Announcing the OBOL Token and Decentralized Operator Ecosystem
TL;DR:
- Check your token allocation at claim.obol.org, claiming is possible for 90 days
- Airdrop includes Obol Core Community, Obol Contributions holders, Solo Stakers and Rocketpool Node Operators
- Tokens are locked (non-transferable NFT) until completion of the first retroactive funding round, subject to a governance vote.
- Delegate your tokens, or become a delegate yourself, to participate in governance.
Today marks the beginning of a new phase of the Obol Collective, defined by unification of the operators and infrastructure networks that form the foundation of Ethereum and the Web3 ecosystem. Using our strength in numbers, we will bring more security, more opportunities, and more rewards for all.
We’re excited to announce the introduction of the OBOL token and the formation of the world’s largest Decentralized Operator Ecosystem.
The OBOL Token is central to governance, operations, and incentives within the Obol Collective. We begin our decentralization journey with a distribution of OBOL to our community in the form of a locked Airdrop.
Last week, we completed the first phase of the Obol Collective with a snapshot of Obol Contributions and Badges. If you’ve contributed to the Obol Collective in the past by staking and earning Obol Contributions, running your own Obol Distributed Validator (DV) node, or other meaningful activities, you can check your token allocation at claim.obol.org.
Solving Challenges for Operators & Networks
In Web3, there is strength in numbers, but infrastructure networks today are not fully tapping into that strength.
Node operators, who form the supply side of trust in infrastructure networks, are generally on their own. Little support and limited opportunities result in high barriers to entry and low margins. Professional node operators must individually source stake and fight against external challenges, like regulatory risks and issuance adjustments. Home node operators are left on their own to meet high financial requirements and figure out complex tooling.
On the demand side, each network or protocol needs to scale their own operator set. For networks and protocols this often means placing significant trust in a limited number of operators, sacrificing network decentralization and taking on correlation risks. The rapid growth of DePIN puts additional competitive pressures on networks who need to rapidly scale their infrastructure in order to support their use cases.
It’s time for that to change.
Operators and infrastructure networks are stronger together. Multiple operators can use DVs to work together and run stronger validators, develop more robust operator sets, and access new opportunities with networks and protocols. Infrastructure networks can work more closely with operators to rapidly scale resilient, secure, and decentralized operator sets.
It’s time to unite operators and networks, by providing everyone with the tools, community, and support to thrive.
The Decentralized Operator Ecosystem
The Obol Collective is the world’s largest Decentralized Operator Ecosystem - a Schelling point for operators and networks scaling, securing, and decentralizing Ethereum and broader Web3 infrastructure.
Today, the operators and protocols in the Obol Collective use distributed validators to secure nearly $1B in Ethereum stake. The 600+ DV operators range from the largest professional operators like Blockdaemon, Figment, and Coinbase Cloud, to individual home operators around the world. In our journey to deploy distributed validators for Ethereum, we built a strong foundation complete with all the pieces — technology, community, and opportunities — for operators and networks to rapidly build and grow together.
The Obol Decentralized Operator Ecosystem is made up of:
Technology: The Obol Product Suite
At the heart of the Obol Collective is the Obol Product Suite, a modular, comprehensive suite of tools to run distributed validators running on any type of hardware, with any combination of software clients. A selection of tools at every step of the operator journey enable any operator to run secure, highly-available, and slashing-resistant nodes.
Opportunity: Infrastructure Networks & Protocols
Obol DVs are supporting a diverse set of protocols and staking providers like Lido, EtherFi, Mellow, Stakewise, Byzantine Finance, and more. Onboarding credentialed operators from Obol’s ecosystem enabled Lido to increase the size of their operator set by 10x, all while improving performance and security. Obol’s operator ecosystem is also quickly becoming multi-chain, with Obol DVs deployed on Ethereum and Gnosis and explorations active on Monad, Cosmos, and more.
Trust: Obol Techne Credential
Trust between operators and networks is critical to the long-term scalability of Web3 infrastructure. Networks need to trust operators within their set to run nodes in a secure and performant manner. Operators need to trust networks to open up opportunities and generate rewards. To facilitate this two-sided marketplace, we developed the Obol Techne Credential, to allow operators of all types to attest to their experience running performant and secure nodes. This enables protocols and networks to tap into a large pool of proven, qualified operators to scale their operator set.
Today, there are 4500+ Techne Credential holders, 500+ of which hold the Silver Techne, attesting to their experience running Mainnet DVs with average performance higher than the top-5 staking protocols.
Community: Obol Operator Community
Through our DV testnet and mainnet phases, we have attracted an operator community boasting a unique combination of performance and decentralization. The Obol Operator Community consists of 600+ unique mainnet operators spanning from the world’s largest operators like Figment, Blockdaemon, and Coinbase Cloud, to individual home operators covering 6 continents.
Contrary to popular belief, operator decentralization doesn’t have to come at the cost of performance. We’ve proven that home operators running DV clusters outperform hand-selected curated set operators running traditional technology.
DVs and squad staking are an inherently collaborative way of running infrastructure. Through formal programs like the Staking Mastery Program and non-formal community support, the Obol Operator Community provides a support system for each other.
Scaling decentralized infrastructure networks
A network is only as robust as its underlying infrastructure. With thousands of experienced, credentialed operators, many of whom operate hardware at home, Obol’s Decentralized Operator Ecosystem stands ready to participate in any and all infrastructure networks requiring a decentralized operator set.
Decentralized infrastructure networks can leverage the Obol Decentralized Operator Ecosystem to rapidly increase the scale and security of their operator set, while accelerating their time to market and reducing maintenance overhead with the Obol Product Suite.
Owners of an Obol DappNode, for example, are not only running Distributed Validators to secure the Ethereum and Gnosis networks, but can also run nodes on IPFS, Swarm, Monero, Bitcoin, and other infrastructure networks. With Obol technology expanding to new networks and use cases, the future opportunities are endless for the expansion of the operator ecosystem into new infrastructure networks.
Details of the OBOL Token
Today also marks the launch of the OBOL Token, which plays a central role in governance, operations and incentives within the Obol Collective. The utility of the Obol token includes:
- Governance: Token holders delegate their voting power to Delegates, who participate in voting on Token House governance proposals. These proposals may affect the Obol Collective’s direction, upgrades, and funding allocations. Read more about the Token House here.
- Obol Retroactive Funding (RAF): Token holders delegate their voting power to Delegates, who vote to allocate retroactive funding to eligible projects. The first RAF round will be focussed on Public Goods for Ethereum, and is scheduled to take place in February. Read more about the Obol RAF here.
- DeFi: The OBOL Token will be integrated into several DeFi liquidity pools and lending protocols, to ensure deep liquidity and broad acceptance within DeFi.
- Added Utility: Via governance proposals, the Obol community can add more functionality to the Obol Token, for example a staking program, or integration with other staking or restaking applications.
For more information about the Obol Token, please read our docs page.
Token Distribution
The total supply is 500M OBOL tokens, distributed as follows:
- Ecosystem Treasury & RAF: 37.7%
- Investors: 23.2%
- Team: 17.3%
- Community Incentives: 12.0%
- Community Airdrop: 7.5%
- Advisors: 2.3%
The OBOL Token Airdrop
Obol is a community first of all. To build the most successful operator ecosystem in web3, we need to bring together all the members that make it a reality. As a consequence, we are pleased to announce a retroactive airdrop that rewards community members who have built Obol with us to this date, to ensure their ongoing participation in the Collective.
In total, 7.5% of the Obol Token supply has been allocated to our community, according to a snapshot of all Obol Contributions and Obol Badges taken on the 13th of January.
Who Received the Airdrop?
Obol Core Community (40%)
The largest portion of the community airdrop goes to the Obol core community. These are members whose involvement and technical expertise within the Obol Collective has earned them badges and credentials, including: all holders of Techne credentials (any tier), Alpha and Beta Mainnet participants, Athena Testnet participants, the most dedicated Bia Testnet participants, and owners of Obol DappNodes. As a reminder, you can view your badges in your dashboard view of the Obol Launchpad.
Obol Contributions Holders (26.7%)
Distributed Validators require ETH to run, as any validator does. We are grateful to the thousands of stakers whose stake resulted in the activation of over 1,500 new Obol DVs, bringing our total TVL to $750M. As this stake accumulated staking rewards and contributed to the revenue of the Obol Collective, we kept track of these Contributions, which served as the basis for this portion of the airdrop.
To ensure fairness when converting Contributions to tokens, a linear distribution is used: the number of tokens allocated increases linearly with the number of Contributions accrued, with the exception of very large Contributions holders which have a quadratic rate applied (<20 addresses). For small amounts of Contributions, to avoid dusting of wallets and nonsensical gas costs for claimers, addresses needed to accumulate enough Contributions for at least 100 OBOL Tokens to qualify for the airdrop.
Solo Stakers and Rocketpool Node Operators (33.3%)
Solo stakers are critical for Ethereum’s decentralization and credible neutrality. We believe that Squad Staking on DVs is the next step in the evolution of solo staking, and we want the entire solo staker community to use Obol DVs to reduce financial and technical barriers to entry. Therefore, we are giving an airdrop allocation to all solo stakers and Rocketpool node operators. We used the lists of Rocketpool Node Operators and StakeCat’s List B to inform the addresses which received an allocation.
How to Claim Your Airdop
You can check your eligibility at claim.obol.org. This is the ONLY place you can check your airdrop eligibility! Please beware of fraudulent websites and DO NOT use links from anywhere other than the official Obol Collective blog, twitter handle, or obol.org website.
Claiming of tokens will be possible starting on the 24th of January at 10am ET / 15:00 CET, for the following 90 days. Tokens are initially locked, to give time for delegation within the governance portal and a first retroactive funding round (RAF), as described below.
Initial Rollout: Locked Airdrop
In the initial phase, the OBOL Token will be locked, meaning non-transferable. This approach allows the community to engage in core governance mechanisms described below, before the full transferability of the OBOL Token is enabled. Unlock of tokens will be subject to a Collective governance vote, upon completion of the first RAF round.
When you claim your locked airdrop, you will receive an ERC-721 NFT which represents your share of OBOL Tokens and allows for the delegation functionality. This NFT can be exchanged for the ERC-20 OBOL Token once unlocks are enabled.
Token Delegation
Establishing a strong governance framework is essential for the long-term success of the Obol Collective. All token holders are encouraged to actively participate in governance, by delegating their tokens during the Locked Airdrop claim, or becoming delegates themselves. Delegation ensures an effective and representative governance structure, empowering Delegates to shape the future of the protocol via voting.
The 1st Retroactive Funding (RAF) Round
The next critical milestone of Obol Collective governance is the first round of Obol Retroactive Funding (RAF). Once the first RAF round is complete, the OBOL Token will be made transferable, pending an approval vote from governance via the Token House.
The RAF mechanism is designed to strengthen and promote the decentralization of Ethereum's settlement layer by rewarding projects that add value and drive impact for Ethereum’s decentralization. Voting and funding distributions occur over a series of RAF rounds, with OBOL Token Delegates determining how to allocate funds from the RAF. It is therefore essential that token holders either delegate their tokens’ voting power to delegates, or become delegates themselves, to ensure tokens are actively contributing toward governance.
For more information about the RAF, please read our docs page.
Stay tuned
The introduction of the OBOL Token represents a crucial step toward our vision of a more decentralized and robust Ethereum staking ecosystem. We are committed to building a sustainable and community-driven protocol that benefits all stakeholders.
Follow us on Twitter and sign up to our blog newsletter (below) to stay tuned for more information about collaborations with more protocols, more networks, and updates about our first RAF round and governance developments.
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For more information about the OBOL Token and the Obol Network, visit our documentation here.
Note: This announcement contains forward-looking statements. Actual implementation details may vary based on regulatory requirements and market conditions.