Obol Network - How DVT helps decentralize Ethereum and incentivize collectivism
I spoke to Oisín Kyne, co-founder and CTO of Obol Network, an ecosystem for trust minimized Ethereum staking that enables people to create, test, run and coordinate distributed validators. Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) enables the duties of an Ethereum validator to be performed across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience as compared to running a validator on a single node. During the discussion we spoke about how DVT works, its implications for community funding,...
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Transcript
Everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast. I'm Josh, and I'm here today with Vashin Kine, who is the cofounder and CTO of Obel, which is a protocol for distributed validators. If you don't know what that is, we're, of course, going to explain that, essentially, a kinda quick rundown of what that is. Personally, that I find interesting is because it essentially offers a way for people to come and stake together, without, being an individual, needing the full staked amount of 32 ETH, for example, specifically in the Ethereum network. And so it is a way to kind of, share the stake amongst many people while still being able to earn the interest that is generated from from proof of stake on Ethereum. But hi, Ashin. How you doing?
Welcome. Good. Pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Maybe to to start off, if you want to just give, like, a quick intro to yourself, what got you to, to starting Obel, and where are you coming from?
Yeah. Absolutely. So I'm from Ireland. My parents have run tech companies all of my life, particularly pre web web one, web two businesses. So I was kind of pretty always into, like, web design and dev space. After college, I got a job as a consultant where I was working for the state and got to see kind of how databases were, I don't know, set up behind the hood and stuff, and it was kind of interesting. And then I came across crypto and thought this is this database that no one could modify or is this kind of, you know, world computer that I even kinda could use. I got my first job with ConsenSys in 2018 as a full stack. Did about two years there, mostly tokenizing things, particularly kind of years of twenties, real estate and stuff with the European side. And Mhmm. After getting laid off at the start of COVID, I set myself up as a software contractor and got picked up by a company called Blockdaemon to do ETH 2 r and d. ETH 2, as we know it now, is kind of proof of stake e Ethereum. It's the change from the kind of energy heavy proof of work Ethereum to the relatively more energy like, environmentally conscious proof of stake and ended up building out their system. And it was super successful in the first couple years, ran to quite a large percentage of network. And along the way, I was struggling with the idea that you couldn't run an Ethereum validator on more than one computer. And this was kind of a bit unorthodox because everything in web two is you might say from, like, a database to a load balancer to anything can run across kind of multiple machines. It's normally known as, like, high availability, and this wasn't a thing yet for validators. And, maybe the 2020 around Genesys, I attended a community call organized by the EF and my now cofounder around, like, what we now know is distributed validator technology. And it was the idea that, hey. Because of the curve that Ethereum uses to sign messages, you can have an Ethereum validator build multiple machines, and this wasn't an accident. This was kind of designed that way, but they just need someone to build the software. And I, at the time, had been, trying to make software to tokenize validators as kind of NFTs, but I was failing miserably on the the business side to sell anything of it. So I was, at the time, reaching out to my old boss being like, hey. I built, you know, this offer. Do you have any interest in helping me, like, ship it? He's like, no. Not really. And Colin was the only business person I knew in the space, particularly. So I reached out to him and was like, hey. I'm trying to build this, and I'm failing miserably to sell it. And he was like, oh, super interesting. I'm trying to start this business to build distributed validators, but I don't have a technical cofounder. And after kind of a couple weeks or so, I got I got convinced, and we started about April 21 building these things. And now it's early February twenty twenty four, and we've been on Mainnet for about a year. And we have, people all over the world running these, yeah, distributed validators, which is one Ethereum validator, one kind of 32 ETH or more being divided us across kind of four to 10 groups of people. And you need more than two thirds of them to be online for the thing to be online. So it's kind of the first Ethereum validated with FaultTiler. We can go a bit further from there, but I think that's the back end of the intro.
Yeah. For sure. That's that's helpful. Interesting story. I think, just to say for people, I'm also kind of experimenting with with Obel at the moment. And, right now with a few others, we have our own crew where we are having our own we're we started our own distributed validator network on the testnet. So we're kind of doing some experiments there so that eventually we can, we can go to the main nets, once we're, we're ready and familiar with, with everything on, on the test nets. But maybe just for people in order to kind of make sure everyone's kind of at the same level, could you kind of quickly recap what is Ethereum staking? Since I know some people may are listening, they may not, they may kind of know what it is, but they may not know exactly the mechanism. And then that'll help build the foundational knowledge for like how Obol works and and why it's why it's useful.
Yeah. Absolutely. So Ethereum staking is the new quote unquote consensus mechanism for Ethereum, meaning it's the rules for how you add blocks to the chain. Previously, in proof of work, you could imagine it as kind of, a no holds barred guessing game where people had factories and factories full of machines guessing numbers trying to get the next block. Whereas
how proof of waste works guessing, I think, is a great way to explain proof of work.
Yeah. Exactly. Proof of waste or something. But yeah. On the proof of stake side, the mechanism is you lock up quite a significant amount of money. In Ethereum's case, it's 32 ether, which is in the region of, like, a $100,000 at the moment. And you, every 6 and a half minutes, sign one message saying, this is what I see as the top of the blockchain, and you send it to the network. And if you do that every six and a half minutes, you get paid a couple percent APR a year. And if you don't do that, you lose about double. And the one extra edge case is if you're caught cheating and trying to say kind of two different things to do to two different people or taking part in something of the sort, you run the risk of having summer, all of your 32 eater that's locked up as steak taken away from you. And that's kind of really the, the big, I don't know, like underlying risk if you get slashed or what it's called, but generally speaking, yeah, that that happens when you do something like run the private keys in two places at the same time, which maybe we'll end up mentioning more as well. Every every slashing to data in the network has been from somebody running a full validator in two blade more or less.
Right. Yeah. No. It's it's essentially, I kind of see it as, like, a consensus mechanism instead of, yeah, proof instead of trying instead of industrialized guessing, there is kind of a protocol that randomizes who gets the rights to validate or mine the next block and based on your state, which is in kind of in multiples of 32 on Ethereum, then that gives you a higher chance of winning the next block in the same way that in proof of work, the more you mine or the more you guess, the more likelihood you are to get the, to get the block. I've heard some people, equate this as maybe a useful metaphor for people. Of course, it's not like completely correct, but, they kinda refer to, this kind of system as essentially an internet bond in many ways. What do you think about that metaphor?
Yeah. I'm pretty in agreement, actually. I think there's a paper called Ethereum, the Internet bond written by my cofounder and Marjesh Schmidt, the, CEO of Alluvial. So they modeled Ethereum as a perpetual bond where you lock up and you earn kind of a perpetual, like, moving APR. I think it's relatively accurate, to be honest, with the decent way to model them. And I don't know. It certainly got me pretty compelled in Ethereum staking beyond just the technical side when it came out quite a number of years ago, maybe even 2019 or some. 2020, I think.
No. So it's a way it's like, it's interesting because it's like, yeah, you can engage in this kind of, say, financial scheme without necessarily being, I don't know, you don't have to go through what, what, what are the names? Like Charles Schwab or whatever. Like these are the things you can just run your own, technical infrastructure at home, for example. And I've I've been doing solo staking for now, like, two or three years or something like that. I can't remember how long it's been. So, yeah. So I've been have been able to take advantage of that. It's been very interesting being a part of it. But so now that we know and we are reminded again, what is proof of stake and how that works? Could you explain to us in your own words, what is DPT or distributed validator technology and how does Obel work?
Yeah. So one particular validator is is usually the term given to 32 ether, has to sign more or less one message every six and a half minutes saying, kind of, here's my vote on the top of the chain. A couple times a year, they also kinda get to produce a block. And what a distributed validator is is instead of one private key sitting on some computer somewhere signing these messages, You take that private key and you split it into key shares, kind of like a multisig. Probably most of your listeners are familiar with kind of a multisig where three out of four people need to sign a message. And you do basically the same thing with these private keys. You split them in a manner so that you only need three to four to sign anything. And or you can, obviously, five out of seven, seven out of 10, so on. And then these pieces of private keys all sit on individual machines. Better yet, these are all different people and not just, you know, one person using four different data centers, but to each their own. And distributed validator software is the software that sits in between all of the rest of the, like, quote, unquote normal validator stack that enables these to work as groups. So it just comes to consensus on what everyone should agree to sign. And then after they've all signed, it uses the BLS signature scheme to combine them into a normal looking signature to the rest of the network, and it sends it outward. So anyone else on that test net won't really be able to tell that your distributed validator that you're running with your friends is any different to a normal validator. I could maybe it'll better opt on if I have anything to say about it.
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So essentially as kind of things largely stand, one validator equals one computer. DBT equals many computers equal one validator. And that's how you're able to kind of split the ownership of like the, the unit of stake that you need in order to, to get going. But also I think, even on top of that, it's a way to perhaps, I don't know, know. You tell me if I'm wrong, but, like, increase resiliency and security. Perhaps Absolutely. You have you you could be one person with multiple compute multiple, you know, validators that you split up across different computers just as a way for increased security if you wanted.
Definitely very important on the resiliency front. And one of the things that happens probably a couple times a year, I kinda wanted to ask you, how often do you end up running out of disk space or your machine dying? Is your Internet reliable? Do you have to go, I have an offer two days because my alerts didn't do do anything? Or, being able to have a machine fail and you validate or not go offline maybe isn't the most important on on a solo staking level, but especially if you're an enterprise and you have, you know, thousands of these things, it's it's pretty significant. So, it also allows them to use commodity servers rather than very fancy ones. A lot of times, people favor machines that have dual CPU, dual networking cards, a RAID array of disks. So if anyone fails and end up having quite expensive hardware, whereas if you have software based fault tolerance, you can have, you know, pretty bog standard commodity hardware instead. And you're also a bit more protected on client failure type of things. We've seen a couple bubbles from clients over the last while. If you wanna be risk averse, you would have, you know, a diff a Teku, a Lighthouse, a Nimbus, a Prism. You'd have kind of a variety of all of them on the different machines, and if finally run into a snag, if it's less than, you know, a quarter or like less than two thirds or one third, you'd stay online.
Yeah. I mean, for me, I've definitely had, I I've learned a lot about, how to host a node simply because I have my own, like stay involved and everything. I haven't had too many, too big of issues, but I have had like a couple of like, you know, smacking my head against the wall, trying to figure out like what's going on exactly and learning how to read error logs and such like that. And then, yeah, sometimes realizing like, oh, it's not even like my like ethernet cable accidentally disconnected. And that was a problem in time or something like that. It's like not too big of a I mean, for me, it's like, I think for some people you can like really freak out if you're like your validator isn't connected. But in reality, I've been like, once you do it for long enough, you're like, oh, it's disconnected. You didn't really lose all that much. It's like pretty, pretty minimal.
Yeah. Couple of bucks a day type of thing. It's like, ugh, this is inconvenient.
Yeah. It's mostly inconvenience to just try to figure out. But usually, I mean, at least for, like, main net staking, there's so many resources to try and figure out kind of what's going on, which helps a lot. So, yeah. So I mean, to for me, it's been, like, part of for me doing it in the beginning was, like, I wanted the, like, the experience and to, like, have to, like, force myself to learn about this stuff a lot more, which has been nice.
Yeah. For sure. I'm Go ahead.
No. I was just gonna say that, yeah. And then I think it's important to to to, support decentral or solo staking for the decentralization Ethereum network if we actually want it to be decentralized and, you know, we gotta talk, we gotta walk the walk.
In that regard, that's one of the things that I think is kind of niche, and you brought it up almost immediately in the, like, intro about d v t and why it's cool is that 32 ETH is basically prohibited for anyone getting into the space. If you the vast majority of people that can solo stake were into Ethereum, you know, back when you could. And Mhmm. It's kind of a problem and something that I think we kind of need to solve if we do want solo staking to continue is, you know, you can't can't have it both ways. And that's where I think distributed validators are super exciting because there are a lot of people that would delegate to distributed validators or to home stakers if it was kind of safe and, like, kind of, not risky to do so. But because of certain designs that we're kind of fixing in the chain, like, kind of forced exits, there's a lot of trust you have to put on the person that runs your nodes, so people kind of favor much more maybe centralized entities. But Mhmm. We've done some initiatives with people like EtherFi where they set up clusters of, 10 home stakers. They just kinda sent them a box, said, here you go, all over the world. And now each of them can all make a couple of dollars a month for, like, operating, like, EtherFi pools stake. And that's something that I get kind of really hopeful about when it comes to the distributed validator side is that there's a lot of people that have the technical capacity, have the interest or into Ethereum. They can, you know, run, you know, Minecraft servers or whatever. But they look at this and even Rocket Pool is 20 something grand in in, like, stake and even as the 80, there's maybe some down to 2 ETH, which is still 6 k. So I'm pretty hopeful that with distributed validated, you can put people in as, like, one seventh or one tenth of the thing, and it's like, cool. Stay online. You know? Hopefully, keep it up, and we'll we have these, like, splitter contracts that allows people to get paid, like, a fixed percent of the rewards and stuff. So that's kind of how I, I don't really hope to 10 x the amount of home stakers in the network.
Yeah. I think this this automatic this is goes very well into my next question, which is gonna be, like, what are the big unlocks, that, distributed validators bring to Ethereum? And I think this is kind of like, for me, there is this tension with the desire for the price of ether to go up and for decentralization.
Which is very,
I mean, yeah, I think it's going, it's never going to that tension is not going to go go anywhere. And so, yeah, the qu the even, you know, rocket pool was this idea. I don't know where exactly they are now because I really use it, but you can do half of the stake or maybe a quarter. I don't remember how far down they go. It's down to a quarter. They're working on more. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, if, if the price of ether keeps going up, then you have to keep splitting, you know, offering a new service of like the ones that are just to make it available for, for others to people to take part in this. And, Yeah, I guess there is one, there is, not wanting to rely on kind of, I mean, still somewhat centralized entities to be able to run these types of things, but allowing people to simply do it for themselves, which is why I think it's important to have this kind of protocol to do it. And then of course you have like, I mean, cosmos, you could say, and a lot of the IBC chains have been doing something similar where they have delegated proof of stake, but it's still you are delegating, to a centralized entity to hold your stake and they give you they take a cut and you take, you know, your portion. So the idea is, like, can we, can we do that without without needing the the the delegated institution to to run it?
Exactly. That's something that, I'm pretty hopeful we can achieve in the next while. We've had quite a few promising other kind of we we normally refer to it as squad staking, where it's like kind of you and I favor picking people that have a kind of a group of friends or a bit of community. Picking kind of strangers on the Internet is kind of a bit harder because they don't necessarily wanna help each other out as much as people that'll kind of, you know so long as you have one or two very technical people in the squad, the rest of them will kinda figure it out. Mhmm. We've had squads set up in, like, Eat Mexico. They did kinda three on whole ski to try and get running. We were doing some with, that are kind of a women in crypto group, getting them to train each other and, like, set up squads and, each staker and a lot of these kind of different communities that are setting up these kinda squad staking clusters. And the hope is for now, and we can talk maybe a bit about road map and release. We've kept thing kind of sane and try to keep it in it. So we've we were in beta, and we've kept everyone at one validator. But as it becomes more battle tested, mature, we're more willing to let people kind of take risk with the software and not kinda get it over their heads. We can let that come up and let people kind of do more delegated staking or something of the sort.
Mhmm. Yeah. I I think, yeah, I think for me, it's just, I mean, it's just, like, interesting to think of using the internet for, I mean, you can, you can make friends over the internet. Like anybody can make friends over the internet and have like their own little online community online group. But then it's another thing whenever you are doing economic activity together. Like, I mean, like techno economic activity together, at least we're talking about if you have like a distributed validator squad with you. It gives you an opportunity to kind of have a longer term potential relationship with people over the thing. But even like this also applies locally as well. I mean, having your own group of, your own squad in your perhaps local community that is doing distributed validating. And then you're using kind of like the yield of the internet bond that you all have staked in Ethereum as perhaps a way to, together figure out what you're, what you want to do with that yield. So I think there's like, it opens up this kind of thing where you can, you, you can choose to do kind of like treat it as a business where I'm, I'm, we're all going to take our percentage cut Or you can, you know, extend that if you want to, to where you want to, have some sort of governance around what you're going to do with the yields to fund this or that initiative in your community, whether that's a local one or an online one. And so that's kind of that's that's what I find really interesting and something that I think, I don't know. I think, in the on the political side, there's kind of like a need to to embody, you know, collectivity and having this techno technical infrastructure and, Primavera likes to use the word scaffolding for for, like, just being able to get on top of, and then now you can, like, take part in in the organization, I think is, like, a super, super interesting thing and super interesting development.
Yeah. I'm I'm super aligned, and we'll hopefully be able to communicate more of that in the coming months around what we hope to do in that regard. But I will say that, my, like, Telegram handle name is, like, liberal radicalism from the original paper by Italic Zoe, England, Wilder and quad like, what do we know is kinda quadratic funding and matching pools and stuff? I think matching pools will be, like, a fascinating thing to bring into this, yeah, Internet bond equation and what's go like, what's, you know, hopefully going to happen over the next decade.
Mhmm. And then I don't know if this is, like, a a good time to to perhaps mention this because there there are also, like, a lot of changes happening in the Ethereum worlds as far as like product or, EIPs. I think there were got, maybe it's an EIP that you mentioned, before we got on the call about the ether issuance curve and that change that's that's being proposed. Do you wanna talk a bit about that?
Yeah. So I think what's kind of one of the things that people deep within the niche within the niche of Ethereum and the staking world is this concern around whether or not people will hold pure ether or whether people will end up holding ST ether, liquid staking tokens, these things that kind of expose you to the reward of staking, but but doing nothing other than holding a token. And some of the arguments are we should change the, like, the reward curve, the issuance curve, the APR that you get from the bond, to go negative or at least to go below real yields. So you're getting, like, you might getting nominally zero, but a real yield of of negative. And in the interest that this might favor either, but this favor the, like, liquid staking tokens and the kind of contention from the community and stuff. And I think there's quite a lot of people interested from, like, quite a lot of those different kind of people with skin in the game, you might say. Is there's already a massive bias towards economies of scale. And if you already have kind of a huge amount of ether sitting there, you may delegate it anyways. And it's the idea that the the marginal validator is the most decentralized one is how someone sees said it, like, push. And if you change the issuance curve or kinda quarter it or something of the sort to kind of achieve it being financially nonviable for more than x amount of people to do it. What you end up doing is people that are running it are the ones that can run it as a last leader, the ones that maybe just want for other things. People will seek yield from Eigen layer and, like, potentially kind of rehypothecating their stake, being more dependent on MEV centralizing because the MEV doesn't go isn't uniformly distributed. It goes to kind of like a power law. So I think well, I totally understand where they're coming from in terms of making ETH be the money, not the, like, STETH or the equivalent. I'm not a 100% sure that cutting the rate is what gets you there. I my perspective, to be honest, would be to up the kind of correlation penalties, particularly with, like, liveness, and I think that would do one thing. And then the other one is around risk you can take in solo stakers and the liquidity preferences you can offer people that are nasal staking, where they're not kind of exchanging it for, like, a liquid staking token. It's getting, like, a little in the weeds, but on the exit side of things, one of the big fears you probably it doesn't bother you in the side of because you're kind of bought in is is how long the execute could be. Almost always, it's twenty seven hours, but if there was a bank run, it could go to months for all that matters. And this is a concern for people that are maybe, you know, like, oh, I'm wanna stay, but if I wanna, you know, have my money back, I should. I shouldn't really be told. Sorry. Everyone also wanted their money back, so I'll get it to you next week. And then they kind of end up holding something like a liquid staking tokens because they're like, okay. I can liquidate that. And, also, they hold the most liquid one because that's the ones they can most liquidate. So one of the EIPs, as you alluded to, that's coming up that's not the issuance curve proposal is related to exits. And one of the things about taking risk on solo stakers that alluded to is because the proof of stake chain began independently from the Ethereum, like, proof of work chain, and they eventually merged it over. There was never a way for the exit address, the kind of address where the withdrawal stuff goes to tell the proof of stake chain to exit a validator. It's all driven on the proof of stake side with the proof of stake key, the hot key. So if you delegate to somebody, they can just turn off the machine. You can't get your money back. You just sit there and and do nothing and, like, kinda get mad. And that's one of the big problems that they intend to address in the next hard fork. That's probably gonna be at the end of the year. It's called forced exits or withdrawal address initiated exits. And the tweak that I would like to do instead of changing the issuance curve is to allow people to pay a fee, an escalating base fee, very like EIP one five five nine, to have their ether back at, like, finality, 12 kind of twelve minutes after the end of the block, and have this be a very small trickle, like, really nothing on the grand scheme of things, but it would end up allowing people to say, oh, I can have my money back for, you know, this price. And if you set it with a preescalating, basically, you'll always get the trickle and you'll see where it balances out. But this would, I think, allow people that don't want a native stake to native stake. Another thing I have mentioned is, well, like, correlation penalties. People should get pretty heavy. It shouldn't matter if you're, like, a solo stake and you go offline. But if the network goes at the moment, it goes past 33% offline, the penalties get extremely severe, but I would keep that in from, like, 10%. If if you lose more than 10% of the network, people should have kind of months of lost earnings, and that won't happen to bother yourself, myself, or someone who's a solo staker because hopefully we'll fail for, you know, just our hardware or whatever. But if someone's running something, you know, in a manner that's 10% of the rest of the network, they should, like, see a bit of, like, a pain. And that would be the thing that would, yeah, decentralize the liquid staking protocols. People would be like, oh, I don't wanna, like, lose a lot of rewards, so I better pick something that won't go offline in the car. It didn't matter. And better yet, you can favor, like, native staking. And also this idea of liquidity finality helped a small liquid staking token. They if you want a kind of a 10 or 50,000,000 market cap and some whale wants to buy a load, they're like, I can't, like, you know, buy enough of this. It's kind of a very liquid project. But if they can exit validators pretty immediately, it's like, cool. I can have $5,000,000 worth of this $50,000,000 project because I can withdraw them all pretty, like, straightforwardly with the exit sheet. But, yeah, this is a little bit of a detour and a rant into the technical weeds of staking, but Maybe I can try to Yeah. I think issuance curve is is maybe not the right way to disfavor liquid stake, Collin.
Okay. I see. I see. So, like, one kind of the if if I'm understanding correctly, there are people in the Ethereum community that are proposing decreasing the yield. Correct. That a staker can get as a way to disincentivize, essentially businesses that if you are a for profit, like larger entity, you wouldn't be able to necessarily continue your business at such a scale because you are not earning enough interest. So it disincentivizes that. And if you are someone who is a solo staker or you are, just heavily bought into decentralization of Ethereum, you're gonna keep going anyways. But you're saying that this might not be the best idea. Instead, there you could like add a fee to the, to speed up your exit, from proof of stake or to that you can withdraw your, your tokens a bit faster.
Yeah. That to favor staking, like, directly in native staking and not to be, like, for the risk averse delegator to hold, like, a liquid staking token. And then on the Mhmm. APR side, it would be, I would rather just more heavily penalize correlated offline than it would be tick the overall rate down because, yes, there are some diehards that will stake a lot of money for negative APR, but not not enough to run a network.
Sure. Sure. Okay. Yeah. I see. So, like, because what but the the way that people kind of compensate for this is by having liquid staking tokens so that they can more liquidly move in and out of a position, and instead allow faster movement of position natively on Ethereum so that you can you're you're more more likely you're willing to to engage in in in staking and solo staking.
Yeah. For sure. And you're not likely to kind of rehab hot the stake for a bit of yield?
Yeah. Yeah. I think the kind of the big the big thing for me is that Shoe to Validators kind of bring and, I think kind of what you're suggesting is that essentially we want to at least, I mean, I feel very strongly we should reduce the power of centralized liquid staking, protocols and applications as this is a huge centralization risk, for Ethereum that if, you know, Lido, I think is the biggest one. If they go down, then it's like, it, that's a, that's a huge event if, if that happens, which is why there's all this discussion about client diversity and all these things that perhaps, maybe we won't, we won't go into there, but I suggest people, kind of look into that thing at the time. So I think it really explains the There's like a lot of politics in like, this is like a like really, really explicitly political, technological space, even though people maybe don't like to look at it that way. And there isn't necessarily clear, like, I don't know. It's not like there's a clear left wing and right wing camp per se, but maybe there is, there is perhaps like, people who want to make as much money as possible and people who, like, care about the long term stability of of the network. Maybe maybe those could be, like, two camps.
Yeah. I kind of agree. I was gonna say pro business and non business or something.
Are there any other, maybe, things that you're hoping people build with distributed validator networks, like using PowerPoints or anything?
Well, the one you hit the the other head with is the kind of public goods funding, but also the kind of I particularly like the kind of quadratic aspect and stuff. So there's a project called Octant, which came out of Gollum. They were kind of a 2017 maybe or ICO, and Octant has quite a large amount of ETH from them. And what they've done is date. So far, they built it themselves in their solo staking. I don't know exactly quite quite amount. I think they kinda have given out a million dollars in staking rewards to projects, and they have a quadratic funding UI to kinda do so. So we're pretty big fans of the auction team and are trying to convince them to also delegate to some squad to do this, rather than only just do it solo. So I think, you know, give it a time, but I think we we we'll get there and give that a try. So I'm really excited to have yeah. We we talked with the at, like, a major hospital in The US once, and they were trying to figure it out. And they caught or someone came up with the idea of calling it a perpetual endowment, that you kinda lock your eat, and you point it out a funnel, and you say, you know, those voters allocate this money, but the money just sits there. You know? If it's still ether, it'll still probably do alright over, you know, decades. And that'd be a very novel way to direct the flow of stake rewards.
Yeah. No. It's interesting. I think, I don't I don't know if I have a I have a project called Gretchen Cooperative, and kind of the first idea that I had of kind of how, what we wanted to build as far as like crypto applications from a, from a post capitalist lens was essentially what now I kind of see as being kind of DVT based things. And this kind of like perpetual endowment idea is like another way of phrasing it. I, we phrased it as crowd staking where everyone just kind of like brings their stake together and then we generate yield and then we govern together what we want to do. It's kind of a, I think of it as public goods funding or whatever. But essentially it was a way to, to fund ourselves to go and do cool shit. And, not thinking such a good, but I I've kind of like naively in the beginning thought like, oh, we can do this with a theory of snaking. That can't be that hard. And then I was like, oh wait, no, it is, it is way more difficult than than that. I realized this is why we kind of switched to this more. I mean, our model is more more like a local currency where you're staking DAI instead or xDAI.
So we're, we're nearly there. I'm happy to show you what should be left to do on top of Obol stuff, but, yeah, I think we have just my contract set up for that if you wanna give it a try next.
Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So I think, I think that was really interesting. Maybe one thing for people who are listening, if, is there any way for them to, begin finding a crew for their own distributed validator network?
Yeah. It's a good question and something we've been trying to figure out how to scale. Right now, what's worked the best is when you have some sort of kind of existing community and a bit of trust versus saying, oh, I'm not in any communities. I'll show up in the Discord and hope somebody will kinda pick me up. So we've been pretty active with the existing kind of Ethereum based communities trying to be like, hey. Have you guys heard of squad digging? You should check it out. Is there, you know, 20 of you that'll come to a workshop day where you'll see a little demo, do the kind of key creation process, and learn a bit about us? Can you end up with seven of those making it on to give it a try and test net? How many of those will commit to the slightly elevated kinda hardware requirements you need for this machine? They'll get cheaper as they go along, but it's still, you know, sometimes, you know, not nontrivial. And then can you get them on to mainnet, and then can you maybe get them delegated stake? But at the very least, if you go to oval.tech and join our Discord, there's a pretty active communities for many different languages as well, and you can kinda get chatting, start to contribute, try and run things with docs. You can run them all solo on your own machine, but if your machine dies, that's you know, you've every copy on one. And you can give that a try, run it on the whole key, but one of the things we're working towards is, a kind of a credentialing program where you get a credential if you can kind of complete a knowledge quiz if you've run a validator on Testnet and stuff. You guys would hopefully be able to do for a technical credential, and that'll eventually show on your kind of profile. And, hopefully, you can also say, was a member of like, the Lido community staking module, was a member of, the EtherFi one, was in this, that squad, and build up a little bit of reputation to actually get a bit more stake or kind of something of the sort. But, yeah, like, flat out, they start in the discord, make friends, but it can be a little tricky. It's one of the things we haven't done is we deliberately didn't do something totally permissionless. We match you and we find your counterparties because that's a bit scary to do and, you know, vulnerable to kind of civils and stuff. We figured that it's much safer to let people use the social layer to get started with kind of these distributed validators rather than trying to protocolize it from the off and not mess it up. So, yeah, relying on communities and squads and layer zero to figure out kind of complexities of running stake with other people some way voluntarily.
Yep. Yep. No. I mean, I'm I'm still like in the, I still have not been convinced that it is possible to kind of protocolize this type of stuff yet. Like, I, it seems to me like really, you just, you just gotta be friends with people. You gotta make friends, man. Like, find a community of people and like build relationships you gotta do and maybe, you know, get out of your, get out of your shell. Don't be so shy. Make some friends and, get excited about, you know, who are excited about these things and, and, and start working together. I think that's kind of like the best way to do it. I was lucky enough to have like, you know, a couple of friends that I knew personally who wanted to do it. And then they had friends and friends and friends. And then we had enough people for our own squad to run our own, our own, distributed validator. But as well, I mean, I could imagine doing that just within my own like, the crypto leftist community, and Discord server and trying to find people there.
Yeah. Start a start a little project like CrowdStake and, see who'd see who'd be interested in getting involved.
Yeah. For sure. For sure. But, yeah, if you don't have that, you can always go to the Obel, the Obel channel I saw that you guys have, to find people. For the, the one last questions I think would be interesting to talk about the roadmap because you, you recently published a very nice looking, kind of metallic copied roadmap graphic that is really, kind of shows what are the different work streams that Obel is working on. And sometimes I've also, I get like when people ask me for, for a roadmap for bread chain, for example, I find it sometimes daunting. I'm thinking, you know, it's like, fuck. We have so many things to do. How can I put, I can't, I can't, I can't promise? I don't want to promise anything because then you're afraid you're going to, you set yourself on these kind of expectations. But I think what, using this, this style of graphic that you have that, that also Patek did is you kind of show each work stream separately, give it a funny name. And so that you can kind of like, you know, bring together or just like conglomerate a few different things into one so that you can show what are the kind of like end games of different aspects of the, of, at least of Obel, what you've done. I want to, can we go through that and talk about what that what that changed? Absolutely.
I certainly empathize with the the roadmap comments. It's just been three years at oval, and it's probably the first roadmap I've ever made. So that was interesting. What what kind of came back to you or something that I found super encouraging way back when is, Vitalik posted his first one, I wanna say, very close to the genesis maybe in a few months afterwards. And he had distributed validators on his road map, and we kinda never, and and I interacted with them and had only kind of recently changed the name a little, towards distributed validators to make them kinda more comprehensible. And that was super encouraging to see. They were, like, marked as distributed validator demo, nearly finished distributed validator implementation kinda only started. And then he had it further on his second one, and then his third one most recently in January. He had distributed validated, like, complete. And I was like, oh, I I appreciate the signaling, Vitalik. You were there's a lot of, you know, clout. But at the same time, I was like, there is, you know, so much, like, left to do. So I decided to basically do the same thing, came up with, you know, the different sections that agonize over, try and make them with urges in the name, give up, and then pick something that I have emojis for. And, set laid it out in kind of a different, like, sections and stuff, put a blog post to go with it, but, it's yeah. So far, it's only been out maybe twenty four hours, but it's been getting pretty good reception. But, the summary for your listeners are that there's well, one of the big differences is we build Oball in an in a bit of a minimum viable product type where it's I've tried very hard to keep it simple. And one of the main places where it simplifies is it's a fixed set of people and settings when you set up the cluster. And if you don't like it, spin it down and create a fresh one. And I think that's much safer. One of the main reasons is for kind of operator rotation. It'll be nice to kinda kick out an underperformer, but it's some complicated math, and it's kinda scary and, you know, it brings in kind of weird incentives if you have it, like, be, like, a performance based kind of change. And then there's even the problems of doing with untrusted people, giving them keys and whatnot. So it was like, to hell with it. People want distributed validators more than they want the reward and punishment scheme to go with it and whatnot. So it was like, give them that. Let them kind of use it in the community. Let them kind of use it for their own cases. And what we refer to, take again, taking a leaf out of Ethereum's book is, like, oval two point o. And the main difference is it would be, like, editable clusters or mutable clusters. So you can add more keys. You can update the MEV or the few recipient address to go somewhere new. You can change operators in a non, you know, scary way. And, generally, yeah, that that's kind of they're all the wish list items of editable clusters, and that's what we kind of partitioned out into the kind of, like, a future iteration and, like, you know, ship something simple first. And why didn't that? It also comes with the idea of wanting to be a bit more decentralized, have a spec, have a couple independent client teams to give people the reassurance that even if OBO disappears in the morning, that there's three more teams of clients in production. So, you know, that piece of the stack is also a risk produced. So I didn't wanna kind of we tried it back with the EF building spec first, kinda team second. And I was like, no. You kinda have to build one before you build a spec for something else, and then you build that instead. And that's kind of the route we're going. So we have something that's more or less approaching v one point o, maybe by the by the time this is out. And we can say, yeah. These are immutable. These are simple. You know? They don't have built in economics and stuff. Just kind of use them as you so choose. And then the fancy editable one is the one that, you know, would be what I'm currently already working on, obviously, for a good year or so, and it'll probably be a few more years out. It's just kind of the thing of UNIV three started before UNIV two shipped. Right.
Yeah. It's a basically, for for people maybe, to understand is that when you make an Obel cluster now, so when you make a a network with your friends, you have to set the number of people. And that is the minimum was five, I wanna say. Four. One, three, four. So you do four up to 10?
And, Yeah. And it could go higher, but, yeah, 10 seems like a lot.
So there's it's kind of like right now, it's kind of, you guys have designed it within within certain parameters to keep things fairly simple as a minimum viable product. And then, in the future, we'll expand that to where you can edit, the people who are in there. So let's say you have, you know, 10 of your friends. One of your friends is a big dick now. You guys can pick them out. Maybe you're down to nine or you find another friend to replace them. So you can edit, you know, the other validators, your other friends that are taking part in your network. At the moment, you can't do that. You just set as it is, but that's, what's coming down in the roadmap. So then I think more and more it's going to become interesting like this technical governance, how it, you know, people are going to actually have to do that where being part of, being part of these like dvts, dvT networks.
I think it'd be interesting. I've already been ordered with the hotkey, let alone the flow of funds.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, to me, it's like, one of the things that I find interesting is that, like, we don't I think in normal life, we don't really have similar things like this. Or often, it's not like the average unless you are really a part of your community and you're really like it take takes quite a bit of effort. But you're you know, it it forces perhaps kind of like small time degens if they're, if they're using dbt to like begin doing the somewhat harder work of like socially coordinating with their friends or acquaintances over the internets or in their communities to where you have to come to conflict resolution perhaps and, you know, help each other out and, you know, have some sort of system of mutual support that otherwise, you know, we're all just like individuals who are, you know, sailing sailing the seas on our own to to find treasure or something. You know?
For sure. We used to call them, co ops before David Hoffman gave them the more catchy name of squad staking. But, yeah, I do think of them as kind of, like, kind of cooperative. And how long can you say, like, god, this guy never updates his note or it's been, like, you know, three months. You know? Do we kick him out? Do we and what do we do now? Do we exit the whole thing? We got them. Yeah. It'll it'll, I don't know, form bonds and, I don't know, frustrate people as well. I I'm sure someone someone will never falling out over it someday, but, yeah, it's it's as I kind of alluded to, I wrote a maybe a blog when we started, and it was like, I think sharing stake is one of the most incredibly neutral ways to run the validator. If you have total control, you can kind of go and change whatever you want. But if you have to kinda negotiate with seven to 10 people being like, hey. I think we should turn such a setting on, like, kind of sandwiching on on the MAV side or to do that on or off and the other thing like that. It's, I don't know. Interested you. I think you'll get a better kind of more centrist outcome if you have a group of people in the small group picking kind of actions rather than people individually being like, yeah. More years to click the button.
Right. Are there any other, any other things you wanna mention that's on the road map?
The other aspect that I'm also quite interested in is more on the Ethereum and the lab section is around vertical trees. Vertical trees will hopefully be one of the next big upgrades, not quite at the end of this year, but everyone's kind of agreed that, you know, 4844, which is kind of blob space, was a big one, and then Virkel Trees is a next kind of main target. The reason being is it would massively, if not nearly completely, reduce the need for historical state on just to store that. So you could reduce your disk requirements for a node, a huge amount. I don't wanna kind of overpromise, but I think at least down to kind of something in the region with, like, 400 gigs at current sizes, whereas main net right now is 1.2 terabytes. And getting it kind of that much lower and well under a terabyte for a significant amount of time would be quite a nice one. We've been working away with the Ethereum on arm, trying to make it easy to run these validators on a Raspberry Pi plus like a solid state drive or DAT nodes are quite popular, to get things out there. And, yeah, that between that and forced exits and maybe even my fact max effective balance, all of these things will come down to make me it easy to run a validator on a small amount of cheap hardware. Because if we do really want to have, you know, more than seven ten, there is more hardware involved. There is more effort. So you do want it to be as cheap as you can kind of make it to be involved. And I hope with those, we will see a plethora of, hey. It's, you know, $500 to make a staking machine. Here, you know, it's 2,500 for the whole cluster. You can kind of sponsor it and get quite a lot more and quite a lot further places. So that's probably the last one that, I don't know, I immediately comes to mind.
Cool. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on and for explaining distributed validators to me and to the audience. Maybe just the last question, if you want to leave where people can keep up with you and OBL.
Absolutely. So we're at OBL network on Twitter, o b o l, and you can get me on at wishing kind, o I s I n k y n e. Our website is oval.tech. From there, you can get to the docs. I'd recommend checking out the launchpad, which is the interface for creating validators. This will be getting a bit more easy to navigate and stuff in the coming weeks. I'm pretty hard to get it, like, out. I don't know if you've seen your cluster status page, but that's probably the main place to get in touch with us. And I think we're on Firecaster on Oval Network as well. And, yeah, I'm trying to get into that side of things. So, yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having
me. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. Find your squad, and, yeah, start figuring out how to start squads thinking.
Catch you later. Yep.