ChainCatcher news, Vitalik published a long article on Warpcast titled "Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: The Merge," in which he emphasized the exploration of "what improvements can be made to the technical design of proof of stake, and what are the pathways to achieve this goal?"Vitalik stated that the three goals of Ethereum staking are to maximize the number of validators that can participate in staking (which directly means minimizing the minimum ETH required for staking); to minimize the time for finality; and to minimize the overhead of running a node. Ideally, he hopes to maintain economic finality while improving the status quo in two areas: completing blocks within a time slot (ideally, maintaining or even reducing the current length of 12 seconds), rather than 15 minutes; and allowing validators to stake with 1 ETH (below the 32 ETH requirement).

ChainCatcher message, the Unichain white paper states that to become a validator in UVN, node operators must stake UNI tokens on the Ethereum mainnet. The staking status is tracked in Unichain's smart contract, which receives notifications of staking and withdrawal operations through a native bridge. Unichain's blocks are divided into fixed-length Epochs. At the beginning of each Epoch, the current staked balance is snapshot, and Unichain chain fees are collected and calculated for the reward value of each staked token.Participants can also stake and vote for validators, thereby increasing the staking weight of that validator. A limited number of validators with the highest staking weight will be considered the active set and will be eligible to publish proofs and receive the designated rewards for that Epoch.

ChainCatcher message, the public chain Zilliqa posted on X that the network is now back online for validators and is deploying permanent fixes for public use. The team will provide updates as they become available.Yesterday's news, Zilliqa stated on X that the network encountered issues again after several days. The team has identified the error and will resolve it as soon as possible. All funds are safe. They added that this error is not caused by the Zilliqa 2.0 upgrade.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a summary of his fireside chat at the Home Staking Summit in Singapore on social media, discussing the real value of independent stakers (including small businesses and community stakers) to the network, and what transformations L1 can undertake to better support these stakers.Vitalik stated that independent stakers are both the "first line of defense" for the Ethereum network, providing censorship resistance, and the "last line of defense," protecting the network by preventing the final confirmation of erroneous chains at 67%. Independent stakers are typically not associated with large organizations, making them difficult to capture or coerce by regulators, thereby enhancing Ethereum's position as a trusted neutral block space.Vitalik proposed the possibility of increasing the required validator ratio (e.g., from 67% to 85%) to enhance network security. However, he also pointed out that this could bring new challenges, such as lowering the cost of attacks that prevent final confirmations. Additionally, Ethereum's network security strategy may need to be reassessed. Currently, 33% of staked ETH represents the highest attack cost for hijacking the blockchain. However, this status quo suggests that there may be an over-investment in defending against positive attacks above 33%, recommending a reallocation of resources to strengthen defenses against "above 66%" attacks.Vitalik emphasized the importance of increasing the number of independent stakers, making them a key component of the current final confirmation threshold, and explored measures that the Ethereum base layer (L1) could take to better support and encourage independent staking.

ChainCatcher message, Terra posted on X that the Terra chain has resumed block production around 4:19 AM UTC today, and the emergency chain upgrade has been completed. Transactions are being processed, and users can resume normal activities. Validators holding over 67% of the voting power on Terra have upgraded their nodes to prevent this vulnerability from occurring again. More validators are expected to upgrade soon.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently responded to concerns raised by Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi regarding network decentralization and validation mechanisms.In response to how validators can obtain 32MB of blob transaction data every 12 seconds, Buterin proposed two possible strategies: each validator is responsible for building only 1/16 of the block, or validators only perform DAS checks without needing to fully download the data.Regarding the issue of Verkle tree design not deleting storage slots, Buterin stated that the impact of deleting storage slots is currently quite small. He denied claims about abandoning the transaction pool, emphasizing that this is an outdated idea that does not align with the current direction of Ethereum research.Buterin acknowledged that validation does not require an execution layer (EL), but stressed that this does not mean making it difficult for most people to run an EL. He pointed out that using SNARKs technology could enable more users to achieve full validation.Buterin emphasized that the key goal for validators is to avoid power concentration, especially in terms of consensus rule validation, fork choice, and transaction inclusion. He believes that during periods of only witnessing, there is no need to re-execute the EVM cycle.

ChainCatcher message, BNB Chain has posted on social media to remind that the Haber hard fork for BSC and opBNB mainnets is coming soon, and validators and node operators need to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.

According to ChainCatcher, citing informed sources from CoinDesk, over 30 validators were kicked out of the Solana Foundation's delegation program last weekend. Although they remain validators on the network, they are no longer eligible to receive rewards for validating transactions on the Solana blockchain. Another source stated that many of the operators are Russian. In total, 32 operators were removed, who collectively held 1.5 million SOL, accounting for about 0.5% of the staked amount in the program.ChainCatcher previously reported that, according to The Block, the Solana Foundation announced that it had removed a group of validator operators from the delegation program due to their involvement in "sandwich" attacks on Solana users.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Solana Foundation announced that it has removed a group of validator operators from its delegation program due to their involvement in "sandwich" attacks on Solana users.Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of Solana RPC provider Helius, explained that this move will ensure that the foundation does not delegate to validators that engage in malicious sandwich attacks on retail users.

ChainCatcher message, SSV Network announced on social platforms that the last round of incentive activities has ended, with over 22,332 validators eligible to receive a total of 12,936 SSV, approximately 485,000 USD.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, Core DAO aims to enhance decentralization and attract reputable infrastructure providers through a proposal vote to "expand the number of node validators on the Core chain from 21 to 31 before the second quarter of 2025."It is reported that this proposal aims to gradually increase the number of validators without affecting staking rewards, thereby strengthening the network's decentralization and resilience.

According to ChainCatcher news, the Solana community has voted to approve the proposal to "allocate 100% of priority fees to validators" on the official governance page, replacing the current structure of 50% burn and 50% rewards.It is reported that the voting ended at the conclusion of epoch 620, with 51.17% of the stake participating, and it was ultimately passed with a support rate of 77.77%.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum staking infrastructure SSV.Network has announced a roadmap aimed at significantly reducing the hardware requirements for operating over 20,000 validators within four months.The SSV Labs team stated that their goal is to reduce hardware requirements by 75-90% over the next 12 months, with the roadmap divided into several phases covering cryptography, consensus, and network optimization.SSV.Network also addresses the issue of network inefficiency by optimizing its network topology. By strategically mapping validators to topics based on cluster affiliations, the platform aims to minimize the burden on individual operators while maintaining network robustness. Message processing can be reduced by 98%.

ChainCatcher news, Puffer Finance announced on social media that Validator Tickets (VTs) have been issued for the first batch of registered validators (May 7th - 16th).

ChainCatcher message, according to the Solana developer forum, the proposal "Enabling Full Priority Fee Rewards for Validators on Solana Mainnet-beta" discusses adjusting the priority fee structure to "give 100% of the priority fee rewards to validators."The discussion initiator stated that the implementation of this proposal requires feature gating. While there will be no changes to the payment structure for transaction submitters, the software that includes this proposal will allocate a larger proportion of fees to validators compared to previous versions. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure a smooth transition for all validators to the new feature at the period boundaries, maintaining consistency.

ChainCatcher news, the founder of the public chain Waves, Sasha, tweeted that yield mining is coming soon. Units.network validators (and $waves holders) will be able to choose which chains to support and which native tokens of the Units Layer One chain to mine.

ChainCatcher news, distributed validator technology provider Obol Labs announced that its partner EtherFi plans to deploy $100 million worth of equity (1,000 validators) on Obol Distributed Validators (DVs). These validators will be operated by a multi-organizational cluster consisting of seven professional validation organizations, including Pier Two, DSRV, Nethermind, Chainnodes, A41, Cosmostation, and Validation Cloud. These node operators have extensive experience in running Obol DVs.It is reported that the Liquidity Re-staking Protocol (LRP) EtherFi aims to maintain a secure, resilient, and decentralized staking environment. Furthermore, by adopting distributed validators, EtherFi and Obol Labs are working together to ensure the highest quality re-staking capital for Activating Validator Services (AVSs).

ChainCatcher message, Solana Status recommends Solana mainnet Beta validators to use version v1.17.31, which includes several enhancements aimed at helping to alleviate the current congestion issues on the network.