EIP-8365 was added to the Ethereum EIPs repository on 17 September, with status Draft. It proposes retiring 0x00, the original genesis-era withdrawal credential type: exit every active validator that still carries one, and stop processing deposits that would create more. The proposal reports that the population has fallen from roughly 600,000 to 9,290 since Capella opened one-way conversion, but that the decline has stalled. Of the 9,119 still active, it counts 374 that have not attested for over six months and 253 that have never attested in a 14-month observation window. Its own reading: "These are, with high likelihood, validators whose keys are lost." High likelihood is as far as it gets, and the proposal has to reason from attestation history precisely because the fact it needs is not in the state. The chain records that a validator is not producing attestations. Whether anyone is still able to act for it is not something the chain records. What the proposal does supply is a measurement of what that missing fact costs. 4.45% of active 0x00 validators have been offline for 30 days or more, against 0.10% for 0x01 and 0.05% for 0x02. The same observable state, with two different meanings: "Being offline is a transient state for execution-credentialed validators, whose owners can always exit and recover funds, but a terminal state for 0x00 validators with lost keys." Terminal, when the signing key is the thing that is gone. Voluntary exit needs that key; the execution-layer triggerable exit needs an execution address, which 0x00 credentials do not have. For that subset — and only that subset — both paths are closed, and at the penalty rates cited natural ejection takes roughly 28 years. Other 0x00 holders still have the ordinary exit available; the proposal writes a rule that does not depend on knowing which is which. No balance is moved by this stage. The unchanged rotation path stays open, and any 0x00 holder who still controls their withdrawal key can use it to recover in full. The lost-key subset — by definition — cannot. The part worth reading twice is what the proposal declines to do. Rescue proposals for this population have been rejected before on credible-neutrality grounds, because a rescue "adjudicates off-chain ownership claims and selects beneficiaries." So this one does not ask who owns anything. It writes "a uniform rule over a class defined by an objective on-chain property," announced ahead of activation, with the conversion path open to every member throughout. That is the trade. A protocol that cannot verify a claim can still act on it — by never making the claim the thing it acts on. https://t.co/UBRFhBDJfc #DeepSafe #Web3Security