Decentralising Restaking: Our Journey With ether.fi

Today, we’re happy to announce the next step in our collaboration with ether.fi, a leading liquid restaking protocol. Ether.fi has committed to deploying $100M worth of stake (1,000 validators) on Obol Distributed Validators, run by seven of their partner node operators: Pier Two, DSRV, Nethermind, Chainnodes, A41, Cosmostation, and Validation Cloud. This is the latest milestone in Obol’s collaborative journey toward a decentralised liquid restaking protocol.

How Distributed Validators Improve Restaking Security

Restaking is a new primitive allowing ETH validators to opt into securing Actively Validated Services (AVSs), and be paid additional rewards for the added security they provide as part of Ethereum’s consensus. This increases the importance of the validators’ security, resiliency, and decentralisation - risks should be minimised as stake begins to secure AVSs.

For liquid restaking protocols (LRPs) like ether.fi, creating a foundationally strong operator set is critical to building a robust protocol with the highest quality of restaked capital for AVS’s. Distributed validators are the most advanced and safe way to run Ethereum validators, enabling validators to be run by multiple machines and operators, with higher validator uptime due to fault-tolerance, reduced slashing risk due to key sharding, and diversification of the operator set via eventual participation of small operators or home stakers.

Adopting distributed validators is the best infrastructure decision for liquid restaking protocols wanting to offer AVS’s best-in-class restaked capital.

Phase 1: Onboarding Home Stakers To ether.fi With Operation Solo Staker

In May 2023, ether.fi made use of Obol DVs for the launch of their Operation Solo Staker. The security and resiliency of DVs enabled ether.fi to confidently onboard smaller operators and home stakers into their operator set for the first time, without requiring a bond. They onboarded solo stakers from 35+ countries, and began successfully proposing blocks and earning MEV rewards.

With Operation Solo Staker, ether.fi proved that they could use Obol DVs to decentralise their node operator set while achieving high levels of validator uptime and robustness. The ongoing success of Operation Solo Staker paved the way for further deployments of DVs within the ether.fi operator set. This initiative will continue to scale as we bring more home stakers online.

Phase 2: Deploying the First Restaked Distributed Validator

As one of the first protocols to enable native restaking, ether.fi also deployed the first natively restaked DVs through Operation Solo Staker.

The deployment of a natively restaked DV was key to proving that the security, resiliency, and decentralisation of DVs could be carried over to restaking without heavy migration.

Next Phase: Deploying $100M on Distributed Validators

During the course of Obol and ether.fi’s collaboration, ether.fi has grown into a leading LRP with a massive $3.4B in TVL. Given ether.fi’s focus on decentralisation as a primary objective, it’s becoming important for them to expand DVs to their existing operator set.

We wholeheartedly support ether.fi in their commitment to deploying 1,000 validators on Obol DVs in the coming days. Validators will be deployed as a multi-org cluster made up of the professional validators Pier Two, DSRV, Nethermind, Chainnodes, A41, Cosmostation, and Validation Cloud. All of these operators have extensive experience with Obol DVs, having previously participated in our Alpha testing on mainnet, and various testing programs on testnets.

This is a major step toward scaling deployments of DVs within ether.fi’s operator set for both professional validators and home stakers. We look forward to continuing our close partnership with ether.fi to ensure a strong foundation for the rapidly evolving restaking ecosystem.