Ethereum Validator Performance Report Q1 2026

This report covers our Ethereum validator performance metrics for Q1 2026. Note that while some Coinbase staking customers choose to delegate to our partner staking providers, the data in this report applies solely to Coinbase validators.

Our guiding principle on Ethereum is that safety and performance should reinforce one another. Protecting client capital begins with supporting the long-term health of the network itself, which is why we operate with a diversified, stewardship-driven approach designed for resilience, accountability, and institutional scale.

That philosophy also defines what we will not do. We do not pursue strategies that concentrate risk, compromise network integrity, or prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability. We believe the market will increasingly distinguish category leaders not by how aggressively they optimize at the margins, but by who can deliver strong performance within a disciplined, transparent, and durable operating framework.

Our results in Q1 underscore that position. We outperformed our institutional peer set on Ethereum APY, demonstrating that leading performance and responsible stewardship are not competing objectives, but the foundation of institutional-grade staking. For large institutions and ETF issuers, staking is not simply a question of access; it is a question of trust, resilience, and long-term alignment. We believe our holistic ecosystem perspective, operational excellence, and continued thought leadership position us as a category leader and a trusted partner for institutions building staking programs at scale.

In Q1 2026, Coinbase validators had an average uptime of 99.98%, outperforming the network average of 99.77%. Participation rate is a reliable indicator of validator uptime; therefore, the two are interchangeable in our definitions.

Participation rate indicates how well validators perform their consensus duties. This metric is measured by the percentage of assigned attestations that a validator successfully signs, submits, and gets included in a block.

The chart below shows Coinbase's participation rate for Q1, as well as our participation averages for two other key validator duties. 

In Q1, Coinbase validators outperformed the network average across two categories.

Network figures are from an internal tool that pulls data from the blockchain.

To help maintain a truly distributed and decentralized Ethereum blockchain, we distribute our validators across several regions, each with multiple availability zones. This also helps compartmentalize potential outages and accommodates customers who require validators to be operated in specific regions for regulatory purposes. Our validators operate in:

Additionally, we distribute our validators between 2 cloud providers: AWS and GCP, which provides diversity, helps further compartmentalize outages, and mitigates the risk of a technical issue impacting our ability to run workloads on a given cloud provider. This distribution strategy also helps mitigate risk in the event of a cloud provider curtailing the hosting of blockchain validators.

If a prolonged issue with a cloud provider or given region were to occur, our validator orchestration system enables us to safely move our validators between data centers. This system has yet to be required in response to an outage. However, it has a proven track record when used for routine validator migrations, either at the request of customers or for scheduled maintenance.

Client diversity is crucial for protecting our customers' assets and strengthening the Ethereum network's resilience. Using a mix of execution layer (EL) and consensus layer (CL) clients reduces single point of failure risk and mitigates correlated incidents from client-specific bugs or outages, supporting decentralization and more consistent validator performance.

Our ETH validators support:

Relay diversity (via MEV-Boost / Commit-Boost) reduces reliance on a single relay's uptime or policies, improving redundancy and reducing centralization risk in block building. Using multiple reputable relays (configured appropriately) can increase the likelihood that proposers receive and select the best available bid, which can improve execution layer rewards (priority fees & MEV) that are otherwise variable.

Our validators are connected to 7 unique MEV relays:

We offer OFAC screening as an option, further increasing the diversity of relays for the subset of our customers that need filtering.

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