Ethereum researcher discusses independent validators. Pros: opportunity for additional airdrops. Cons: IP address exposure.

With the completion of the Ethereum Shapella upgrade, discussions on Ethereum staking have been reignited. In the latest episode of the Bankless interview program, the topic was extensively discussed. However, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake inadvertently revealed that the IP locations of stakers would be exposed when discussing the advantages of independent stakers, drawing attention to privacy concerns within the crypto community once again.

Ethereum Foundation Researcher Discusses Advantages of Independent ETH Stakers

In the final topic of this episode, EthHub co-founder Anthony Sassano discusses his experience becoming an independent ETH staker, running staking nodes independently without using staking service providers. Sassano mentions that becoming an independent staker is not as difficult as one might imagine, with not very high hardware or technical requirements. Most of the time, it involves copying and pasting tutorials found online, but he ultimately successfully completed the staking process.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake also mentioned two benefits of becoming an independent staker. The first is that there are no fees to be paid because there is no need to go through other service providers, and the second point surprised everyone in the conversation, which is the potential for "special airdrops" due to staking revealing some personal information.

"This is information that I've gotten from the inside, where some people are looking at large quantities of staker metadata, such as deposit and withdrawal addresses, fee recipients, IP addresses, and errors in time zones when the staker is offline," Justin Drake explained.

To this, Bankless host Ryan expressed surprise, saying, "This is like a heavy Ethereum user data set for anti-witch attacks?"

Justin Drake agreed and added that if certain protocols only want to provide airdrops to individual independent stakers, they can exclude staking service providers like Coinbase and Kraken through this data.

ETH Staking Privacy Concerns

While potential airdrops may be obtained, ETH staking leading to IP address leaks has sparked negative sentiment in the crypto community and raised discussions on privacy issues, although the Ethereum Foundation has not responded to the content yet.

Blockchain browser Metamask also faced similar issues in November last year, as when users use Infura as the default RPC remote procedure call provider for MetaMask, Infura collects users' IP and Ethereum wallet addresses when users send transactions. However, this issue can be resolved by changing the RPC provider.