Equilibrium Infra Bulletin #30: Obol Releases Charon V1, Ethereum Validator Decentralization, MegaETH, and more...
Equilibrium Labs builds the state-of-the-art of decentralized infrastructure. We are a global team of ~30 people who tackle challenges around security, privacy, and scaling.
🔍 Releasing Charon 1.0
⚡️ Topic Summary
Obol offers distributed validator technology (DVT), enabling multiple nodes to run an Ethereum validator collectively. By leveraging distributed key generation, it splits the validator key into M pieces and distributes it to corresponding nodes. A simplified way to think of DVT is that it’s a “multi-sig of validation”, where at least N-out-M nodes need to come to a consensus on validator duties. While the cluster behaves as a single unified proof-of-stake validator, the distributed nature aims to increase network resilience and decentralization.
Charon is Obol’s middleware client that enables existing Ethereum validator clients to operate together as part of a distributed validator (DV) cluster. Charon is compatible with any combination of existing clients and sits between a normal validating client and its connected beacon node (intercepting and proxying API traffic). After rigorous testing and auditing, it’s now production-ready (v1.0)!
The workflow and architecture of Charon (source) Obol’s other products, Launchpad, Obol SDK, and Obol Splits, make it easier to deploy and run DVs, which should help with adoption. Obol’s focus going forward will be to get production-ready versions for these complementing products as well.
The compensating product suite will make it easier to set up and run a distributed validator cluster (source)
🤔 Our Thoughts
There is currently $1.5bn deployed to Obol’s distributed validators across 175+ DV operators in 35+ countries. Most of the demand seems to come from liquid staking and restaking protocols, such as Lido and EtherFi, which aim to diversify and decentralize their operator sets. There are currently 26 DV clusters on Lido using Obol and the DAO recently voted to increase its target to 4% of all stake.
Attracting more solo stakers through “squad staking” would help decentralize the network geographically (relevant for the article below!). However, it seems there is limited demand despite the reduced capital requirements (the 32 ETH split between all the node operators) and better liveness guarantees (don’t need to be online 24/7 as long as enough nodes in the cluster remain live).
The other DVT protocol is SSV network, which currently has a TVL of more than $3.2bn across >700 operators. It’s worth noting that SSV is currently running an incentivized mainnet campaign that boosts validator rewards with the native token $SSV (total annual rewards up to 50%), which might partly explain the wider adoption.
💡 Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest
🤓 Estimating Ethereum Validator Decentralization Using p2p Data: Using crawlers to collect data and estimate the geographical distribution of Ethereum validators.
📚 MegaETH: Unveiling The First Real-Time Blockchain: A deeper dive into the Ethereum L2 that takes the rollup vision to its extreme. Recently raised a $20m seed round.
📚 Releasing Reth 1.0: The Rust-based Ethereum execution client developed by Paradigm is now production-ready.
📚 Epochs and Slots All The Way Down: Vitalik’s latest blog dives into ways to give Ethereum users faster transaction confirmation times, following the recent discussion around pre-confirmations.
🎧 Frameworks for Programmable Privacy with Ying Tong and Bryan Gillespie: The recent ZK Podcast (episode 330) covers their joint work on SOK and programmable privacy in distributed systems more broadly (from 22 mins onwards).
🎧 Starkware demos Stwo prover: The new Stwo prover can prove 620,000 hashes per second (on an M3 laptop) - a 1,000x improvement to Starkware’s current prover, Stone. Planned for production in early 2025.
🤌 Personal Recommendations From Our Team
📚 Reading: Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott: The book analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans and how well-intentioned schemes for improving the human condition can go tragically wrong.
🎧 Listening: Bleeding Me Dry - Alicia Creti: A live performance from her debut EP Self/Less.
💡 Other: Faces Made Of Living Skin Make Robots Smile: Scientists find a way to attach living skin to robot faces for more realistic smiles and expressions. Judging by how it looks, we still have some way to go…