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Table Details

The beacon.validator.queue table provides daily historical estimates of the validator entry and exit queues on the Ethereum Beacon Chain. These queue durations represent the expected time for all pending activations or exits to be processed, based on Ethereum protocol rules and validator balance state. Queue estimates differ before and after Pectra (activated on 2025-05-07), due to major changes in how the Beacon Chain processes activations and exits.

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Sample Query

Fetch historical stats of the estimated time taken to clear the entry and exit queues by days.

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Validator Queues

The validator queue system is a critical component of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake mechanism. When validators want to join the network, they must wait in an entry queue until activated. Similarly, validators wanting to exit must wait in an exit queue.

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Churn Rate

The speed at which validators move through these queues is governed by the “churn rate” - the number of validators (pre-Pectra) or amount of ETH (post-Pectra) that can enter or exit per epoch. There are two different churn rates before and after Pectra-upgrade. In both periods, queue epochs are converted to time units at 32 slots per epoch and 12 seconds per slot (1 epoch = 6.4 minutes), giving total_*_queue_minutes, total_*_queue_hours and total_*_queue_days.

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Pre-Pectra

Before Pectra-upgrade (2025-05-07), queue calculations were based on validator counts, with churn determined by how many validators could enter or exit per epoch. The total time of the exit/entry queue is derived based on this methodology:
  • We index the balances of all validators on the Beacon chain daily (beacon.raw.balances_daily), which informs us of the status of all the validators (entering, exiting, slashed, active, etc)
  • From the daily balances, we identify validators in the pending_queued status (entry queue) and active_exiting status (exit queue)
  • For each day, we determine the churn rate as the median number of validators assigned to each activation_epoch (entry) or exit_epoch (exit); validators without an assigned activation epoch are excluded from the entry churn
  • The queue length in epochs is the number of queued validators divided by the churn rate, rounded up

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Post-Pectra

Post-Pectra, the activation and exit churn is 256 ETH per epoch (~57,600 ETH per day), independent of validator count. entry_churn_per_epoch and exit_churn_per_epoch are therefore 0 for post-Pectra dates.
  • Entry queue: taken from the last pending-deposits snapshot of each day (beacon.raw.pending_deposits). validators_entry_queued is the number of distinct pubkeys with a pending deposit, entry_queue_eth is the total pending deposit amount, and total_entry_queue_epochs is entry_queue_eth / 256.
  • Exit queue: validators with status active_exiting or active_slashed in the daily balances snapshot. The protocol already assigns each of them an exit_epoch, so total_exit_queue_epochs is the latest exit_epoch in the queue minus the current epoch (floored at 0).
  • Consolidations are excluded from the exit queue: a consolidation source validator also shows active_exiting, but it waits on the separate consolidation churn. A validator is treated as a consolidation source if it ever appears in the beacon state’s pending consolidations (recorded every epoch from 2026-03-11). For exits that started before 2026-03-11, a validator is treated as a consolidation source if it sent a consolidation request (source differs from target) before it started exiting, its exit was never paid out to its withdrawal address (no withdrawal of at least half its effective balance), and it does not have 0x00 withdrawal credentials.
  • Partial withdrawals requested from the execution layer (EIP-7002) also consume exit churn but are not visible as a validator status, so they are not counted.

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Table Columns