Is it possible to run an Ethereum 2.0 validator on a Raspberry Pi?

UPDATE 28 August 2022: Get your supplemental guide for how to prepare your Raspberry Pi validator for The Merge right here.

Update 26 March 2024: You can still run GETH on a Pi 4 without issue. To run Lighthouse post version 5.0, you’ll need a Pi 5. To answer a FAQ, the sole performance issue with my Pi 4 setup from Genesis to upgrading to a Pi 5 yesterday was when the rig was selected for sync committee. 64% effectiveness. But that’s a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence, and not enough to budge me from my minimalist hardware principles.

I’ve been a Raspberry Pi hobbyist for years. I also invested early in Ethereum and had racked up enough, just, to put 32 Eth down as a two year commitment to staking Ethereum 2.0. So my natural inclination was to build my validator on the platform I knew best. There were a couple pre-built images for Pi that included validator software, but was I going to risk not knowing what was under the hood with a 15K USD investment at stake? I really wanted to build from scratch.

Again and again I heard dire warnings. “You need a REAL computer.” “The Pi is too underpowered to keep up when the network gets busy.” And when I successfully ran on the testnets, I’d get “Testnet is one thing, but it’ll never keep up on the mainnet.” Despite the obvious question of what good is a testnet if it doesn’t replicate conditions on the mainnet, I had deep, deep misgivings. About 32 Eth worth of misgivings. As Genesis approached I had an order for a NUC queued up and ready to go for that-day delivery and was asking panicked questions about whether I could just swap my SSD to the new machine and boot. I had nightmares of seeing red attestation blocks and watching as my local geth block number slid ever farther from the blockchain head as I waited for equipment delivery and struggled to configure a new rig while the penalties on my validators for being offline mounted.

Instead, one week after Genesis, this is what I’m calmly seeing on beaconcha.in:

100% Attestation Effectiveness. Flawless performance. Running a local version of Geth as well as a Lighthouse validator. (UPDATE 8 January: One month on, same performance: 99-100% Attestation Effectiveness, 13% APR projected, 11 blocks proposed, and my rig ranks in…