How to Stake ETH with your friends with Thomas Heremans (Obol)
I spoke to Thomas Heremans, CEO of the Obol Association. Obol is an ecosystem for trust minimized Ethereum staking that enables distributed validators (DVs) across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience as compared to running a validator on a single node. Previously I spoke to Osín Kyne, the CTO of Obol Network and they had plenty of updates since last time. Thomas gave us a refresher on what DVs are and what they can enable, some success stories of how communities have funded them...
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Transcript
Ethereum is still undefeated in terms of security. In the end, it's all about security. And so that's what we're trying to solve here with distributed validators. It's how do we improve the security of Ethereum. Governance is actually pretty cool if you think about it. One of the most inspiring one is distribute validators being run-in Kenya, actually, powered by solar energy. I think the staking rewards are helping them live a bit better in that little village there. So that was quite inspiring. Shout out to the team there that's building that. Nice. And then the even crazier vision, and that's one that I rarely share. But so Vitalik sometimes says that he wants every phone to become a validator. So in that world where every phone where you turn it on, it becomes a validator.
Alright. Hi, everyone. This is the Blockchain Socials podcast. And for today's episode, I have Thomas Herrimans. He is the CEO of Obel. I previously had Ashin Kine, if you remember him, the CTO of Obel, where we talked about the technology that they've been working on called distributed validators. It's really interesting stuff. It's basically a way to, allow people to stake together in a kind of more communal way. You can pool together your ether, for example, if you want to stake on the Ethereum blockchain to earn yield together. In case you don't have, like, 32 ETH because not everyone has that, you can get a bunch of friends and just put in a couple together, scrounge what you got just together. But before I butcher what distributed validators are anymore, maybe, Thomas, you want to give a quick introduction to who you are and maybe remind the audience a bit of what
Obol is and how it works. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having me today. So, Thomas, CEO of the Obol Association. Yeah. You talk about distributed validators as a way to pull funds, and this is the blockchain socialist, right, so maybe it's socialist staking as you pull in as a group. Maybe that's how we call it this time. Well, the term we like to use is actually squad staking. But yeah. So we can go into that in a minute. Overall, like, OBO and the OBO collective that we're trying to build is the largest centralized operator ecosystem. And who needs these sort of operators, decentralized networks is blockchains like Ethereum where decentralization and security really important, where you want a lot of resilience. And I think we just saw it recently with Bybit or with the Tornado Cash sanctions being revoked. Ethereum is still undefeated in terms of security. And too often, we talk about decentralization, and I think that doesn't really resonate with a lot of normies out there. In the end, it's all about security. And so that's what we're trying to solve here with distributed validators. It's how do we improve the security of Ethereum. And I'm happy to go a bit more now into distributed validators, if that's okay.
Cool. Right. Sure. So, like, distributed validators, you can think of maybe as, useful for many different things. One of those can be for pulling funds together to stake with your community or just to, do things kind of like rocket pool or one of these types of things. If you don't have, you can, put a little bit with them, and then they stake for you type of thing. But, also, it's important for decentralization and kind of, the redundancy, I guess, of the uptime of nodes that would be running Ethereum software or blockchain software, oddly,
kind of a Yeah. Yeah. I like to break down the sort of supply chain of staking for for for people who might not be, like, super familiar, and I think that's, like, a nice way to start Yeah. When talking about distributed validators. So at the end of the day, it's your technology, and you need humans running that technology. So these humans running nodes, we call them operators. They can be individuals like you and me, like rocket pool operators. They can also be entities like Con Swiss or Figment and Blockdaemint and professional operators. And what these humans or entities do, they run machines which we called nodes. And there's really two types of nodes. You have your standard full node, Ethereum that's just relaying transactions, and that's still very important for communicating across the globe on this global settlement layer. And then you can also sort of upgrade your node and make it a validator by staking some beef. Typically, it's just one entity or one operator bringing all of that, or you can get that from someone else if you're an operator for Lido, for example, or for Enerfi. And then you transform this node into a validator that does a number of duties such as validating transactions, proposing blocks, and you get rewards for it. Now the issue is that this is a machine, and machines go down. Humans go on holidays. Sometimes they don't have time to repair those machines. They need to upgrade these machines. Some of these machines may be caught on fires. We saw that recently, I think, with the Los Angeles fires. They were, like, some Ethereum nodes affected there. I think we also have, like, a South African data center that's lost Internet for, like, a few hours, and they were part of the the Lido curated set. So machines have all sort of issues. There are bugs. We also saw stuff with Olskey, Testnet, etcetera, and that's why Ethereum puts such importance on having several clients, the diversity across the nodes, etcetera, across the cloud cloud providers. Now Mhmm. In in this entire setup of increasing decentralization, which in the end increases security for Ethereum, there is still always one point of failure, which is the operator running that machine. And that's really what the central, distributed validator solve is splitting that validator across several machine so that if one of that machine fails, the rest can continue, doing the duties, accruing the rewards, and don't get penalty. So you can think of you, me, and maybe two other people pulling together our machines, as well as the the 32 ETH So that if one of our machine loses Internet, we forget to update to the latest work, we have an issue, you can count on the rest of the three of us to keep having the rewards, keep having the uptime, protecting Ethereum. And that means also just more rewards, in the end for us as well as a as a collective of four people. And so you can do this very locally as as a legal group, which we call squad staking, or you can have institutions do that as well, which is also the trend that that we're seeing at the moment.
Right. So, like yeah. Right now, maybe for for people who maybe, you know, aren't as familiar with, all these various terms, blockchains like Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, have proof of stake consensus. Proof of stake consensus means that you put up your cryptocurrency as collateral, to run a node in the peer to peer network of Ethereum. You are basically validating transactions that are happening on the Ethereum blockchain, and you get rewarded for that. Right now, the minimum requirement is that you have 32 ether in order to run one of these machines. And if you run the machines very poorly, then you would lose that 32 ether. And running that machine poorly could mean, like, an accident happens. It could mean you're just bad at your job. It could mean a lot of different things. Your house could catch on fire. And so to build up resilience or redundancies, you could have multiple machines running for the same 32 ETH stake. And so having that, kind of security through, almost like fit I guess, like, physical decentralization. You have, like, more guarantees that, you know, the the computer that represents your 32 ETH will be online and connected to the blockchain whenever it's their turn to to validate transactions. So
maybe just to to fill in those dots there for for some people. Absolutely. I think it's a way to protect your capital as an individual to make sure it's safeguarded. I like to think about it the same way we used to have or probably still have laptops that have this sticker that says Intel Inside. Right? And when you buy this laptop, you know, it's good quality. Right? And so it's a bit the same when you're choosing a provider that has distributed value there for your stake. You know you have higher security on your capital. So I think that's definitely one part for you as protecting your own capital, but it's just important for Ethereum itself as well. We're seeing attacks go on all the time. For the positive side, the tornado cash sanctions got removed, but it's really important to keep decentralizing for the sake of Ethereum itself, not just for the protection of capital of the stakers. Because the more nodes, the more diversity, the more geos, the more clients, the more entities running those nodes. And all that is facilitated through distributed validators, the more TMS resilient through these external attacks.
Yeah. We like to talk about liquid staking. So, liquid staking would be, like, kind of what, I guess, distributed validators facilitate is, like, one of the things, or would you kinda maybe explain, what the liquid staking is and how Obel kinda relates to it? Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So
we mainly see three sort of verticals in terms of the relevant markets for distributed validators, and liquid staking is definitely one of the big ones. So the challenge for these protocols, and we're talking here about, for example, Lido, is they're taking the ether, from people like you and me, from retail, from institutions. And then they have a number of trusted operators, the humans or entities that are running that stake on their behalf. Those protocols are sort of this marketplace between operators and capital providers or staker. And the challenge for these protocols, at least a couple years ago, and there was a very large debate around Lido at the time, is that it was a centralizing force for the network. As we're discussing earlier, centralization force means risk, and it's an attack vector, the credible neutrality of Ethereum. So protocols, especially LIDO in the early days, we're looking at how can we safely increase the number of operators that we distribute the stake towards without compromising the risk. Obviously, giving a lot of stake to someone, there is a lot of risk they can run away with the amounts of money that's being trusted in them. Then distributed by leaders sort of came around that time and solved that problem for the protocols where instead of giving big chunks up to individual operators, they could say, we'll put the four of you together. We'll actually give you more per person than we would have otherwise. But now, suddenly, no single party can go away with the money because three out of four is enough or five out of seven depending on how you configure the the cluster, and you don't have to trust a single party anymore. And so what these protocols did is they brought in a lot of new operators, even, like, more solo and homestakers, with various modules they're introducing now that they don't really trust yet, but they also know they don't have to trust them because the technology won't allow these people to get away with the funds. And so I think Lido increased by tenfold the number of operators from 30 to 300. Eterphi as their program called, Eterphi solo operator or something like that as well. And recently, Swell is also decentralizing their operator set with over distributed validators. So we saw a lot of, like, these protocols, again, for for their peace of mind, for being that Intel inside security to their staker adopt, distributed validators. So that was the the first big segment. The second one is everything more around institution. I think that's still very early. We're expecting staking ETF this year. Well, that's what people are saying. I don't have any insider info. But I think if I was the SEC, if I was BlackRock, if I was these issuers, you don't want to trust again one entity to be running all of that stake. That's, very risky from, regulatory perspective. And when we think about risk, I think TradFi is way worse in terms of risk aversion than, crypto natives, let's say. So for them, it just makes sense to trust a cluster of, of entities running the stake and so that no single one of them can get away with the funds. So that's, the second big segment I see. And then the third one are just, like, home stakers, like you and me. And for people like that, it's more like a peace of mind. You only get to propose a block, like, once a year, typically, and that's probably, what, 30% of your rewards for the year. So you don't wanna miss that block. And we've seen too many cases of people, like, just on holidays or if you're at a conference, you forgot to upgrade something on your machine. And so by teaming up with others, you can reduce the risk and increase the reliance. And so that's definitely something we also wanna keep back to Ethereum is just keep allowing all mistakers and solar stakers to get access to better software.
Right. So there's the I guess it was like you know, if you have just for for the audience, you know, let's say you do have 32 ETH. You could either choose to stake for yourself in which you you will have to keep up with your machine. You have to make sure that it get that it does all of its upgrades on time. You have to do a little bit of work, while it's running, in order to make sure that you're earning rewards for doing it. Or the other choice is put it into a liquid staking protocol like Lido, where you can basically give them your ETH, and they give you, like, a derivative of staked ETH, and then you will be earning rewards through that or a fee. Lido, I think, has just been, like, very dominant, player in in this market. I think, ticking up, like, maybe more than 50%, I think, at at one point, if not, they still are, of the kind of, like, liquid staking markets, which means that we're kinda, like, trusting one entity. And so I think one of the things that they are doing to try to make up for that is to decentralize their the way that they run validators, and Obel is kind of like one of the ways that you can do that. Or because, like, Obel works at the layer to where anybody can kind of create the you create the distributed validator set or a cluster, of of validators to to run something similar to Lido. So, if I'm not mistaken, you know, with something like Obel, you can make a your own liquid staking token, by combining a a couple of things together and if you wanted to. Yeah. That's,
like, creating a a liquid staking derivative that would require, like, oh, issuing tokens and stuff, and that's definitely another market, Dennis. But we're at that infrastructure. And whether you rely on Yeah. Someone else like Lido to help you with that or you wanna do it directly because you have the capital upfront and the machine and the skills, these are definitely two avenues you can pursue.
Right. But so the reason you're on today is because Obel released or they you're you guys are starting a new program, the Obel Incentives program. Do you wanna talk a little bit about what that is, what people can expect, and, yeah, how do you get involved?
Yeah. Absolutely. So quite excited about this. So we understand that it's not easy to move your stake around, and sometimes people need a little bit of a push. I think the difference in our technology rather than your typical, let's say, DeFi pool is you just move capital from one pool to the other where there is the highest APR, right, as a good, farmer that you are. In our case, there are actually machines that are involved, on the back end. And if we go back to these operators, the humans, and the nodes, like, there is actual infrastructure deployed somewhere by someone. And so, that makes that transition and that moving of one technology, let's say, nondistributed validators to distributed validators with a bit more friction. And so to help people go through that, we were introducing the Indiobo Incentive program, which is giving out rewards 2.5% of the DioBoard supply per year in equal trenches each week to people who have deployed on distributed validators. And so that can be, again, squad stakers like you and me if we're operating everything from scratch, or it can be people staking with Lido, through their, or it can be with EtherFi or with Swell or. If you go to hubal.org/incentives, you can see all of the partners that have distributed validators under the hood, which you maybe already are staking with, and then you become automatically eligible, for the elbow incentives as these partners will get the rewards and then redistribute to their community.
So usually in these types of situations, of course, people want to know, is this how is this program different than an airdrop? Is there also an airdrop? What's the connection tier? And then, also, I think, for me, what is more interesting is also what can you do with, with the Obel token.
Cool. Yeah. So this is a totally different program than the airdrop. We actually already executed airdrop around two months ago, I think late January, where there were mainly three groups that were recipients of that airdrop. The first group were solo stakers for the same reason. We love these people. We want you to keep doing what you're doing to decentralize Ethereum. The second big group was capital providers. They were accruing points, and this is what has sort of evolved into the programmatic incentives or overall incentives program we're discussing today. And then the third big groups are the operators running these machines. We understand there are important humans that are credentialed and that have shown good capability in terms of running those nodes, and so we also drop that that group. And so if we look at these distribution methods for getting Obol tokens as many hands as we can, the airdrop was one piece. Now we're doing the Obol incentives. And, actually, governance was enabled a couple weeks ago, and they voted to actually unlock the Obol token soon. So currently, all of the airdrop and the Obol incentives were locked. And now as the association, we're working with, listing partners to unlock the token. And so once that's live, people will be able to do a few things with regard to your utility question. So the first one is governance. That's, like, no different than your typical governance. You have proposals. People vote in proportion to their, number of tokens. Now, I've always been inspired by the governance vision of optimism, and that's why we tried to replicate a bit of their two house system where they have both the token house and the citizen's house for people who are familiar with the Optimism ecosystem. And the citizen house is used for retroactive funding. And so this is the second thing that you can do with your Obol token is vote on retroactive funding. And we actually just ran, around where we distributed, 1,000,000 Obol tokens to project, to contribute it to the collective, whether they're building software, whether they're making it easy to stake on Obol DVs, whether they're, making educational resources. So that's the second thing you can do with your token is allocate where does that that money go for retroactive funding. The third thing you can do with your token is actually stake them. This was also recently passed by governance recently, And this is also something I'm super excited. It's powered by Telly and the Telly protocol that they recently released. I don't know if if you've seen that. And one of the challenges they're trying to tackle is typically, you either keep your token in your wallet to be able to vote on governance, because there is important stuff to vote on, like capital allocation and treasury and grants, etcetera, or you move your token in some sort of farm or liquidity mining program, and then you lose all of that voting power. And so when you stake your OBO tokens, you're able to sort of break this dilemma as you get stakable in return that not only accrues revenue, but that you can also use in DeFi without losing the the delegation of your voting power. And so that ensures we have strong governance, and it's protected, and we have good engagement from our delegates. And that for you, you don't we don't care about voting, etcetera. You can just keep using your token in DeFi. And so I find that a very nice paradigm of reconciling using DeFi and governance power. So that's the third thing that you can do with your whole token, stake them to protect governance, make a bit of rewards for that. And then, obviously, I touched a bit upon that now. We're looking at various DeFi integrations such as lending and liquidity pools.
Hey there, listeners. Before we jump back into today's episode, I wanna take a moment to talk about how you can support the blockchain socialist and help us continue our mission of providing a voice for alternative and radical viewpoints on crypto. As a creator, there are typically three main ways to generate revenue, advertising, affiliate sponsors, and audience funding. For us, the first two options are aligned with our values or the radical nature of our content. That's why we rely on audience funding to pay for the costs associated with producing the show. By becoming a patron on Patreon, you're not just providing financial support, you're actively participating in the growth of a community dedicated to creating high quality content on the crypto and blockchain space from a political point of view. Your contributions to Patreon enable us to create more in-depth content, bring on amazing guests, and exploit issues that matter to you without the constraints of traditional sponsorship. When you join us on Patreon, you'll receive access to exclusive content, blockchain socialist swag, and a copy of my critically acclaimed book, Blockchain Radicals in digital format. More importantly, you'll play a vital role in sustaining our community of like minded people who share your passion for meaningful change in the blockchain space. If you're looking for a more decentralized option, consider joining TBSDAO, which is a crypto alternative to Patreon by paying in BREAD, a post capitalist cryptocurrency which you can find more information on my website. However you support your contributions, make a real impact. Together, we can amplify the voices pushing the boundaries of what's possible and help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Nice. And this is, would this be on, Mainnet Ethereum?
Since our technology is mainly powering Mainnet Ethereum, it makes sense to have our token there. We'll likely explore an l two when it comes down to that. But for now, we're focused on delisting the the main tier one exchanges as was voted by governance recently as the next priority for the collective.
Right. Right. Right. I was just saying because I know that you guys are also on Gnosis chain, for example. So that's the chain that we build on at, Bread Chain Cooperative. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's, you know, still an interesting, phenomenon you have here in the crypto space where you can, give voting rights to those who are contributing to your ecosystem and projects in a way that's also confers some sort of governance rights that, you know, in the world of Facebook or whatever else, other insert big tech company here was never, like, an option. It was never, like, even, you know, something that was considered. Those who built a bunch of things that ended up being useful to Facebook, they simply just took it. It. Correct. And Correct. And I think governance in crypto got a bit of
a bad rap due to the probably last administration in The US. People were afraid of doing anything else but governance. So the meme of useless governance token emerged. But governance is actually pretty cool if you think about it. But I agree, you need other stuff to do with your tokens. And it's great if these things Right. Don't compete with governance. But, actually, ownership and governance is something very unique to crypto that I think should be celebrated. And it's a bit sad that it turned into a meme because that's all that was available for a while. I
mean, I think it has a lot to do with maybe also I mean, there's definitely, like, regulatory pressures, I think, is a big part of that, but there's also we have never been able to do this before. Like, it plays into this, I think, a little bit. You know, we don't really know how to exist in a decentralized governed network. You know? I think that's a, it's a muscle you have to exercise and learn. And, you know,
it was inevitable there were going to be a ton of failures. Correct. We tend to spin around the the story of everything. Right? So, we'll probably end up with some sort of similar to traditional governance systems. Hopefully Right. One that's improved and more transparent and more fair. But I think there is a reason also to why humans organize and do the way they do. And then back to your comments on noses, that's absolutely fair. So we focused a lot on Ethereum for now. But, obviously, we can bring this technology to many other chains. And we have done it with noses, and we have done it as well with Monads, which is a lot of the hype at the moment. Now Ethereum is the most credibly neutral out there, so it made sense to start there. But if we see, like, genuine traction somewhere else, we can bring the technology there. It's not like a groundbreaking technology per se. Like, it exists in TradFi. It's just, like, high reliability software. And so every chain probably, if they get enough traction and are serious about decentralization, should benefit from distributed validators.
Nice. Yeah. I think, that makes sense. I'm curious to hear I actually don't even know that much about Monad to be it's one of those things that I've seen. Like, it seems like it's trending, but I haven't had the time to look into it.
But, yeah, I guess it is is it also an, a layer one? It is a layer one, and it's a bit Okay. I like to compare it to the pagan layer intersubjective token thing they released when they did the airdrop. And now Monad has this proof of liquidity. It's sort of this concept everyone's talking about no one understands. So we can see where it goes. Right. I think they're trying stuff, and I think that's what crypto is is great at, trying stuff, improving capital efficiency, trying to align through cryptoeconomics various stakeholders. And that's, yeah, generally positive, I'd say, to to experiment with these things.
Alright. Yeah. Things that, one day I will get around to finally understanding. You know, for people who are listening and they feel like they don't understand some things, that's also the case for everyone else. Correct. Alright. It's impossible to understand every little thing that's going on. Alright. Everyone's just pretending. So I was curious to hear more about any kind of more community led efforts that you've seen within Obel. I guess, like, creative ways to inspire maybe audience a bit of how people have used, squad staking or, you know, using distributed validators for some interesting purpose. So, yeah, I'm curious you can kind of regale us with some stories about that. Sure.
The best place to maybe start this is to look into the recipient of our attractive, fund. We put this, like, 1,000,000 token, and people could apply by sharing their stories of how how they've leveraged more distributed validators for their communities over different ways. We were quite amazed by the different stories we got in there. Communities, obviously, really likes what's taking as they already trust each other, but sometimes they don't always have the skills to take on, like, a 50 k worth validator 32 ETH. By teaming up, creating a squad, they can sort of share the risk. One of the most inspiring one is, distribute validators being run-in Kenya, actually, powered by solar energy. I think the staking rewards are helping them live a bit better in that little village there. So that was quite inspiring. Shout out to the team there that's building that. Nice. Overall, communities also are looking at ways to deploy distributed validators in a very easy way. Recipient of the attractive round were things like dApp nodes that make running a node very easy or Ethereum on Arm, which is also a group aiming at using very low power devices. Again, that's threatening the, Ethereum network through, making it available to even, like, low power, devices. And then a bunch of, communities such as Mexico or I think we had a bunch in Asia as well that are just creating these, like, grassroots communities and and using distributed validators, as they don't really wanna trust these big groups and protocols with their ETH, and then they can just use all of the rewards to maybe do some marketing and organize events. And so that was that was really, heartwarming to to see.
Nice. So a lot of different groups are trying different ways to use distributed validators to fund basically the initiatives that they care about. And using the interest of the collective capital that they have to help fund that is a nice way to do it, especially if you're a group that broadly is interested in crypto blockchains, Ethereum space, for example. Correct. So you mentioned that there were a couple of proposals that were passed. Do you guys refer to yourself as a DAO? Is that true? A collective. A collective? Okay. I like that. I like that. Probably I like that. Fairly similar, but I think the collective,
really puts front and center, the cocreation principle, which Mhmm. We've just actually embarked recently. So we launched governance for the collective through token voting about a month ago, and there were a couple proposals that were submitted by members of the collective. The first one, which I discussed earlier, was the will to unlock the token, so we'll proceed with that. And the second one was enabling staking, which I also touched upon earlier. And what we saw was, like, an incredible amount of engagement from our delegates, and I was trying to understand how come is it. Like, the number of participation, I think we're at about 120, on each proposal. Well, that's higher than compound on their typical governance proposal. And I think we made the conscious choice of not going for top of the leaderboard delegates that are very well known and instead actually heavily promoting the people that are using our product, like the Mexico group, for example, that I was referring to earlier. And so these are people that are investing in our technology that understand it. They might not know everything about governance, about all the different protocols, but they know a lot about Uber and how it's helping their own communities. And that means they have a vested interest beside just governance to also add the success of the token and the collective in the long term in the long term. So that was quite positive to see the amount of involvement there. And then we also saw a lot of debates as they actually are so motivated that they wanted to do more. So we were pressed to actually post a framework for the goals of the collective, and we did that yesterday on the March 24, about sharing what we think the goals of the collective should be. And in the same way that any of the other proposal, this is a collective effort. So people will comment on this proposal. They can come up with their own goals, and then that will set the direction for the collective. So So it's really a cocreation mechanism. It's actually inspired by the Goose goals, which we reframed as the squad goals so that it stays on brand. So super excited to see what comments the community comes with as they're super passionate and, yeah, shout out to all the delegates of the collective.
Nice. And then I was wondering because you also sometimes refer to Obel as the association. Yeah. Is that different than the collective, or do you guys use, like, a Swiss association?
Correct. It's not the So the Swiss association is just the legal entity that allow us to, for example, make contracts with, tier one exchanges for for the listing. It's sort of the legal wrapper. And until, a lot of the world catches up on how to regulate crypto, Switzerland was, was a good place to start. So that's that's where we established the the association, but it's not meant to be a need that stays there forever. My goal is actually that I don't have a job in a couple years and that it's all decentralized, within the within the collective. So let's see how that goes. But I also know that decentralization is a process. We've seen other projects try to decentralize too fast. That often doesn't go well either. So it's sort of navigating this, this road, slowly. Yeah.
So you heard it here first. The goal is to fire Thomas from, from.
Yeah. Two years, but not sooner.
Cool. So, also, you know, you guys have progressed quite a bit in the past year since I spoke to. Lot of progress, and it's been really awesome to see. I was wondering if you can give us maybe a taste of what else is there to come, maybe in the next, couple of years. Where do you see what types of things do you think Oba will be bringing to to the space? Cool.
Yeah. No. Definitely, it's been quite a a wide ride. So 2023 was the first distributed validator on Mainnet. I like to call it TVS for total value stake rather than total value locked. Then 2024, we had our first billion TVS. And 2025, we're aiming for 10 to to 20,000,000,000. So another order of magnitude there. Now talking about billion TVL or TVS can seem a lot. Now for infrastructure and for Ethereum, it's actually not even that big. Ethereum staking is the biggest market out there, so it's still the the largest, protocols, out there. So that's why you can achieve things like 10,000,000,000, which a lot of DeFi protocols would, not even dream dream about. But that's the the short term goal in terms of just pushing distributed validators. But now if you if you look at the technology we have, we have on one side these operators and these humans that we know are really good at running stuff. And then we have networks like Ethereum or Monad or Noesis Safe that actually need operators to run decentralized application. We are also seeing things like, decentralized compute with a cache or with all the stuff around AI that's trying to to source a lot of the the inference from various machines. So I think Obol can evolve into more of a marketplace where on one side, you have these operators that know how to run software very well and with credentialed and maybe given, like, tools to easily spin up, like, from a marketplace. Oh, now I wanna add on my machine maybe decentralized computes or a local AI agent. And on the other side, you have networks that need decentralized, operators to to be resilient and because they understand the value of blockchain and capture resistance, and they can directly tap into our network of operators. So I think that's probably the bigger vision where we become this more marketplace for apps on one side that want to decentralize and operators that we've vetted and we know are really good at running decentralized apps and make money from it, obviously.
Interesting. Are you guys, now I'm curious. Are you guys looking into, like, Eigenlayer, as,
another place for this? When you describe this marketplace, I was kind of thinking of, like, Eigenlayer services. Correct. Correct. So AVS is our, like, an obvious type of app that need operators to run their services.
That's awesome to hear.
And then the even crazier vision, and that's one that I rarely share. But, so Vitalik sometimes says that he wants every phone to become a validator. So in that world where every phone where you turn it on, it becomes a validator, you could imagine that as soon as you turn it on, it actually auto joins a cluster. These, like, mega distributed validator cluster of maybe, I don't know, 50 to 100 nodes. And, as soon as you turn off your phone, it it stop validating. And you just do, like, this little part of the cluster, and people join on and off. These validators never go offline. And maybe this, like, extra source of income can pay for your phone plan or can pay for, I don't know, your your Twitter, pro accounts, something like that. And so if we can make this to be validator, like, super easy to join on and off, I think we can even leave in a world where everyone is running, like, a super light distributed validator Ethereum node. And that means you can also then push your transactions with total privacy directly from your phone, etcetera. So kind of a crazy vision, but let's see if there we go.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You think that is that one a pass within two years, you think?
Yeah. It depends what our clients does do, I think. We'll we'll see. Yeah. I haven't seen much on this recently on the road map. I think they're more focused on the beam chain and, making it here in, like, quantum resistant. I think that those are also things we're definitely looking at supporting.
Right. Nice. Well, yeah, thanks so much for sharing, about Opal and giving us this update. It's been great to see you guys progress, like, super successfully is what it looks like to me. Would you want to just share with people where they can keep up with Opal and how they can start their own distributed validator, I guess. Yeah. Absolutely. So
two places, the website, obl.org. If you're interested in the OBL incentives and boosting your APR on staking, then that's obo.org/incentives. And then I think our Twitter or x feet, OBO underscore collective is, yeah, the best place to stay up to date with all the announcements.
Cool. Well, awesome. Thanks so much, Thomas. Yeah. Wish you guys the best of luck. And, yeah, I will definitely check out creating another Obel cluster. I had one before, and then we ended it. When you start again, I would love to do one in the Discord server. Would love to get some people there to help me start a cluster. So if you're interested in that, let me know. Come join in the Discord server. We'll start, a distributed validator. I can do Ethereum. I can do Gnosis. I'm open. Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, and, yeah, we'll stay in touch. It was a pleasure. Thanks, Josh.