The technical foundation

TrueStake's reconciliation engine is built on Ethereum's consensus-layer protocol specifications. Every staking reward figure in a TrueStake report traces back through validated beacon-node data to the canonical chain.

Validator lifecycle and reward sources

An Ethereum validator moves through a defined lifecycle: pending deposit, active duty, optional voluntary exit, withdrawable state, and finally withdrawal completion. While active, a validator earns rewards from five sources:

Attestation rewards. Every epoch (approximately 6.4 minutes), each active validator must vote on the canonical chain head, target checkpoint, and source checkpoint. Correct, timely attestations earn rewards; missed or incorrect attestations incur penalties. Attestation rewards are the most frequent income source for a typical validator.

Sync committee rewards. A randomly selected committee of 256 validators signs every slot to support light-client verification. Committee membership rotates approximately every 27 hours. Sync committee participation produces per-slot rewards; non-participation produces per-slot penalties.

Block proposal rewards. When a validator is randomly selected to propose a block, it earns consensus-layer inclusion bonuses for the attestations, sync-committee signatures, and (rarely) slashing reports it includes in the block.

Priority fees (EIP-1559 tips). When a validator proposes a block, transaction senders' priority fees (the "tip" above the burned base fee) flow to the validator's designated fee recipient address on the execution layer.

MEV (block value beyond tips). When a validator uses MEV-Boost, a block builder pays additional value to the fee recipient address beyond the priority fees. TrueStake derives MEV as the difference between the fee recipient's balance delta and the sum of priority fees for the proposed block, and cross-checks against relay-reported bid values.

Gwei-to-wei normalization

Ethereum's consensus layer expresses balances and rewards in gwei (10⁹ wei). The execution layer expresses values in wei. TrueStake normalizes everything to wei at the adapter boundary — multiplying consensus-layer gwei values by 10⁹ — so all internal accounting, reconciliation, and reporting works in the canonical unit. This eliminates a class of rounding errors that compound over large reward histories.

Capella withdrawals and the reconciliation anchor

The Capella upgrade (April 2023, "Shapella") introduced execution-layer withdrawals. Validators with 0x01 withdrawal credentials automatically receive ETH sweeps to their execution-layer withdrawal address whenever their balance exceeds 32 ETH. Exited validators receive their full remaining balance.

Each Capella withdrawal carries a globally unique withdrawal_index — a monotonically increasing sequence number assigned by the consensus layer. TrueStake uses this index as the natural key for withdrawal receipts. The sum of all withdrawal amounts for a given address over a period is the observable on-chain ETH received — TrueStake's reconciliation engine compares its derived reward totals against this observed figure, and flags any divergence exceeding 100 wei as a reconciliation finding requiring review.

The Pectra upgrade (May 2025) added 0x02 compounding credentials and EIP-7002 execution-layer withdrawal requests. These are tracked separately as withdrawal request metadata; only the settled Capella-style withdrawal entry that actually credits the address becomes a recognized receipt.