Obol V2: Looking Forward

From day 1, the mission of Obol has been to help establish a credibly neutral, trust-minimised infrastructure layer for web3.

To achieve this, we needed to improve the resiliency and decentralisation of all validator operators and stakers. Together with the community, we’ve endeavoured to turn all validators into distributed validators, and through our Alpha and testing program participants we’ve seen incredible momentum and support in this effort.

At the heart of this is Charon, a middleware implementation of DVT, that served as the fastest, most synergistic way to allow existing validators to transition to DVs. With that said, as we move towards our full V1 launch, it is important to start looking ahead to the future.

In our continued effort to build the Obol Network; we have begun a working group to research, specify, implement, and maintain Obol V2, the Distributed Validator Protocol.

Partnering With Nethermind: Multi-Implementation DV Protocol

Today we are excited to announce that we have partnered with Nethermind to research and develop a specification for Obol V2. The partnership enables Nethermind to become the second core development team of the Obol Network.

Together, we will collaborate on establishing a middleware specification for creating Distributed Validators, with the goal to lead to the development of a second client implementation of the Obol DV Protocol.

Nethermind is a proven engineering team that has developed a highly performant (and second most used) Ethereum execution client. They’ve done critical work for projects like Lido, Starkware, EigenLayer, Gnosis Chain, and many others. They have also performed deep research and published many articles on DVs already.

We could not think of a more qualified engineering team to collaborate with in this effort.

The Design Journey of the Obol Protocol

We will begin communicating this journey by sharing a highlight of the different focus areas that make up the specification. In the coming weeks, we will share more details and findings on the areas of research for the Obol V2.

• Epoch 1: Attributable Consensus
• Epoch 2: Attributable Threshold Signing
• Epoch 3: Proof of Access to Recent Chain State. (Ethereum Delay Towers)
• Epoch 4: L2/State Channel Full Economics Spec
• Epoch 5: Editability
• Epoch 6: Key Refresh Scheme
• Epoch 7: Encrypted Distributed Block Building

Looking Forward

We believe that establishing a credibly neutral, trust-minimised infrastructure layer for web3 is a shared vision for many. As we make progress towards protocolization, we will look to the community for more involvement, collaboration, and support.

We are still just tapping the surface of the potential of Obol. There are many areas DVT can be applied to further decentralisation, such as in Cosmos and Distributed Sequencer Technology.

To explore these potential areas and facilitate the discussion of research ideas, we’ve recently soft launched our Obol Network Research Forum. Please participate! 🤝