Data: The number of active validators on Ethereum has dropped to approximately 863,000, while staked ETH has slightly increased

According to The Defiant citing data from Beaconcha.in, the number of active Ethereum validators has decreased by 2.5% over the past 7 days, to approximately 863,000, while the total amount of staked ETH has slightly increased by 0.08%, reaching 43.74 million.

The decline in the number of validators is mainly related to the validator merging mechanism after the Pectra upgrade. This upgrade raised the maximum effective balance of a single validator from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, allowing operators to merge multiple validators without needing to exit staking, thereby reducing network communication and consensus overhead. Currently, approximately 507,000 ETH are in the merging queue, with an expected waiting time of about 5 days and 11 hours.