Ethereum validators receive rewards from several activities, including attestations, proposing new blocks, sync committee duties, and MEV. Keeping track of these rewards in real time is useful for stakers, node operators, researchers, and anyone who needs accurate records for taxes.
This article provides information on the best ways to monitor validator balance using on-chain balance trackers, open-source staking dashboards, validator data tools, and developer SDKs.
Why Real-Time Validator Tracking Matters
Tracking validator rewards is essential because validators rely on accurate data for:
- Reward monitoring: Tracking validator rewards is important, because validators need to know how much they are earning and when those rewards are coming in. This real-time tracking helps them verify payouts, as well as detecting missing or delayed rewards.
- Performance analysis: When validators have access to real- time data, they are able to evaluate performance indicators such as uptime, block proposals etc. With this knowledge, validators can spot issues early and also optimize their setup.
- MEV revenue tracking:Access to real-time data separates MEV rewards from standard block rewards, which makes it easy to understand how much revenue is generated from priority fees as a significant portion of validator earnings can come from MEV-related activities.
- Tax reporting: Having accurate, time-stamped reward data makes tax calculations easy as validator rewards as often considered as taxable income. This helps for proper record keeping, and also reduces the risk of reporting errors.
- Research and dashboards: Real-time validator data can be used to build dashboards, study network behavior, and analyze trends. Proper tracking can provide developers, analysts and researchers accurate insights.
Bitquery
Bitquery offers users powerful blockchain APIs & Streams that help to track real-time balance across Ethereum accounts including validators.
The Bitquery Transaction Balance Tracker API provides users with real-time balance for all addresses involved in transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. It captures all balance changes with detailed information about why a change happened which makes it perfect for building comprehensive transaction monitoring, portfolio tracking, and blockchain analytics applications.
You can build enterprise-scale applications using their real-time balance Kafka stream, as seen in the data sample here.
Some important data points of the Ethereum Transaction Balance Tracker API include:
Ethereum Validator Balance Tracker
The Ethereum Validator Balance Tracker API provides users real-time balance updates for Ethereum validators, tracking their staking rewards, withdrawals, and balance changes.
Some examples include:
- Track Validator Balance Updates: This allows users to see how a validator’s balance changes over time. Every time the validator earns a reward, gets penalized, or receives a withdrawal from the beacon chain, the balance shifts. By tracking these updates, you can understand how well the validator is performing and spot unusual movements quickly.
- Top Validators by Total Tips earned in the last 24 hrs: This query helps you identify which validators are earning the most from priority fees over the past 24 hours. It adds up all the priority fees each validator has received during this time period and then ranks them from highest to lowest. It is useful for understanding how validator performance compares within the last day, validators that are generating the highest fee-based rewards in a short timeframe.
The Ethereum MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) Balance Tracker API provides users real-time balance updates related to MEV activities, including transaction fee rewards, block builder rewards, and other MEV-related balance changes.
Some examples
Beaconcha.in
Beaconcha.in is a highly popular open-source explorer for Ethereum validators, designed to be accessible to both technical and non-technical users.
Features include
- Real-time validator balance updates
- Reward breakdown per epoch
- Integration of both consensus and execution layer data
- Very user-friendly: Known for its clean interface and accessibility.
- Has support for validator monitoring alerts
- Great visuals and charts
BeaconScan
BeaconScan provides users deep visibility into Ethereum’s consensus layer by organizing complex validator data into simple and easy to understand metrics. It is a reliable and trusted platform within the Ethereum community.
Some of the features users can track include:
- Validator Performance: It allows users to monitor how well a validator is performing over time. This lets users track validator uptime, attestation effectiveness, missed or late attestations, overall participation consistency. Strong performance usually results in steady rewards, while poor performance can indicate issues such as client downtime, network instability, or misconfiguration.
- Deposits, Withdrawals, and Balance History: BeaconScan provides users with a complete view of a validator’s financial lifecycle, where users can see initial deposits, partial and full withdrawals, current balances, etc. This helps validators and staking operators understand how rewards accumulate and when funds are withdrawn.
- Attestation Inclusion: This shows if a validator’s attestations are included in blocks on time. It displays attestation slot, Inclusion delay.Timely inclusion is important because late or missed attestations reduce rewards. Tracking this data helps diagnose performance problems early.
- Validator State Changes:BeaconScan monitors the different transaction states validators move during their lifecycle. Monitoring state changes helps users understand validator availability, exit progress, and any security-related events.
- Network Statistics and Finality Status: BeaconScan also provides users network-wide insights, where users can track the total number of active validators, network participation rate and also the finality status of the Beacon Chain which confirms whether blocks are irreversibly finalized, which is essential for understanding Ethereum’s network health and stability.
Best For
- Users who prefer the familiar Etherscan UI
- Simple, reliable day-to-day tracking of individual and network activity
- Users who want a straightforward, ad-free experience.
Rated Network
Rated Labs provides a leading, independent platform for data analytics and network performance metrics, widely used by professional staking providers, node operators, and enterprise-level platforms like MetaMask Institutional.
Key Tracking Features
- Rated Labs offers a leading, independent platform for data analytics and network performance monitoring, trusted by professional staking providers, node operators, and enterprise platforms such as MetaMask Institutional. The platform provides actionable insights to optimize validator performance, monitor rewards, and maintain network health.
- Validator and Operator Performance Scores: Rated labs tracks and calculates performance ratings for individual validators and operators, which allows users benchmark their performance against network averages and identify key areas that may need improvement.
- Geo-Distribution and Client Breakdown: This allows for the visualization of the geographical spread of validators and the distribution of client software, which ensures network decentralization and resilience, while highlighting potential concentration risks.
- Reward Trends Over Time: With this, users can monitor historical and real-time reward data earnings. This makes it easier to identify patterns, anomalies, or periods of reduced performance.
- MEV, Penalties, and Effectiveness Metrics: It also provides advanced metrics such as MEV earnings, slashing penalties, and validator reliability.
Dune Analytics Dashboards
Dune transforms raw, complex blockchain data into easily queryable SQL databases, making it an essential tool for analysts, researchers, and anyone needing detailed, custom insights.
What It Enables
- Customized validator reward analytics:With Dune, you can write SQL queries to calculate validator rewards in your own way. For example, you can track: Rewards earned per validator over a chosen time range, comparisons between solo validators and staking pools, reward performance before and after network upgrades.
This flexibility is helpful when default dashboards don’t show the exact metrics you care about.
- Network-wide staking trends: Dune dashboards can give a big-picture view of the staking ecosystem. You can analyze: total ETH staked across the network, market share of major staking providers and pools, growth or decline in validator counts over time. These insights help users understand how decentralized the network is and how staking power is distributed.
- MEV earnings over time: Because Dune works with detailed transaction-level data, it allows deep analysis of MEV. You can: track MEV rewards earned by validators across blocks, compare MEV income to standard block rewards, observe how MEV changes during periods of high network activity. This is useful for evaluating validator profitability and understanding the real sources of rewards.
- Real-time charts and tables: Once a query is written, its results can be visualized instantly. Dune supports: Line charts for trends over time, bar charts for comparisons, tables for precise numerical breakdowns.
Dashboards update automatically as new blocks are produced, making them suitable for ongoing monitoring, not just one-time analysis.
Conclusion
Tracking Ethereum validator rewards in real time is now easier than ever. Bitquery APIs handle the heavy on-chain data processing, while community dashboards and SDKs allow anyone to create fast, accurate validator monitoring tools.
Whether you want a simple dashboard, an automated reporting tool, or a custom validator analytics platform, the tools listed here provide everything you need.
