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What is Obol and how does it work?

Obol is in fact a remote project consisting of a team of 10 people and tries to prevent the heavy losses of validators as much as possible with the help of multiple validators. Obol's activity will bring even more, because with the new Distributed Validator Technology (DVT), Failures in existing validators(such as double-signing) that would jeopardize the security of the Ethereum network are less likely to occur. This greatly improves its security and at the same time helps to further decentralize the Ethereum network. With the help of this technology, Obol is trying to play a significant role in the future of the Ethereum blockchain network.

What is Distributed Validator Technology?

Obol tries to act as a layer around a core that keeps that core from focusing and increases its security, resilience, and flexibility. Obol intends to do this using DVT technology. DVT is based on Secret Sharing. Secret sharing means that an important thing (such as a key) is split between several pieces so that the owner of any piece will never be able to access its full state, and in fact the full state of that thing is nowhere accessible.

But another important point is that in DVT, all the owners of those private key pieces form a cluster together. The cluster operates in such a way that each component that is playing its role separately are connected to each other through the middleware introduced by Obol (Charon). This system plays an important role in decentralization.

What has happened to validators to date is that they have to sign certificates and offer blocks with a private key. Having only one validator with a private key increases the risk on people's assets. This risk is clearly higher in the case of smaller validators. On the other hand, a company may concentrate staked assets(consciously or unconsciously), which can be risky on a larger scale for the blockchain network itself. in addition to, the infrastructure provided is not unique to all users, and one infrastructure may be used in several applications, which is another negative factor, because this infrastructure may have problems and users It can cause problems and can also be attacked and pose a greater danger. Heavy fines for Ethereum network for validators in case of Double Signing is another important issue that can sometimes threaten validators. If we want to best explain the basic responsibilities of a editor, we can mention two things:

1. Security: Keep the validator key private to prevent future problems.
2. Being online: Offline can be a precondition for a double signing and a heavy penalty for the Ethereum network.

Therefore, there is a set of negative and unpleasant points that can be eliminated by multifaceted advantages. But what is the solution? There was no definite solution until Secret Shared Validators, or SSV for short, changed the rules of the game. This is the foundation of Distributed Validator technology.

Obol is one of the pioneers in DVT development for the upcoming Ethereum 2 stake revolution. From Obol's point of view, this process includes 2 visions:

• V1 - Trusted Distributed Validators: The first distributed validation version will have out-of-band dispute resolution. This means that if there is a problem with your shared cluster, you need to know and communicate with the operators on the other side.

Here different people or groups can work together to create a DV, but the important point is that in the event of a problem in the cluster, the parties must contact to each other to resolve the dispute. This version actually serves a small number of participants in a cluster with a lot of tasks. Therefore, the second version was introduced.

• V2 - Trustless Distributed Validators: Here is a reward-driven trend. This means that the more active and available you are, the more rewards you will receive, and if you are offline and do not play a role in validation, you will not receive any rewards. This motivational process solved many existing problems. This motivational process can also be improved in future.

Okay, let's take a look at the DVT provided by Obol:

A distributed validator is a validator's public key on the Ethereum network that works active/active through the use of distributed validation technology. A distributed validator node is a collection of clients that a moderator must configure and run to perform the functions of a distributed validator moderator. An operator can also run backup runtime and consensus clients, runtime payload forwarding such as mevboost or other monitoring or telemetry services on the same hardware to ensure optimal performance.

A distributed validator cluster is a collection of distributed validator nodes interconnected to serve a set of distributed validators generated during a DVK ceremony.

References:

1. Obol Ducuments
2. Distributed Validator Technology on Eth2

Distributed Validator Technology (or DVT for short), is a new infrastructure primitive that enables the distribution of validator keys between independently operating validator instances, enabling Active Redundancy in Eth2 infrastructure deployments. Imagine a world where it becomes nearly impossible to steal the authentication key because of the applied cryptography. You can think of this as an iteration in the resiliency of your validator setup, allowing your validator to behave like a multisig, eliminating single points of failure, including obsolescence. uptime and compromise the authentication key. The threshold signature schemes used, which allow a fraction of instances to work offline (e.g. 2 out of 7), provide greater fault tolerance than validator configurations used today.