Withdraw Stake

Partial or full withdrawal of validator BERA: withdrawal credentials, fees, minimum stake, and finalization delay.

The holder of the withdrawal credential, set during the initial deposit, can trigger partial or complete withdrawal of $BERA stake from a Validator. This process is demonstrated in the Docker Devnet’s final steps.

Withdrawing your $BERA stake will reduce the probability that your validator is selected to produce a block and therefore reduce your $BGT emissions. Withdrawing all stake will exit your validator from the Active Set.

Requirements

• A fully-synced full node
• Foundry v1.0.0 or greater
• Validator Withdrawal Credential Address Private Key or Ledger

Withdrawal rules and process

Withdrawals occur at the end of the 256th epoch (~27 hours) after the epoch in which you perform the withdrawal.

Every withdrawal requires a fee, which will increase if the withdrawal service experiences an unusual volume of requests.

The withdrawal transaction must originate from the Withdrawal Credential Address for the validator to perform a withdrawal.

The withdrawal API will silently adjust the withdrawal amount to maintain a minimum stake of 250,000 $BERA. For instance, a validator with 350,000 $BERA staked that requests a withdrawal of 300,000 $BERA will only withdraw 100,000 $BERA.

To exit your validator from the Active Set and return the entire stake, use the special withdrawal amount of 0. Then, as described in the lifecycle overview, your validator will immediately be queued to exit the active set and no longer produce blocks. The stake will be returned by the consensus layer on the above schedule.

If you leave the Active Set, future deposits to your CometBFT public key will be refunded to the withdrawal address. If you want to activate as a validator again, you must do so with a new CometBFT identity.

How to withdraw $BERA stake

The following walks you through how to withdraw a portion of a validator’s $BERA stake with the validator withdrawal credentials on Berachain Bepolia.

Step 1 - Configurations

Set up your environment. You will need the private key of your Withdrawal Credential Address, or to have it on an attached ledger. To obtain your CometBFT public key, you can invoke beacond --home path/to/beacond/data deposit validator-keys.

export RPC_URL=https://bepolia.rpc.berachain.com/
export WITHDRAW_CONTRACT=0x00000961Ef480Eb55e80D19ad83579A64c007002
export WITHDRAW_AMOUNT_ETH=10000
# Alternatively
export WITHDRAW_AMOUNT_GWEI=${WITHDRAW_AMOUNT_ETH}000000000

export COMETBFT_PUB_KEY=<0xYOUR_COMETBFT_PUBLIC_KEY>
export WITHDRAW_CREDENTIAL_PRIVATE_KEY=<YOUR_WITHDRAW_CREDENTIAL_PRIVATE_KEY>

Use the special amount of 0 to withdraw the Validator’s entire stake.

Step 2 - Determine withdrawal fee

In addition to the desired amount to withdraw, a withdrawal fee must be sent with the transaction.

WITHDRAW_FEE_HEX=$(cast call -r $RPC_URL $WITHDRAW_CONTRACT);
WITHDRAW_FEE=$(cast to-dec $WITHDRAW_FEE_HEX);
echo $WITHDRAW_FEE;

# [Typical Output, may vary]
# 1

Step 3 - Create withdrawal request

Package the desired withdrawal amount with the Validator’s identity as an encoded request.

WITHDRAW_REQUEST=$(cast abi-encode --packed '(bytes,uint64)' $COMETBFT_PUB_KEY $WITHDRAW_AMOUNT_GWEI);
echo $WITHDRAW_REQUEST;

# [Typical Output, will vary]
# 0xacaf2e8ec309513...0009184E72A000

Step 4 - Send withdrawal request

Send the withdrawal request to the contract, from the Validator’s Withdraw Credential Address.

Remember to send it from the Withdrawal Credential Address, otherwise the transaction will fail.

cast send $WITHDRAW_CONTRACT $WITHDRAW_REQUEST --rpc-url $RPC_URL --private-key $WITHDRAW_CREDENTIAL_PRIVATE_KEY --value ${WITHDRAW_FEE}wei;

Substitute --ledger for the --private-key if your key is kept on a hardware module.

Step 5 - Monitor Beacon Kit API

To ensure the withdrawal request succeeded, monitor the Beacon Kit Validator API to observe your stake’s change.

The beacon API must be enabled on your node (in app.toml: [beacon-kit.node-api]).

The beacon state is available from your node’s beacon API via:

curl http://localhost:3500/eth/v1/beacon/states/head/validators | jq '.[] | select(type == "object" and .validator? and .validator.pubkey == "$COMETBFT_PUB_KEY")'

This request should show your validator’s status.