As Ethereum staking matures, stakers increasingly need metrics that separate operational performance from randomness. One such metric is the Beacon Score from beaconcha.in, which aims to measure how effectively a validator performs its core consensus-layer duties, while minimizing noise from more volatile reward sources.
What Is the Beacon Score?
Capturing a validator’s effectiveness is the goal of the Beacon Score. The calculation looks at the three consensus layer activities that carry rewards: attestations, proposals and sync committee participation.
Importantly, the Beacon Score focuses on rewards on the consensus layer (CL). Compared to looking at total rewards, execution layer (EL) rewards and consensus layer rewards, the Beacon Score reduces the luck factor and noise of volatile EL rewards.
Why Should Stakers Care?
The Beacon Score can be a helpful metric for stakers to understand how their validators are performing versus the network or others. That said, like any single metric, it should be interpreted with care.
Understanding what the Beacon Score does — and does not — capture is critical before using it to draw conclusions about validator quality or operator performance.
How the Beacon Score Is Calculated
CL rewards received divided by total possible CL rewards is the basis for the Beacon Score. More specifically, the calculation is:
efficiency = (attesterActualReward + proposerActualReward + syncActualReward)(attesterIdealReward + proposerIdealReward + syncIdealReward)
Actual rewards refer to rewards received for a specific task, like attestations, proposals and sync committee; these do not capture any penalties. For instance, failing to get a sync committee signature in a block leads to a penalty for that particular slot – “actual rewards” in this calculation do not account for these types of penalties.Ideal rewards are the highest rewards possible – the assumption is that whenever a validator is called on to perform a duty, it does so successfully. Comparing the rewards received for a specific duty versus the maximum rewards possible gives a better sense of performance.
Ideal rewards for attestations are relatively straight forward – total possible attestation rewards over a given period. Sync committee rewards are similar, but missed blocks are excluded from the calculation, the rationale being that a proposer missing a block, and, hence, failing to include sync committee signatures, is out of the control of the validators in the sync committee and, so, should not count against them.
Additionally, the calculation of ideal rewards for block proposals, takes the maximum of: rewards earned and the median block proposal rewards of the surrounding 32 blocks. The goal here is to reduce the volatility of results. Note, that this calculation looks at consensus layer rewards only – it does not consider execution layer (EL) rewards given the luck and volatility in EL rewards.
In most cases, the difference between received rewards and ideal (or maximum) rewards on Ethereum is small, but at times they can diverge more substantially. For instance, shortly after the Fusaka fork on December 3rd the network experienced a drop in the particiaption rate related to a client issue:
Over this period, validators’ Beacon Scores would have dropped.
Likewise, average performance varies based on the task, with attestation performance typically above 99% while other duties like sync committee performance is typically between 90 and 95%.
When the Beacon Score Can Be Misleading
Generally the metric posted on beaconcha.in is calculated over 30 days. For a single validator with 32 ETH, it is most likely that the only activity captured over that 30-day period is attesting. A validator with 32 ETH is expected to propose a block once every 5 to 6 months and be selected for sync committee once every 5 to 6 years.
In most cases validators should expect performance over 99% for attestation duties (an average taken over TIMELY_HEAD, TIMELY_SOURCE, TIMELY_TARGET). However, for the sync committee duty, for instance, average performance is typically lower – 90 to 95% for a validator chosen at random. This is due in part to the more active nature of sync committee.
What this means, is that for validators chosen to participate in sync committee, their Beacon Scores will be lower than they usually are when just attesting. It can be alarming to see performance drop from, say, 99% on the Beacon Score, to 93%. Readers are encouraged to review any duties performed over the period in question and look for some of these lower-on-average-performance tasks like sync committee.
For example, here is a validator that has only been assigned attestation duties over the last 30 days (as at January 15, 2026):
Notice the happy BeaconScore:
On the other hand, here is a validator that has been assigned attestation duties and sync committee in the last 30 days (as at January 15, 2026):
Less happy BeaconScore:
Notice also that the sync committee performance of this particular validator is good – it’s not that the validator did poorly, it’s that the BeaconScore is tuned to attestation performance.
One more point is worth considering: a low Beacon Score over a given period could be the result of prudent operations. For instance, there are times when it makes more sense for a validator to remain offline than to prematurely come back online and risk a severe outcome like slashing. Figment refers to this concept as safety over liveness. The implication is that it is often necessary to go beyond the metrics to make a fully informed conclusion.
For more information on Ethereum, check out our ‘Beyond the Basics’ content series on Ethereum performance, rewards, and pentalites.
Putting the Beacon Score in Context
The Beacon Score is a valuable addition to the set of tools available to Ethereum stakers, particularly because it focuses on consensus-layer performance and strips out much of the noise associated with execution-layer rewards.
However, as with any metric, it is most useful when paired with an understanding of how it is calculated and what activities occurred during the evaluation period. Used thoughtfully, the Beacon Score can provide meaningful insight into validator performance, but it should never be viewed in isolation.
