ETH Staking Guide

6 min readFeb 28, 2023

The Foundry team has developed an all-in-one portal to expedite the staking process for institutions.

With Foundry’s Staking Portal, institutional clients can easily stake and withdraw tokens, manage wallets and team access, monitor rewards, and export detailed rewards statements by protocol or portfolio.

We recommend following this guide to stake your ETH tokens and suggest our API documentation if you are considering offering ETH staking to your customers through our trusted white-label infrastructure.

To stake your ETH or build a custom staking solution with Foundry, please contact us here.

Objectives

This guide aims to assist delegators with two goals:

Quickly and easily stake your ETH holdings via Foundry’s Staking Portal (‘Stake’)
Monitor and export key staking information for your staked ETH via Foundry’s Staking Portal (‘Wallets’)

Staking Process

We broke down the steps to stake ETH with Foundry into two categories:

1 — Preparation

Confirm your Validator Information and Share your Withdrawal Address
Foundry Sets Up your Validator
Foundry Shares the Deposit Data JSON File and Invites you to the Portal

2 — On-Portal Steps

Locate your Deposit Data JSON File (Previously Sent by Foundry)
Connect your Funding Wallet
Review the Transaction Details, Agree to Foundry’s Terms, and Sign the Transaction

The Appendix (Optional) walks you through how to review your ETH transactions and export detailed rewards statements.

The Foundry team has a high-touch approach to manage all our enterprise clients, and we are looking forward to assisting you and your team at any step of the way via email, Telegram, or on a walk-through delegation call.

Preparation

This section of the guide walks you through the requirements and communication process prior to staking with Foundry’s Portal.

Step 1 — Confirm your Validator Information and Share your Withdrawal Address

You will need an Ethereum account with sufficient ETH to fund your validator(s) with Foundry. Each must have 32 ETH.

You might choose to use your funding wallet as your withdrawal address as well. In this case, after the Shanghai upgrade, you may withdraw your ETH rewards (partial withdrawal) or stake (full withdrawal) to this address.

If you do not have an Ethereum account yet, we recommend MetaMask, Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet, and WalletConnect, which are integrated with Foundry’s Staking Portal. You may read more on Ethereum wallets and best practices here.

When ready, via email, you (or your custodian*) can:

Confirm how many Etherem validators you want to fund
Share your withdrawal address with the Foundry team
For your assets’ security, never share your private keys.

Foundry will let you know if any information shared by you or your custodian is incomplete or incorrect.

* Foundry is custodian agnostic, which means that we can work with any compatible custodian.

Step 2 — Foundry Sets Up your Validator

The Foundry team is fully responsible for this step.

We confirm the receipt of your information from Step 1 and start setting up your public validator(s). Foundry validators are hosted in a Tier 5, bare metal data center in Las Vegas. You may learn more about the Switch facility, which meets our security standards for Ethereum infrastructure, here.

Compliant with EIP 2333 and EIP 2334, Foundry’s batch deployment-optimized process goes as follows:

1 — Foundry generates validating keys, which allow you to sign transactions and withdraw your staked ETH funds (again, after the Shanghai upgrade).

Validating keys cannot be used to spend funds on your validator(s).

2 — With the validating keys, Foundry generates a deposit data JSON file, which allows you to create the transaction to fund the ETH validator(s), including these fields:

pubkey: The public key of the validator Foundry created.
withdrawal_credentials: A SHA256 hash of your withdrawal address.
amount: The ETH amount necessary to fund the number of validators you requested (again, 32 ETH are needed for each validator).
signature: A signature by the public key that proves it exists.
deposit_data_root: A Merkle Root or Root Hash that verifies the origin of the other fields.

Step 3 — Foundry Shares the Deposit Data JSON File and Invites you to the Portal

The Foundry team:

Responds to you with the secure deposit data JSON file generated in Step 2, which you may download.
Invites you to sign up for or log into an existing account on our Portal and manage roles as needed.

Again, our team will support you through any errors that you might encounter and remain available for walk-through or troubleshooting calls with you and your team as needed.

On-Portal Steps

This section of the guide walks you through the three steps from the ‘Stake’ tab on Foundry’s Staking Portal.

Step 1 — Locate your Deposit Data JSON File (Previously Sent by Foundry)

Logged into Foundry’s Staking Portal account, you may:

Go to the ‘Stake’ tab on the top left navigation menu
Drop or click to browse for the deposit data JSON file, which was previously sent by the Foundry team for download
A Checkmark indicates the file type is correct (otherwise, an error message will appear)
Click on ‘Continue’

Step 2 — Connect your Funding Wallet

Click on ‘Connect ETH Wallet’
Follow the pop-up instructions to connect your funding wallet from MetaMask, Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet, or WalletConnect
Confirm your funding wallet has the amount necessary to fund the validator(s)
Click on ‘Continue’

Step 3 — Review the Transaction Details, Agree to Foundry’s Terms, and Sign the Transaction

Review the information displayed for Funding Account, Staking Information, and Transaction Details
Agree to Foundry’s ETH staking terms (i.e., “I confirm the information above is correct,” “I understand that I cannot transfer or withdraw my staked ETH until an unknown date in the future,” and “I have read and agreed to Foundry’s terms of service”)
Click on ‘Sign Transaction’
Follow the pop-up instructions to confirm and sign the transaction in your funding wallet

A confirmation message will appear, congratulating you for successfully depositing your ETH tokens and funding the validator(s). The transaction details and account balances will be automatically added to the ‘MyWallets’ section of the Portal. You may view the transaction on Etherscan too.

Appendix — Wallet

With Foundry’s Staking Portal, you may also add your Ethereum wallets to the ‘My Wallets’ section. Our all-in-one interface allows enterprise customers to:

Review recent transactions
Monitor balance and rewards in USD or ETH for the past 7, 30, or 90 days
Export your Payout History, including transaction hash, payout time, payout amount in ETH and USD, balance in ETH and USD, and spot prices (USD)

Interested in staking your ETH holdings with Foundry? Contact us here to learn more about our program.

Disclaimer

The contents of this post have been provided by Foundry Digital LLC (“Foundry” or “we”) for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as giving legal, financial or any other kind of advice. Although we strive to provide quality information, we do not guarantee or warrant any particular results from the use of this information or any opinions provided. Foundry accepts no liability whatsoever for any damages, costs or any other consequences resulting from any actions taken on the basis of the information or opinions provided. Furthermore, Foundry has no control over information provided in any third-party sites linked herein, and Foundry accepts no liability whatsoever over any consequences resulting from any actions taken on the basis of that information. Foundry reserves the right to make changes to this information at any time without prior notice and makes no commitment to update the information contained in this post.