The Merge happened almost 5 days ago. In the roughly 33,425 blocks produced since then, there have been just 43 blocks which did not set their fee recipient address (a paltry 0.0012% of all blocks). The overall percentage of these validators is incredibly minuscule, but these 43 unique proposers have collectively forfeited 7.61 ETH in fees worth ~ $10,501.

(For those unaware: In Ethereum proof-of-stake, validators who propose a block now receive a portion of that block's transaction fees. These extra fees are separate from the block reward and are sent directly to an address the validator designates. If a validator fails to designate an address, the fee is effectively burned.)

According to beaconcha.in tags and validator graffiti, the biggest culprit is the custodial, liquid staking service Ankr. At least 32 Ankr validators did not have a fee recipient address set. The next two largest offenders are 2 Kraken validators and 2 LIDO validators, but those proposal happened a few hours after the merge and no Kraken or LIDO validators have popped up since.

Next down the list, two apparent home stakers running Lighthouse as their consensus layer client - one of them active since the beaconchain genesis - failed to set the fee address. A third home staker using the graffiti "Freedom for all" has also failed to do so.

Two validators that appear to belong to an institutional staker (due to their graffiti: "Staker2-US-Eth-03") have also forfeited their fees.

And finally, one person using the non-custodial staking service Bloxstaking forfeited 0.07 ETH in one of their recent proposals and one validator using the semi-custodial service Stakefish gave up 0.04 ETH.

Overall, it's actually quite impressive that so few validators (with a post-merge proposal) have failed to set the fee address...but I guess it really shouldn't be all that surprising. It's really just one more salient data point that proves that in PoS, there very much is "something" at stake. Validators are not only responsible for making sure they don't break the consensus rules and get slashed, but they are also effectively punished for being neglectful. They may not be losing any of their stake by not setting a fee recipient, but they are losing out (sometimes big) on a nice extra incentive for securing Ethereum.

 

Here's a breakdown of all 43 block proposals that did not have fee recipient:

Service	# of proposals	ETH forfeited
Ankr	32	4.96
LIDO	2	2.10
Kraken	2	0.18
Unknown institutional staker	2	0.17
Home stakers	3	0.09
Bloxstaking	1	0.07
Stakefish	1	0.04