An Ethereum Validator in Every Home: The Road to 1 Billion

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Ben Adams

Type: Talk

Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

Ethereum's validator architecture was designed for a much smaller set of continuously online participants. This talk asks what would need to change if Ethereum instead supported more than a billion staking identities, including phones, wallets, and intermittently connected home devices. It examines stake-weighted committee sampling, temporary availability commitments, lightweight ZK and data-availability duties, hierarchical signature aggregation, and a finality model that does not rely on punishing ordinary downtime. It also explores how these ideas interact with ePBS, shorter slots, inactivity leaks, slashing, and post-quantum signatures. Attendees will leave with a concrete design space, its security tradeoffs, and the key open research questions that must be solved before billion-validator Ethereum is practical.