Ethereum 2.0 is an ambitious multi-year network upgrade of Ethereum. The upgrade is intended to achieve better scalability, security and decentralization of Ethereum 2.0.

Proof of Stake has validators instead of miners to propose and finalize blocks on a blockchain. Rewards are distributed to honest validators, while those who act maliciously will be penalized.

In order to participate as a validator, you need to have at least 32 ETH deposited on your validator account. The act of locking up 32 ETH and validating to receive rewards is called staking.

The Beacon Chain will slash validators that act maliciously. The network will also penalize validators who are offline for a sustained amount of time.

Additionally, ETH locked in staking cannot be withdrawn until at least Phase 2.

In the current iteration of Ethereum (Eth1), new blocks of transactions are created using Proof of Work, a consensus mechanism in which specialized computers race to be the first to solve a difficult math problem.

Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) is a Proof of Stake network, in which holders stake their coins to become validators eligible to propose and verify blocks and receive rewards for it. These validators are disincentivized from attempting to cheat by a system of penalties for engaging in malicious behavior.

Because staking does not require any specialized hardware, the barrier to entry to becoming a block producer is dramatically lowered, and anyone holding ETH can participate in securing the network and earning rewards.

The amount you can earn by staking your ETH depends on the percentage of the total supply of ETH staked on the network, referred to as the staking ratio. Additionally all validators on stakefish participates in MAX MEV Smoothing Pool which is eligible for additional rewards.

Generally, Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to the maximum value that can be extracted from block production in excess of the standard block reward and gas fees by including, excluding, and changing the order of transactions in a block. At no additional charge, stakefish validators participate in MAX MEV Smoothing Pool, which leverages the major MEV Relays to maximize each block rewards. All the rewards are fed to smoothing contract, and are available to be collected from our dashboard: https://stake.fish/dashboard. Currently, we use the following relayers: flashbots, bloxroute, blocknative, eden, ultrasound, and agnostics.

The main risks of staking on Ethereum 2.0 are penalties that result in a loss of funds, including slashing, and the possibility that the network will somehow fail to fully launch.

As a leading validator for 10+ Proof of Stake blockchains, we are confident in our ability to avoid slashing and other penalties. Read our slashing FAQ for more details.

While failure is a possibility for any project, we are strong supporters of Ethereum 2.0 and do not anticipate any major issues with its progress.

The only requirement for becoming a staker is owning ETH. Most non-custodial staking services like ours require the full 32 ETH for each validator. If you would like to stake with less than 32 ETH, you may want to look into staking pools. You can also consider running your own validator.

At the moment, it is only possible to use a Ledger Nano X or Nano S to stake on Ethereum 2.0.

Staking Ethereum from your Ledger is a simple process. There may be some differences between platforms, but the main requirement is connecting your hardware wallet to MetaMask.

You may need to enable "Contract Interaction" in your Ledger device settings. If you don’t have an account on MetaMask, you can create one without saving any data about that new web wallet and move forward to connecting your Ledger.

Staking on the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain can be achieved by different means, such as running your own infrastructure, choosing an exchange, joining a pool, or staking through a professional validator like stakefish. Some of these solutions offer tokenized assets to give users a form of access to the locked rewards until Phase 1.5, when they will become accessible.

By staking on your own or through a fully non-custodial solution, you are choosing to have full control of your assets at all times, with the tradeoff that your rewards are locked until withdrawals are enabled.

Withdrawals are planned for the Shanghai upgrade, the next major upgrade following The Merge. This means that newly issued ETH, though accumulating on the Beacon Chain, will remain locked and illiquid for at least 6-12 months following The Merge.

Once a deposit is made to the Ethereum Beacon Chain, it will join a waiting queue before joining the network.

All Ethereum 2.0 deposits have two delays before going into the waiting queue:

1. Eth1 data inclusion delay: The Beacon Chain follows Eth1 with some delay to make sure the Eth1 data is finalized.
2. Eth1 data voting delay: The Beacon Chain validators vote on the deposits to process every 4 hours.

You can check more details about your validator, including the estimated time to join the network, at https://beaconcha.in/.

Attestations can be positive but still return a negative reward. This is an aspect of the protocol that will be addressed in the future to provide more clarity.

The issue is currently being discussed here: https://github.com/gobitfly/eth2-beaconchain-explorer/issues/188

To start you will need to acquire the transaction ID for your deposit.

You can do this two ways: by looking in your MetaMask history at the last transaction, or by getting the validator address from your dashboard and then searching for it on beaconcha.in.

Once you have your transaction ID, you can view it on etherscan to verify that your withdrawal credential matches what’s in the deposit-*.json.