Announcing Our Collaboration With Liquid Collective

Today we’re excited to share our upcoming plans with Liquid Collective, the community of industry participants building LsETH, a liquid staking protocol built to meet the needs of enterprises. The commitment that Liquid Collective has shown for trust and security is perfectly aligned with what Obol is delivering to the staking ecosystem through Distributed Validators. At Obol, we’re excited about furthering security, resiliency, and decentralisation in all parts of the staking ecosystem. we’re looking forward to collaborating with the Liquid Collective on many fronts to strengthen the foundation of liquid staking for institutional participants, while we also work on other parts of the ecosystem to improve participation with community and home stakers,

Node operator working group
Obol Labs will play a key role in assisting Liquid Collective’s Node Operator Working Group, in the exploration of how Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) can enhance their protocol's node operator set requirements and onboarding processes. Liquid Collective’s Node Operator Working Group includes Alluvial, Coinbase Cloud, Figment, Staked, and other industry-leading teams with technical staking expertise who will benefit from Obol’s leadership in DV R&D. The working group will define and implement node operator risk evaluation categories such as performance and security, and other distribution criteria for active set membership, thereby establishing benchmarks for risk assessments.

“We're thrilled to begin our collaboration with Liquid Collective to integrate DVT into the fabric of their node operator standards, enhancing security, resilience, and decentralisation for professional node operators, institutional stakers, and the entire Ethereum network. Together, we're forging a path towards a more robust and trust-minimised web3 infrastructure.” - Collin Myers, Obol co-founder & CEO

Running an Oracle for Liquid Collective 
Obol Labs has also started assisting Liquid Collective’s Oracle operations, which is the infrastructure responsible for regularly reporting consensus layer data to the execution layer and to the Liquid Collective protocol. This allows for reporting of network rewards received by the protocol’s active set, helping to ensure an accurate conversion rate for Liquid Collective’s LsETH token.

Testing effort with Liquid Collective node operators
Over the coming months, we will also work with the team at Alluvial to carry out testing of DVs as part of their research on the integration of security-enabling technologies into Liquid Collective’s active set of node operators. Both Alluvial and Obol believe that multi-operator staking is a key strength of DVs which will become vital to enabling low-risk staking in an institutional setting. As such, the primary goal of the testing effort is to familiarise Alluvial with DVs by running high-performance distributed validators on testnet, with MEV-Boost enabled, while leveraging Obol’s best practices distilled from previous testing efforts.

“Obol Labs’ leadership in the field of DVT research, and expertise in developing proof of stake infrastructure, will support Liquid Collective’s ongoing efforts to advance, expand, and harden the protocol’s staking infrastructure across multiple fronts. We’re excited to kick off internal DV testing at Alluvial with Obol Labs to further develop our understanding of how this future-looking technology will support the security, distribution, and resiliency of Liquid Collective’s active set.” - Matt Leisinger, Co-Founder and CPO of Alluvial

Institutional staking research and education
Finally, Obol and Liquid Collective plan to collaborate on further research and education on institutional staking. Together, we will work to better understand the motivations, risks, and opportunities that staking presents to institutional participants. We’ll also provide opportunities for interested participants to gain deeper knowledge and experience into staking through webinars, podcasts, and various other programs to ensure they are capturing the opportunities provided by staking while managing risk.

Stay tuned!

About Obol Labs
Obol’s mission is to build shared web3 technologies for Ethereum infrastructure operators, to establish a credibly neutral and trust-minimised infrastructure layer for web3. Obol’s Distributed Validator middleware client, Charon, boosts the security, resilience, and decentralisation of the Ethereum validator network by enabling “squad staking”.
https://obol.tech/ 

About Liquid Collective
Liquid Collective is the trusted and secure liquid staking standard: a distributed protocol designed to meet the needs of enterprises, built and run by a broad and dispersed collective of leading web3 teams.
https://liquidcollective.io