How does “Rainbow Staking” alleviate the problem of staking centralization?

"Anti-correlation incentives" proposal

While Vitalik Buterin acknowledges the advantages that large validators provide to the Ethereum network, he still tries to Balancing validators with the requirements of a decentralized and resilient network. On March 27, he proposed an innovative plan of "anti-correlated incentives", aiming to deal with the problem of centralization among validators, increase the penalty for failure of large validators, and enhance the decentralization and fairness of the Ethereum staking mechanism. sex.

Correlation failures in the Ethereum network could be due to the control of multiple validators from a single location, thus undermining the decentralized nature of the system. To address this issue, the“Anti-Correlation Incentive” scheme will penalize validators for correlated failures, thus incentivizing them to expand the scope of their validator activities.

Vitalik Buterin believes that if multiple validators controlled by the same entity fail together, they will suffer higher consequences than if a separate validator fails. Penalty because any mistake made by a large validator will be replicated across all identities it controls. For example, validators in the same cluster (such as a Staking Pool) are more likely to experience related failures, possibly due to shared infrastructure.

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The proposal proposes to penalize validators that deviate from the average failure rate accordingly. If many validators fail in a given slot, the penalty for each failure will be higher.

Simulations show that this approach can reduce the advantage of large Ethereum staking platforms, as large entities are more likely to cause spikes in failure rates due to related failures. Potential benefits of the proposal include incentivizing decentralization by establishing separate infrastructure for each validator and making solo staking more economically competitive relative to staking pools.

In addition to this, Vitalik Buterin also proposed other options, such as different penalty schemes to minimize the advantage of large validators , and examine the impact on geographic and customer decentralization.

Although Ethereum has penalty mechanisms such as slashing to deal with serious violations, these mechanisms are usually used to deal with extremely malicious or serious behavior. The proposal integrates penalties into regular network operations, with an emphasis on promoting true diversity among validators. The purpose of this strategy is to ensure that efforts to increase decentralization promote substantive transformation rather than mere superficial compliance.