but it took me a while to understand what it actually was I was doing at each step."

> "Trying to have a good backup plan where I could continue to stake even if my main machine or validator went down, but not have a risk of getting slashed."

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Q. What did you find hardest to understand about staking when you started?

A total of 643 people answered this free-form question. Responses generally spanned across four themes:

- Hardware 5%
- Software 76%
- Economics 10%
- No issues 9%

**Hardware**
Most comments revolved around sourcing the right equipment and also, in hindsight, how it could be future-proofed.

**Economics**
Responses were almost exclusively around two key subjects:

1. Staking rewards calculations / Validator reward calculations
2. How slashing works, what the risks are

**Software**
This was by far the biggest area of responses and was broken down into sub-themes:

- Linux / Operating System 19%
- Security 19%
- Client 20%
- Resources / Guides 8%
- Deposit 9%
- Other 25%

**Linux**
- Most solo stakers were already familiar with Linux, and a lack of familiarity with Linux is the most significant hurdle preventing other from solo-staking.
- Few references to easy-to-use staking software were mentioned.
- A representative comment was, "I failed and bought a Dappnode, which was super easy."

Did you purchase hardware specifically for staking?


**Security**
This was an extremely common theme throughout comments and has highlighted that more needs to be done around privacy, DDoS, and key management.

Open Source key management software was not often quoted.
Making the staking community aware of these tools could make a substantial impact.

**Client**
There needs to be clarity around Consensus clients vs. Execution clients. Understanding how they work and why two clients are needed.

**Resources/Guides**
A lot of people used guides and resources. Keeping these up to date is essential, as is building awareness of new tools that could make the process easier. More guides are needed that assume no knowledge.

ETHStakers recently started building out the ‘what if things go wrong’ gitbook which adddresses many comments.

**Deposit**
Many people mentioned this in comments - It is unclear how much potential ETH has not been staked due to fear at the deposit stage.

Other noteworthy comments:

- Not understanding why there were missed attestations
- Not knowing how much bandwidth usage a validator will need

**How concerned were you about slashing risks?**


**Once withdrawls are enabled will you continue to stake?**


SOLO STAKER QUOTES
> "The long-term implications. Starting in 2020, I knew I was in for a long haul, but I didn't know that it would last well into 2023 before I would be able to reap any rewards. Starting with 500G SSD and having to upgrade. Internet requiring ~6G/day of data is costly to upgrade ISP data."

> "The explanations for slashing and other penalties are bad. For example, slashing is characterised as a punishment for actions that harm the network, implied to be intentional using terms like "attack" or "misbehave". Slashing is really only caused by negligence/misconfiguration."

> "Though on a separate note, capital efficiency using some form of decentralised liquid staking that generates a token e.g. rplETH would be main reason for me to not do pure solo staking"

> "the technical requirements are still high. I did not have much difficulty, but I’d consider myself an expert linux admin and technical guru."

> "All the different keys and password confused me. I'm still a bit worried about how I'm going to be able to successfully withdraw using my keys."

# STAKING AS A SERVICE

**Once withdrawals are enabled will you continue to stake?**

**What was the main reason for choosing that staking service?**

**Q. What would motivate you to move services?**

Around 1/3 of respondents would be interested in solo staking once withdrawals are enabled, with some wanting it to be less of a technical challenge in the setup and maintenance.

A quarter of responses want to move to a more decentralized option (maybe even more prevalent after centralized exchanges points of failure in 2022.

The third highest category of answers was around a higher APR/rewards, which suggests features such as MEV pooling and liquid staking derivatives will play a significant factor in rewards and may sway people to use a pool instead of solo staking.

In fourth place was security which was also cited a lot with their funds being locked on a centralized exchange.

**How likely would you switch staking services once withdrawals are enabled?**


**What was the main barrier against solo staking?**

**Staking as a service quotes**

> "How to stake yourself. I bought the hardware and it felt far too difficult and nerve-wracking with the amount of money at hand."

> "I wanted more robustness and couldn't find it. Looking forward to DVT."

> "How to do it. even though the Ethereum foundation made a step by step, it was still quite technical to generate keys and frankly, I don't even know if I did it right and will not know until I try to withdraw and it doesn't work."

# Minipool Operators
**How concerned were you about slashing risks?**

Once withdrawls are enabled will you continue to stake?

**Q. What did you find most challenging to understand about staking when you started?**

This group of respondents gave similar answers to solo stakers - with even more mentions of the hardware setup being a challenge. Linux was also noted as a challenge for mini-pool operators.

What resources are you using to learn how to stake?

The Mini node operators heavily rely on Rocketpool documentation and the discord channel to learn and keep up to date.

If you are using the MEV boost relayer, which are you using, and could you tell us why you chose it?

Flashbots is still the dominant player in this group, although bloxroute is much closer in terms of mentions; Rocketpool's smoothing pool is also mentioned, although 6x less than Flashbots.

Nearly all Rocketpool operators are using MEV vs. solo stakers.

# Not Yet Staking
**What's the main reason you haven't staked yet?**

- 40% of those not yet staking don't have the 32 ETH required, but would like to solo stake
- 40% stated various technical aspects (bandwidth, goerli eth availability, security worries)
- 20% wanted to wait for withdrawals to be available

What is the hardest part about learning to stake?

Most users cite the technical hurdles as the primary reason for not yet staking.

Looking back at the question for solo stakers, "What did you find hardest to understand about staking when you started?" they also had a technical hurdle that they had to overcome. More comprehensive guides and resources would help mitigate

**Not yet staking quotes**

> "Where do I start?"

> "It seems like a steep learning curve for non-technical user."

> "Waiting for withdrawals to be enabled and I want to upskill myself and test it out first to make sure I know what I am doing. I do plan to solo stake from home in the future. I might try staking through rocket pool at some point too."

> "inability to unstake, waiting for how it evolves."

# Key Takeaways

What can we as a community do to fix some of the issues identified in this survey?

- Given the vast amount of people buying hardware for staking, we need better guides and independent recommendations on hardware with considerations for future requirements and budget constraints of different users.

- The previous survey in October 2021 highlighted the same as this survey - a considerable desire to stake from home. However, we must continue to reduce the barriers for this to be possible - technical installations should be as easy as possible and increasing knowledge on attestations, slashing, rewards, and penalties.

- Slashing fears were highlighted. While this can be healthy in some respects, potentially this fear is over-emphasized as the number of validators slashed is 224 (25th Jan 2023) vs over 500,000 validators active on the network. The number of validators with a total loss of ethereum is even lower. Education around potential misunderstandings is important.

- Most popular guides (someresats, coincashew) assume some technical knowledge. We need to tackle the first step for people unfamiliar with hardware or installing Linux and build more guides for simpler open source software that already exists.

- Free and open-source software such as Stereum, Ethdocker, and Dappnode are available, but are not widely mentioned. This may be due to a lack of good walkthrough guides and awareness. Building trust with the community through software audits is also an important consideration.

- More research on testing bandwidth usage, especially in different geographies, would be helpful. Predictions on future bandwidth usage would also be beneficial for stakers to make more informed decisions.

- Making the process of testing staking setups and walkthroughs easy should be a priority. Key management, deposit address, and Georli ETH (or a staking testnet) were also identified as issues that the community can address.

**QUOTES
**

> The quotes selected are an attempt to represent the community zeitgeist. I hope the selection encourages you to dive into the raw data and read more.
>
>
> If solo staking was easier and had better APR than staking services
>
> Probably things like estimating actual rewards, not just APR, but the types of rewards that come from attesting, proposing, execution rewards, sync committee rewards. Also understanding the value that a solo node can provide the network.
>
> I now feel comfortable to solo-stake using DAppNode or a similar solution.
>
> Don't really know, probably something that have made its proofs in past in terms of security, good reputation and other important aspects
>
> esting my setup without risking my ETH. ETH for testnets is hard to get, testnets don't behave like mainnet. CL and EL client log messages can be cryptic, even when everything is OK. Engine API HTTP vs websocket compatibility is confusing, why are there even 2 standards?
>
> Coming up with reliable backup methods to store a backup of the chain so that if data corruption occurs we can be back online without doing a resync. (In summary, I have a love/hate relationship with Geth)
>
> Everything. Build own machine and linux is totally new for me.
>
> ow the client software worked. I could follow a guide and set it up but it took me a while to understand what it actually was I was doing at each step.
>
> Tusting in the processes that hadn't been developed yet. For instance how the merge was going to work, unstaking…
>
> I first tried to stake using the cli. Using a lot of software, without really knowing what I am doing, turned out to be too tough to handle. DAppNode and the ethereum foundation staking website made that part easy enough for me to do. But I did try first on prater testnet!
>
> The 32 ETH cost is still out of reach, more than my net worth, despite the recent price drop. Probably 2-3 years away, hopefully less! RocketPool-style staking is of less interest, as I am mainly into participating for technical interest, i.e. running nodes myself (so long as the APR and token safety are respectable).
>
> Waiting for withdrawals to be enabled and I want to upskill myself and test it out first to make sure I know what I am doing. I do plan to solo stake from home in the future. I might try staking through rocket pool at some point too.
>
> Bandwidth requirements are to high to (reliably) stake from home. (home) IP is public, meaning can be targeted for attack. Cost of running a validating node in cloud seems expensive (don't know the exact numbers)
> Tax treatment unclear (could mean my ETH _holdings_ are taxed at +55%, not just the rewards)
>
>
> To have enough time to learn how to set up correctly and secure
>
> Where do I start?

CHARTS and RAW DATA AVAILABLE ON THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/cafcee00-e1af-4148-bae8-442a88ac75fa/page/p_h8d0aa5q2c