Proto Community Launch

Obol Proto Community

Today we are honored to launch the Obol Proto Community, an onramp to organize, educate, and incentivize community members contributing to DVT and the Obol Ecosystem.

The Proto Community will fuse the different subcommunities of Obol and offer community members the opportunity to participate in the development and testing of the Network!

Purpose

Obol Labs is a remote first research and software development team focused on POS infrastructure for public blockchain networks. Specific topics of focus are Internet Bonds, Distributed Validator Technology, and Multi-Operator Validation.

The core team is building the Obol Network, a protocol to foster trust minimized staking through multi-operator validation. This will enable low-trust access to Ethereum staking yield, which can be used as a core building block in numerous Web3 applications.

The project has reached the point where formalizing and organizing community participation will drive significant impact on the growth of the core technology.

This blog intends to outline what the Obol Ecosystem is, how it is organized, what lies ahead, and how you can get involved.

We appreciate the heavy community feedback and want to participate - this ultimately created the next evolution of the Obol Community

The Obol Ecosystem

Obol Network is a distributed consensus protocol and ecosystem for POS Ethereum with a mission to eliminate single points of technical failure risks on Ethereum via Distributed Validator Technology (DVT).

Obol as a layer is focused on enabling main chain staking to scale by providing permissionless access to Distributed Validators. Staking infrastructure is entering its protocol phase of evolution, which must include trust-minimized staking networks that can be plugged into at scale.

The Obol Ecosystem is inspired by previous work on Ethereum public goods and experimenting with circular economics. We believe that to unlock innovation in staking use cases, a credibly neutral layer must exist for innovation to flow and evolve vertically. Without this layer highly available uptime will continue to be a moat and stake will accumulate amongst a few products.

The Obol Network develops and maintains four core public goods:

• The DV Launchpad, a CLI tool and User Interface for bootstrapping Distributed Validators
• Charon, a middleware client that enables validators to run in a fault-tolerant, distributed manner
• Obol Managers, a set of solidity smart contracts for the formation of Distributed Validators in unique ways
• Obol Testing programs, a set of on-going public testing programs that enable any sized operator to test their deployment before serving for the mainnet Obol Network.

What is the Proto Community?

Since inception, Obol has been working closely on the early stages of the project with our genesis community. Over this time we have also gained a new collection of participants who have expressed the interest in contributing to the build and maintenance of the network.

We quickly found that the most important area we could invest in was unique ways to effectively scale an increase in the community while also scaling research, code, and testing....simultaneously.

After the past few months of experimentation, we have decided to create the Proto Community, which will fuse our different sub communities into the backbone of Obol.

The project has reached the point where increasing the community interaction, participation, and ownership distribution will drive significant impact on the growth of the core technology. To this we appreciate the support and patience as we scaled.

Working Group Formation

Obol is building critical public goods and as a result, has chosen to design the project in a way that enables diversity by opening the project to external participation early on, to collaborate on the standardization and build of open source components.

The Obol Community will roll out / open different working groups for participation as the network matures. This means that each public good component will have a dedicated working group open to participation by members of the Obol Proto Community.

In the coming weeks we will be launching our first working group for participation by the proto community which will include documentation and an onboarding process.

What's Next?

Moving forward the Proto Community will serve as the primary entry point and onboarding outlet for Obol Working Groups. Please fill out the following link to get involved!

In our next post, we will discuss our first Working Group, which will be focused on the DV LaunchPad!