ETH Insights: Discussing MaxEB with Ethereum Foundation's Mike Neuder

With the Dencun upgrade behind us, focus in the Ethereum community has turned toward the next Ethereum upgrade: Pectra (Prague/Electra). The most significant update expected to be included is EIP-7251, which will increase the amount of staked ETH from which a single validator can earn rewards (known as a validator's maximum effective balance, or MaxEB) from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH.

As with any significant change, though — and increasing MaxEB is arguably the biggest change since withdrawals were implemented in last year's Shapella upgrade — there are other implications to consider, such as current specs around initial slashing penalties, which if left untouched would expose validators with large effective balances to outsized penalties.

To dig into this topic, Ben Rodriguez, senior protocol specialist at Coinbase, sat down to discuss MaxEB with Mike Neuder, a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation and co-author of EIP-7251. They cover the basics around MaxEB, discuss the rationale for increasing it, and downstream for validators. They also touch on the controversial topic of Ethereum's issuance rate, which Mike has also written about.