Building Distributed Validators for EthereumThe Obol Network is an ecosystem for trust minimized staking that enables people to create, test, run & co-ordinate distributed validators

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Our Mission

Open SourceThe Obol Network will forever be open source and permissionless. The impact of distributed validators lies in their accessibility.

Public GoodAll fee's collected in Obol V1 will be granted through retroactive public goods funding. Long term problems call for regenerative circular economics.

Trust MinimisedObol is committed to using technology and cryptography to reduce the need to trust any single staking operator. Removing this trust is a core pillar to keep stake decentralized.

How Distributed Validators workDistributed Validator Technology enables the duties of an Ethereum validator to be performed across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience (safety, liveness, or both) as compared to running a validator on a single node.

Traditional Validator NodeCurrent validators have a single point of failure. Only one validator client can be running and signing messages at any time. If two validators with the same private key sign conflicting messages the validator will be slashed.

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Distributed Validator ClusterDistributed Validator nodes operate together as a cluster through the inclusion of distributed validator middleware clients called Charon, which coordinate what each validator signs, and reconstitutes the partial signatures into an aggregate signature for the Distributed Validator.

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Distributed Validator ClusterThe Obol Network is responsible for fostering the adoption of multi-operator validation as a use case for Distributed Validator Technology.Distributed Validator Clusters are multi-operator, fault-tolerant clusters of servers running Ethereum Execution clients, Consensus clients, Distributed Validator clients, and Validator clients; that combined enable a subset of servers to fail and recover, without a Distributed Validator running on this cluster going offline.

Distributed Validator ClusterCharon is Obol Network's Distributed Validator client and first step in enabling trust-minimised validation.Charon enables fault tolerant, high-availability validation, empowering a group of people to collectively run a validator across multiple machines instead of on a single one.The more multi-operator clusters on mainnet the more immutable and resilient to attack Ethereum will become.Learn More about Charon

Advantages of a Distributed Validator Cluster

Geographic RedundancyExisting validators have a single point of failure. Only one validator client instance can be online and signing messages at any time. If two validators with the same private key sign conflicting messages the validator will be slashed.

Key DistributionDistributed Validator Clusters share one private key, no single node in the cluster has the full private key, and the full private key never exists in full anywhere. This makes validator key compromise more difficult for an attacker.

Fault ToleranceDistributed Validator Clusters require only a subset of nodes to be online to produce signatures. This allows for fault-tolerant validators to be built, and allows a Distributed Validator to remain online despite hardware failure.

Build with Obol

CreateCreate distributed validator keys as a group with the Distributed Validator Launchpad.

TestTest your Obol Cluster on Obol's long-lived incentivised testnet.

RunRun distributed validators on the main network to benefit from fault tolerant staking.