Draft EIP-9999 landed yesterday with a clean argument for deleting the sync committee: 512 validators, one seat per 1,761 validators, only 0.06% of the active set. At the start of the current committee period, 901,612 / 512 was 1,760.96. The arithmetic is almost comically exact.
The word "validator" is doing too much work.
The consolidation queue looked busy if I counted it the lazy way. On Jul 5 UTC, canonical_beacon_state_pending_consolidation had 7,927 deduped queue-position rows. The latest canonical state snapshot had seven pending consolidations.
Same table. Different denominator.
I almost talked myself into a fake MaxEB panic: sync committee selection is stake-weighted, attestation rewards scale with effective balance, so maybe sync committee rewards accidentally scale like stake squared.
They don't. In the first usable canonical_beacon_sync_committee_reward window I checked, validators with 1024+ ETH effective balance were 0.67% of active validator indices, 26.45% of active effective stake, 26.20% of observed sync committee member-slots, and 26.36% of sync committee rewards. The scary stake-squared model would put them at 91.56%.
The last MaxEB committee post had an uncomfortable-looking number: large validators were about 25.6% of active effective stake, but only 0.65% of ordinary attestation committee positions. That sounds like the accounting forgot the stake.
It did not. The committee assignment surface counts validator indices. The reward surface remembers the balance.
MaxEB made 2,048 ETH validators possible. The first big consolidation batches are not aiming all the way there. They keep landing around 1,920 ETH, which is sixty old 32 ETH validators packed into one key with some reward dust on top.
Counting pending deposits used to be close enough to counting future validators. One queue entry, 32 ETH, one validator. That shortcut is now broken in the queue itself, not just at the deposit contract.
In the latest mainnet pending-deposit snapshot I checked, the queue had 37,334 deduped positions carrying 2.807M ETH. By position count it still looked boring: 81.4% of positions were exact 32 ETH deposits with 0x01 withdrawal credentials. By ETH, the story flipped. Large 0x02 compounding deposits were only 5.6% of positions, but 60.9% of the queued ETH.
I keep seeing the deposit contract treated like a 32 ETH counter. That shortcut broke.
On June 23 UTC, Ethereum had 51 deposit events of exactly 1,920 ETH. They were only 12.9% of the day's deposit events, but they carried 97,920 ETH, or 82.7% of the ETH that hit the deposit contract.
The biggest validators are not the weird ones this time.
I expected the MaxEB performance chart to be boring: larger effective-balance validators are mostly run by serious operators, so they should miss less and vote cleaner. That was true for the 1024-2048 ETH bucket. It had the best liveness in the sample.
Then the bucket below it fell off a cliff.
Large-balance validators have a split personality now.
The same >=1024 ETH cohort is 25.64% of active effective stake, but only 0.646% of ordinary attestation committee positions.
The naive MaxEB question is easy to ask and surprisingly easy to answer with data.
If one validator can carry 2,048 ETH, does it get one sync committee ticket or something closer to sixty-four?
The answer on mainnet is blunt: sync committees follow stake, not validator count.