GNOETH
Gnosis / Ethereum
crypto

Solo validators simply became an insignificant minority on Gnosis chain around 2025. All thanks to Stakewise which accumulated over 50% of the staked GNO in their LST protocol before the balancer hack. This made it possible to 51% attack their own chain and stop the attacker from moving their funds off gnosis chain. No matter if they forked or not, gnosis chain became so heavily centralized within 1-2 years, that solo validators did no really matter anymore. The dangers of LSTs are real. I think pretty much every solo validator left after that. If I look at the numbers now, there seem to be 304k GNO staked and 300k GNO of that is through stakewise. That is a crazy acceleration of the centralization which happened within just a few months. Gnosis is still paying 8.4% APY on these staked GNO. That is close to $3 million per year. They pay that for security, but they get pretty much zero security out of it. The best move forward for them is to turn into an L2, get some security through Ethereum and otherwise remain centralized through a single sequencer. They did not discuss yet in detail how they want to implement it, but it looks to me they prefer to have a lot of control, so at most they will be a stage 0 L2 in the L2beat classification. Not great, but better than being a fully centralized alt L1.
In the end, if the EEZ becomes a successful implementation, the Ethereum ecosystem can profit massively from it, so I am pretty happy that they go all in on the EEZ.

Solo validators simply became an insignificant minority on Gnosis chain around 2025. All thanks to Stakewise which accumulated over 50% of the staked GNO in their LST protocol before the balancer hack. This made it possible to 51% attack their own chain and stop the attacker from moving their funds off gnosis chain. No matter if they forked or not, gnosis chain became so heavily centralized within 1-2 years, that solo validators did no really matter anymore. The dangers of LSTs are real. I think pretty much every solo validator left after that. If I look at the numbers now, there seem to be 304k GNO staked and 300k GNO of that is through stakewise. That is a crazy acceleration of the centralization which happened within just a few months. Gnosis is still paying 8.4% APY on these staked GNO. That is close to $3 million per year. They pay that for security, but they get pretty much zero security out of it. The best move forward for them is to turn into an L2, get some security through Ethereum and otherwise remain centralized through a single sequencer. They did not discuss yet in detail how they want to implement it, but it looks to me they prefer to have a lot of control, so at most they will be a stage 0 L2 in the L2beat classification. Not great, but better than being a fully centralized alt L1.
In the end, if the EEZ becomes a successful implementation, the Ethereum ecosystem can profit massively from it, so I am pretty happy that they go all in on the EEZ.