According to CoinMeta, as reported by The Defiant, the number of active validators on Ethereum has dropped to around 863,000, a decrease of about 2.5% in the past 7 days and about 4.9% in the past month. Meanwhile, the network's staked ETH has still risen to around 43.7 million. This decline is mainly due to the Pectra upgrade which introduced EIP-7251: the maximum valid balance for a single validator has been increased from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. As a result, large staking operators can merge multiple validators without having to exit and re-enter the staking queue.