Can ETH Solo Stakers Handle the Heat? Why More Blobs Won’t Hurt Them

On Ep. 70 of Infinite Jungle, Christine chats with founder of ProbeLab, Yiannis Psaras, about a data-driven study his team conducted on Ethereum node bandwidth availability. The study (linked in the show notes) measured the bandwidth availability of 70% of online and reachable nodes in the Ethereum network. It found that the mean available bandwidth for nodes stayed between 18 to 23 mbps, indicating that nodes do have additional capacity for packaging more blobs into blocks. Yiannis supported the decision by Ethereum protocol developers to include a blob capacity increase from 3/6 to 6/9 target/max blobs per block in the Pectra upgrade. Finally, he shared improvements that could be made to Ethereum’s P2P network to alleviate bandwidth constraints and enforce geographic decentralization of nodes. Guests: Name: Yiannis Psaras Title: Founder, ProbeLab X: https://x.com/yiannisbot Show note links: Probelab study on Ethereum node bandwidth availability (https://ethresear.ch/t/bandwidth-availability-in-ethereum-regional-differences-and-network-impacts/21138) EthPandaOps study on performance of home stakers (https://ethresear.ch/t/block-arrivals-home-stakers-bumping-the-blob-count/21096) Codex node crawler for Ethereum (https://ethresear.ch/t/crawling-the-ethereum-discv5-network-fast/20962) Infinite Jungle episode mentioning Probelab data and analysis (https://www.galaxy.com/insights/podcasts/infinite-jungle/acdc-139-the-role-of-acd-call-chairs-in-ethereum-governance/) Probelab website (https://probelab.io/) Timestamps: (00:01:09) What does ProbeLab do? (00:03:59) How Probelab measured Ethereum node bandwidth availability (00:07:49) Differences in upload vs download bandwidth availability (00:11:16) Comparing bandwidth of solo stakers vs professional stakers (00:15:32) How the Probelab study compares other studies on Ethereum node bandwidth (00:18:20) Study recommendations to save node bandwidth (00:24:50) How geography impacts node bandwidth This episode was recorded on Friday, December 6, 2024. ++ Follow us on Twitter, @glxyresearch, and read our research at www.galaxy.com/research/ to learn more! This podcast, and the information contained herein, has been provided to you by Galaxy Digital Holdings LP and its affiliates (“Galaxy Digital”) solely for informational purposes. View the full disclaimer at www.galaxy.com/disclaimer-galaxy-brains-podcast/