Yesterday in Ethereum, March 20, 2025

Nethermind is using the Holesky test network to test blocks with 60 million gas (it's 36 million/block now). They say "on mainnet we will discuss it and suggest increasing but a bit slower (like for example 45->60 – but not yet any decisions made)."

The Beam Chain is an effort to modernize and replace Ethereum's consensus layer. It's expected to take a few years. There's a site to follow its progress now: BeamRoadmap.org.

Coinbase released an Ethereum Validator Performance Report. They're distributing their stake between clients, countries, relays, and cloud-service providers. They run 11.4% of validators (the percentage was previously unknown). Lido is the only larger one, at 27.2% (down from its peak around 32%).

Someone asked about the best ways to stake, and the responses include /u/Hairy_Candy_3225 suggesting seeking higher return through Kelp's professionally-managed vaults, like High Gain, which I see has an expected yield of about 14% now, and me suggesting StakeWise's Boost, which seems to have nailed leveraged staking.

There was some good discussion of the risks of a centralized stablecoin becoming too big in the Daily. I was most convinced by Tim Beiko's tweet ("This level of interconnectedness means that any irregular state change, even if socially palatable, would have near-intractable ripple effects. A "full rollback", where a portion of the recent chain history was invalidated, would be even worse. Any settled transaction, many of which have implications outside Ethereum (e.g. exchange sales, RWA redemptions, etc.) would be undone, with no way to revert the offchain half of it.") and /u/haurog's response. I worry about this less now, though I agree that everyone's power over the ecosystem should be limited. See also /u/eth2353's concern that that professional stakers could raise the gas limit enough to force out home stakers.

See the previous Yesterday in Ethereum.