The Ethereum Foundation began investing part of its treasury, transforming one of Ethereum’s most influential entities into a direct participant in the network’s economic consensus.
As of Tuesday post at
In its announcement, the foundation highlighted that the recent validators are powered using the open source infrastructure, Dirk and Vouch, originally developed by Attestant and now part of the Bitwise institutional staking stack.
Dirk acts as a distributed signer, while Vouch serves as a verification client, allowing keys and operations to be shared across multiple jurisdictions and operators, rather than focusing on a single machine or provider.
Chris Berry, head of Ethereum onchain engineering at Bitwise Onchain Solutions, told Cointelegraph that Vouch and Dirk were “built to fulfill the responsibilities of an honest validator in the most secure manner possible,” with an emphasis on client diversity, non-custodial control and compliance.
Avoiding single points of failure
According to the foundation, this setup is designed to avoid a “single point of failure” and reflects best practices for protected, unattended betting.
Most importantly, the Ethereum Foundation claims that its setup “employs minority customers” along with a mix of hosted infrastructure and self-managed hardware in several jurisdictions.
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According to Berry, these properties “really align with Ethereum’s core values,” and the adoption of EF shows that the team is “confident in deploying and managing the software.”
The choice is also crucial in the long term worries that Ethereum’s client ecosystem and validator set may become overly dependent on a few dominant implementations and centralized cloud service providers.
It appears that the foundation, by clearly opting for a stack composed of minority clients, is using its own staking space to model what I want immense institutional validators.
Ethereum Staking Concentration Concerns
This move comes as Ethereum staking continues to develop and professionalize. Around 30% ETH supply is currently under threat, with liquid staking protocols and immense custodians such as Lido and Coinbase still controlling a significant portion of validators and effective voting power.
This caused recurring questions about how much decentralization Ethereum can retain as more capital flows into highly optimized, institutionally run staking operations.
Berry emphasized that Ethereum has “always prioritized decentralization and security” at the protocol level and that there are “multiple mechanisms” in place to ensure Ethereum “remains secure if large numbers of shareholders wish to leave or fail to perform their responsibilities properly.”
He added that institutional staking is “very competitive” and that allocators are increasingly focusing on characteristics such as customer diversity, infrastructure resilience and validator performance.
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