Yesterday, consensus-specs deleted its implementation of EIP-6914. The proposal is Stagnant and nobody expects it in an upcoming fork, so removing dead code is sensible. What surprised me was how much work that dead code was already ready to do.
EIP-8148's worked 128 ETH threshold currently has two answers. The EIP tells deposit tooling to write bytes 00 80; the consensus spec merged yesterday reads those bytes as little-endian, gets 32,768, rejects it as out of range, and silently restores the 2,048 ETH default.
Mainnet still has 910 validator records with exactly 1 ETH. They are all pending_initialized, their median age is 404 days, and none can activate unless somebody supplies the other 31 ETH. EIP-8205 exists to stop protocols from creating this awkward little balance in the first place.
EIP-8148 says the rate of validators moving to 0x02 compounding credentials has been very low. That is true if a validator means a key: on the complete UTC day of August 21, 0x02 was 17,780 of 901,667 active indices, or 1.97%. Those keys carried 14.05 million of Ethereum's 42.33 million active effective ETH, or 33.19%.
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.
EIP-8321 sounds almost suspiciously cheap. Replace the BLS RANDAO reveal with a hash chain, then store only the validator's current 32-byte commitment. The per-validator number is tiny. The validator registry is not.
Backcast against mainnet at finalized epoch 469,034, the proposed list body is 74.75 MB in raw SSZ. Of that, 45.98 MB points at validator indices that have already exited and can never propose again. The fork transition would initialize every one of those entries to zero, and the old indices have no proposal duty that needs a commitment.
Missing a block does not make its attestations disappear. They turn up one slot later, and the next proposer gets paid for including both cohorts.
Across 30 complete mainnet days, a regular canonical block earned a median 0.048761995 ETH from included attestations. A block after exactly one slot without a canonical block earned 0.084636038 ETH, or 73.57% more. That gap showed up on all 30 days, not in one ugly incident window.
Ethereum has scheduled a fivefold expansion of the validator exit lane for Glamsterdam. At mainnet's current active stake, EIP-8061 would let 1,279 ETH exit per epoch instead of 256 ETH. Deposits do not get the same treatment.
A draft proposal to sunset Ethereum's old BLS withdrawal credentials starts from a neat premise: set the initial balance ceiling at 64 ETH, safely above every affected validator, then lower it gradually. Mainnet has already broken that premise. Six active 0x00 validators now hold more than 64 ETH, with a combined 31.31 ETH above the proposed cap.
EIP-8363 arrived in the EIPs repository yesterday with a cushion: double the base reward factor at activation, then decay it back to today's value over 18 months. That sounds like a gentle start. At Ethereum's current active effective balance, it is already a 16.0% cut to the net consensus reward curve.
The reason is simple. The proposal doubles gross duty rewards, but it also burns 58.0% of each doubled reward. A fully performing duty nets 84.0% of what the current curve pays.