The proposed economics of Casper FFG:

For an ETH stakeholder who wants to participate in the Validation process under Casper FFG, there are, conceptually, two points of access. The first is through operating a private Validator node, with a minimum deposit size of 1500 ETH. The second is to join a PoS “pool”, where many users pool their ETH deposits to reach the 1500 ETH level, and split the related income (minus a pool fee) on a pro-rata basis. With these two choices, the barriers to entry for small ETH holders has been removed.

Once acting as a PoS Validator, the stakeholder is now entitled to their pro-rata share of an issuance schedule, dependent upon how many ETH are staked, over time. The currently contemplated schedule is:

In this schedule “Deposit Size” refers to the total amount of ETH staked (network wide); “Annual Validator Interest” is the approximate reward, in pct ETH, payable to all stakeholders per year; and “Funding Crunch” is the amount of time the network can operate PoS at certain Deposit Sizes, with the initial 1.25MM ETH Casper Balance, before another fork is required.

The most important non-payment aspect associated with these economics is the “Withdrawal Delay” — after a Validator successfully logs out of the Casper FFG PoS smart contract, their funds are held for a period of 15,000 epochs (approximately 4 months), before being released to the Validator’s wallet address. Under a pool, one would assume that this condition passes through to each participant.