Why Do You Have to Wait a Month to Participate in Ethereum's Native Staking?

Author: imToken

If you have recently participated in Ethereum's native staking, you may have noticed that while your ETH has been deposited and the on-chain transaction was successful, the validator has yet to start working and remains "in queue."

Moreover, this queue is likely to last over a month.

As of September 16, there are still over 1.8 million ETH waiting to enter the validator set, with an estimated waiting time of about 32 days. In July of this year, the waiting time once exceeded 43 days, and during the peak of the queue in March, around 3.4 million ETH were stuck at the entrance, with waiting times approaching 60 days.

In other words, the phrase "waiting a month" is not an exaggeration.

But this brings up a question.

Ethereum can produce a slot approximately every 12 seconds, and a regular transaction can be confirmed quickly. Why does staking require ETH worth billions of dollars to wait for days? More importantly, is there any yield during these days? Why does entering staking now take over a month, while exiting might only take a few minutes?

The answer lies in an important mechanism in Ethereum that is often overlooked by ordinary users: the Validator Queue.

1. How is the "one-month wait" calculated?

First, let's clarify a common misconception: Ethereum does not stipulate that newly staked ETH must be locked for 40 days before it can start working.

A month is merely a dynamic result.

In simple terms, it can be understood as the ETH waiting to enter divided by the amount of ETH Ethereum allows to enter daily, which gives an approximate waiting time.

Ethereum's PoS does not allow all new validators to enter the network at once; instead, it has a throttling mechanism called the Churn Limit, which controls how much staked balance can join the validator set in each epoch.

An epoch consists of 32 slots, each slot lasting about 12 seconds, so one epoch is approximately 6.4 minutes, and there are about 225 epochs in a day.

After Pectra / Electra, Ethereum began to calculate this limit more based on "ETH balance" rather than just the number of validators. Currently, the processing limit for new stakes is 256 ETH per epoch. If converted to traditional 32 ETH validators, this means that a maximum of 8 standard validators can be released every 6.4 minutes.

Thus, it is easy to calculate how much ETH can enter in a day: 256 ETH × 225 ≈ 57600 ETH/day.

So, if there are about 1.83 million ETH waiting to enter, that means 1.83 million ÷ 57.6 thousand ≈ 32 days, which is the core source of the "one-month wait."

Therefore, this number changes daily.

If the amount of ETH entering the queue daily is less than 57,600, the backlog will gradually be digested, and 40 days could turn into 30 or 20 days. Conversely, if more than this amount of ETH flows in daily, the queue will not shorten but will instead grow longer.

The extreme example of about 3.4 million ETH waiting in March for nearly 60 days illustrates this well.

Thus, it is different from our usual understanding of whether "Ethereum is congested."

Low gas fees and ample block space do not mean that validators can join immediately, as the limiting factor is not the transaction capacity of the execution layer but the throttling mechanism set by Ethereum for validator entry.

2. Why not simply open the entrance and let all ETH in at once?

Since waiting for days means that funds cannot generate staking rewards, the most straightforward solution seems simple: just raise the limit of 256 ETH per epoch, right?

The problem is that validators are not ordinary accounts.

Once an ETH transfer is completed, it generally does not add a sustained burden to the entire network. However, once a validator is activated, it will long-term enter Ethereum's consensus system, participating in block proofs, committee assignments, and network consensus.

Currently, Ethereum has over 900,000 active validators, with more than 42 million ETH staked. Each new validator becomes part of this vast consensus system.

This is why Ethereum has been actively controlling the speed of changes in the validator set.

The EIP-7514 proposed in 2023 specifically set a limit on the activation speed of validators. The concern behind this is not that "too many people staking is bad"; on the contrary, it is that if the number of validators grows unchecked in a short time, the scale of the consensus layer state, validator management, and network communication and processing pressure will all increase.

After Pectra, Ethereum allowed the effective balance of a single compounded validator to be raised to a maximum of 2048 ETH, partly to prevent large amounts of staked funds from needing to be split into thousands of 32 ETH validators, thus reducing the additional burden caused by the continuous expansion of the number of validators.

But beyond that, the Churn Limit has a deeper purpose: to prevent the group maintaining Ethereum's security from undergoing drastic changes in a short time.

After all, the security of a PoS network relies on the currently active validator set.

If large amounts of staked funds can instantly join or leave, the entire network's basis for determining who is qualified to participate in consensus and how much economic security remains in the system would change rapidly. Therefore, Ethereum needs to artificially set a speed limit for such changes.

This is why "waiting in line" is not a bug that needs fixing.

From the user's perspective, it does sacrifice some capital efficiency; but from the protocol's perspective, it is more like a deliberately set speed bump, indicating that Ethereum would rather let millions of ETH wait at the door for dozens of days than allow the validator set to suddenly expand or contract in just a few days.

Even from the future roadmap, this thinking has not changed.

The EIP-8061 planned to be included in Glamsterdam aims to significantly improve the processing capacity for exits and validator merges to alleviate exit congestion, but it still plans to maintain the 256 ETH per epoch limit for activations.

In other words, Ethereum is considering making "exiting" more flexible but is not yet ready to completely open the gates for "entering."

3. Is there any yield during the waiting period? Why is exiting so fast now?

So, if the ETH has been deposited, does the waiting month count as staking?

From the perspective of protocol rewards, it does not count.

Only when a validator truly enters the Active state, meaning it is "active," will it begin to execute proofs, participate in block proposals, and earn corresponding Ethereum protocol rewards.

Until then, even if the staking transaction has been completed and ETH has entered the staking process, as long as the validator remains Pending, it will not generate normal validator staking rewards. Ethereum.org defines "Active" as the point when a validator starts working and generating rewards.

This is where the long queue truly affects ordinary users.

Based on the current approximate 2.6% overall staking APR, a 32 ETH validator waiting for 40 days would miss out on about 0.09 ETH of potential protocol rewards.

On its own, this may not seem particularly exaggerated, but for an institution that needs to deploy tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ETH, the cost of idle funds for 40 days can quickly escalate.

This also explains why Ethereum's staking queue has recently attracted increasing attention from institutions and ETH treasury companies. In the past, when comparing different staking solutions, the most noticeable differences were the APR by a few percentage points and the fees. However, when the waiting time itself can last over a month, "when can we truly start generating rewards" also becomes part of capital efficiency.

However, there is an interesting contrast here.

If you look at the exit queue, you will find that the waiting time is often only a few minutes to a few hours. Does Ethereum allow people to exit quickly but not enter quickly?

Actually, it is not. Both entering and exiting have Churn Limits, and both are subject to protocol throttling; however, the length of the queue ultimately depends on how many people are in line.

Currently, over 2 million ETH want to enter, while the actual ETH waiting to exit is very few. Thus, on the same throttled highway, one side has a queue stretching for dozens of kilometers, while the other side is almost clear.

Moreover, "a short exit queue" does not mean that ETH can immediately return to the wallet in a few minutes. After a validator completes its exit, it still needs to wait for a fixed 256 epochs, approximately 27 hours, before it can enter a withdrawable state. After that, it must wait for Ethereum's automatic Withdrawal Sweep to send the funds to the withdrawal address, which can take several additional days.

For ordinary users, this also means that there is an easily overlooked difference between different staking methods.

If you choose to run your own validator or create an independent validator through a non-custodial ETH staking service like imToken, you must genuinely enter the Ethereum validator set, thus having to go through this protocol queue. For example, in imToken's non-custodial staking, users hold the withdrawal keys while the node service provider is responsible for running the validator. When the page shows "in queue," it essentially means the validator is waiting for Ethereum to release it, and it will only start generating protocol rewards once its status changes to "active."

On the other hand, some liquid staking pools, due to the presence of many active validators and liquidity tokens, can abstract this waiting period to some extent at the product level, so users may not directly feel the "zero-yield waiting period" of dozens of days.

However, the cost is that it introduces another set of trust boundaries, including smart contracts, LST liquidity, protocol governance, and asset exchange risks. This is also a problem often obscured by APR, as the true cost of staking is never just about fees and yield rates.

When funds enter, when they truly start working, when they can exit, and who controls the assets during this process are all part of the staking product.

In Conclusion

On the surface, it seems that Ethereum allowing millions of ETH to wait at the door for over a month is quite an inefficient design.

But if we shift our perspective to the entire network, we can understand that ordinary transactions pursue quick execution, while validators are about who maintains the next moment of Ethereum's consensus.

The former can pursue speed, while the latter requires moderation.

Thus, this is actually a safety barrier that becomes visible in the form of a long queue when the demand for staking far exceeds the entry speed set by the protocol.

In a sense, the longer this queue, the more it indicates that at this stage, the demand for entering the Ethereum validator set continues to exceed the entry speed allowed by the protocol.

But no matter how many people are waiting outside, Ethereum will still only open the door at its own pace, one epoch at a time.

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