Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has now grown for more than six weeks as concerns have risen over the network’s staking exit queue.
In X’s September 18th post, Buterin assembled the process as a deliberate design option rather than a flaw, comparing it to military service discipline.
According to Buterin, staking is not a casual activity, but a commitment to protecting the network. From this point of view, friction such as exit delays serves as protective measures.
“If the army can leave suddenly at any time, the army cannot be held together,” he wrote, stressing that Ethereum’s credibility depends on the balter’s inability to instantly abandon his role.
Buterin admitted that the current design is not perfect. Nevertheless, he insisted:
“That’s not to say that the current staking queue design is best. Rather, naively reducing the constants makes the chain much less reliable from POVs on nodes that don’t go to frequently online.”
Buterin’s remarks reiterated the perspective of Sreeram Kannan, founder of protocol Eigenlayer.
In his own post on September 17th, Kannan described Ethereum’s long-term exit period as “conservative parameters” that serve as an important security measure.
He explained that wait times protect against worst-case scenarios, such as a adjusted validator attack that could result in participants attempting an exit before facing a thrashing penalty.
With this in mind, Kannan warned:
“You can’t staking instantly.”
He continued that by shortening the process over several days, it could expose Ethereum to attacks that emit security assumptions.
In contrast, long windows can detect and punish malicious behaviors such as double signatures. This design ensures that the effective person in the fraudulent act cannot easily escape accountability.
Kannan emphasized that this buffer allows inactive nodes to reconnect the correct forks and verify them regularly. He argues that competing forks can each be argued that they are valid without such mechanisms, and offline nodes are unable to determine the truth when rejoining.
He concluded:
“Instead of ensuring a long, fixed staking period, Ethereum instantly designed an exit queue if only a small amount of shares were withdrawn during a certain period.
This powerful defense occurs when the Ethereum exit queue reaches historic highs.
Data from the Ethereum Validators queue shows that the staking-free backlog currently spans more than 2.48 million ETH over 43 days, valued at around $11.3 billion, waiting to withdraw.