Voluntary Exiting a Validator

Remove a validator from staking duties.

Use the Voluntary Exit command to signal your intentions to permanently stop your duties as a validator.

• Timeline: Voluntary exiting takes a minimum of 2048 epochs (or ~9days). There is a queue to exit and a delay before your validator is finally exited.

• Consequences: Once a validator is in exited state, it's non-reversible. You would need to re-key, or generate new validator keys to start staking again.

• ETH Deposit: In order to re-claim your 32ETH validator deposit and perform a full withdrawal, you must have previously set a Withdrawal Address. If not yet set, see here: 0x01 withdrawal address.

• Responsibilities: After your validator leaves the exit queue and is truly exited, it is safe to turn off your execution client, consensus client and validator.

Lighthouse

lighthouse account validator exit \
--keystore $HOME/.lighthouse/mainnet/validators/<0x validator>/<keystore.json file> \
--beacon-node http://localhost:5052 \
--network mainnet

Example:

lighthouse account validator exit \
--keystore $HOME/.lighthouse/mainnet/validators/0x838f024753064e90fd8fa183400af82dd2103df885/keystore-m_12311_12-112312.json \
--beacon-node http://localhost:5052 \
--network mainnet

Teku

Nimbus

Prysm

Lodestar

Troubleshooting: To perform a voluntary exit, make sure your consensus client (aka beacon node) is running with REST-API enabled.

Official reference documentation from each team can be found below:

• Exiting a Teku validator

• Exiting a Prysm validator

• Exiting a Nimbus validator

• Exiting a Lodestar validator

• Exiting a Lighthouse validator