Tech
Obol Labs Forms Industry Group to Advance Decentralized Validation Technology
Blockchain startup Obol Labs has formed a new industry group that aims to advance the growing field of distributed validation technology – at the heart of developers’ latest effort to eliminate single points of failure within decentralized networks like Ethereum.
The Obol Collective includes a consortium of Ethereum ecosystem players “dedicated to the security, resilience, and decentralization of Ethereum consensus,” according to a Wednesday blog post from Obol Labs. The company is the lead developer behind Obol Network, considered one of the leading distributed validation projects.
Obol Labs says the collective includes more than 50 staking protocols, client teams, software tools, education and community projects, professional node operators, home operators, and stakers. Early participants in the collective include EigenLayer, Lido, Figment, Bitcoin Suisse, Nethermind, Blockdaemon, Chorus One, DappNode, and ETH Stakers.
Obol’s distributed validation technology is designed to improve the security of a key category of actors in Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus system: its validators, the companies, pools, and individuals who operate the hardware that runs Ethereum behind the scenes.
Validators can use Obol to distribute control of their hardware among multiple parties, a setup designed to make the entire process more resilient to failures and malicious attacks.
Ethereum’s infrastructure is made up of two layers: the execution layer, which manages apps and transactions, and the consensus layer, where validators agree on the state of the system.
“Obol helped build DVT and did its part to strengthen and decentralize the consensus layer with distributed validators,” said Thomas Heremans, CEO of the new Obol Association, founded to support the Collective. “We’re realizing we can bring together many other players on that layer to achieve that vision together.”
According to Heremans, DVT’s proposal has become especially relevant now that US regulators have approved the first ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds.
“If I were a regulator looking at staking, DVT would make sense,” Heremans told CoinDesk. “I would want these ETFs to be powered by DVT. I think it makes sense to reduce risk.”
Today, 1% of the staking rewards produced by Obol’s distributed validators go to its recently established retroactive staking fundor “RAF”. Over time, Obol plans to develop a community governance process that will distribute those funds to members of the new collective.
Obol was launched in 2022 and has been adopted by key players like Lidothe largest staking pool on Ethereum, using Obol’s DVT technology for a small portion of its validators.
Most large validators, including Lido, continue to operate most of their hardware conventionally, meaning they rely on centralized entities to manage their systems.
“Today, the security and decentralization of consensus depends primarily on social pressure and mutual trust that protocols and staking operators will do what is best for Ethereum: this is the ‘cannot be evil’ phase,” Obol said in his blog post. “At Obol, we are making distributed validators (DVs) readily available, providing not only protection against client issues and poor key management, but also Byzantine fault tolerance: ushering in the ‘cannot be evil’ phase.”