Frequently Asked Questions¶

If you're able to stake yourself, we encourage you to do so. It is one of the best ways to help keep Ethereum decentralized.

However, not everyone wants to or can manage validator infrastructure themselves. Serenita aims to provide a safer and simpler alternative without compromising on operational quality.

1. Risk minimization

   Risk minimization is our highest priority. Not only do we employ industry standard best practices like the principle of least privilege, we also extend this in domain-specific ways specifically designed to better protect validators.

   We have developed our own validator client, Vero, which helps protect our validators from client bugs that can have devastating consequences.

2. Infrastructure

   We run redundant multi-node infrastructure across different datacenters to optimize our validator performance. This includes not only running multiple different Ethereum clients, but also fault-tolerant monitoring and alerting systems that allow us to quickly spot even minor issues.

3. Performance

   We frequently rank among the best-performing staking node operators on Ethereum.

The underlying smart contracts have undergone security reviews by multiple parties whose reports are publicly available here. Security reviews are not a guarantee of safety though, they are a way through which we try to lower the probability of a critical bug being present in the code.

In comparison to traditional DeFi smart contracts, staking smart contracts do have a small safety advantage. Staked ETH is not immediately accessible to attackers – it is locked on the beacon chain. Even if the smart contracts were compromised, the attackers would need to wait for the staked ETH to exit the beacon chain before they could do anything with it. Unstaking would take at least several hours, giving defenders a chance to respond before the attacker gains access to the unstaked ETH.

No. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Staking is generally considered a relatively low-risk way to earn yield on ETH/GNO. However, low risk is not the same as zero risk or risk-free.

In Ethereum's proof-of-stake system, staked tokens are literally at stake and can be taken away if the associated validator misbehaves. This mechanism helps protect the network from attacks and other harmful behavior.

However, validators can also misbehave unintentionally. For example, software bugs, configuration mistakes, infrastructure failures, or operator errors may cause a validator to behave in a way the protocol considers slashable. The Ethereum protocol cannot distinguish between malicious intent and accidental misbehavior, and penalties may therefore still apply.

In addition to direct validator-related risks, staking may also involve smart contract risk, wallet security risk, and risks associated with Ethereum protocol upgrades or broader network events.

At Serenita, we take multiple steps to reduce these risks, including extensive testing, minimal external dependencies, client diversity, infrastructure redundancy, and conservative operational practices. While we believe these measures significantly reduce risk, it cannot be fully eliminated.

Yes. Even though you interact with smart contracts operated by Serenita, those smart contracts are designed in a way that doesn't allow us to access your ETH. As the node operator, all we can do is stake it, and nothing else.

Only the person/entity that deposited assets can later withdraw them from the same smart contract.

There is no minimum staking amount. However, at some point the transaction fees involved will surpass the expected staking returns over the time period you intend to stake for. Therefore, the minimum advisable amount depends on how long you plan to stake for, and how expensive you expect transaction fees to be.

When you deposit your tokens, the staking smart contract registers a corresponding number of shares to your wallet address. Every share represents a proportional claim on the assets held by the vault, including earned staking rewards.

Rewards are distributed on a daily basis and are automatically staked.

Our fee is deducted from the total amount of consensus-layer (CL) and execution-layer (EL) rewards. We charge 5% on Ethereum and 15% on Gnosis Chain.

Yes and no.

Yes – you can request to unstake your tokens at any time, and our systems will automatically take care of the associated protocol actions.

No – this will not be instant. Unstaking is a two-step process where we must first unstake the tokens at the protocol level where exit queues apply and cannot currently be skipped in any way. Therefore the time to unstake depends to a large degree on the amount of other people that are exiting at the same time.

Once the tokens are unstaked (exited) at the protocol level, you can claim the exited assets at any time, instantly.

Yes, that is the beauty of Ethereum, DeFi and permissionlessness!

There are multiple ways you can interact with the underlying smart contracts. The two simplest ways are:

1. Our own staking DApp
2. StakeWise's user interface

Apart from those, you can also run your own interface locally or interact directly with the smart contract through a universal UI like Etherscan.

Any of those options will allow you to unstake your tokens without Serenita needing to be involved at all.