Client Diversity Matters: Thinking Independently Together
Devcon 6 · 14 Nov 2022 · 9:38
The speaker argues Ethereum validation is concentrated across geography, execution and consensus clients, Amazon hosting, and staking providers such as Lido and centralized exchanges. He urges stakers to weigh custody, node location, jurisdiction, hosting provider and client mix. He presents a non-custodial Sensei Node contract for Latin American nodes, although he calls it already launched before saying it would launch the next week. An attendee disputes the slide’s treatment of Lido; the speaker acknowledges its 28 node providers but cites a potential smart-contract failure point, and says the contract had undergone two audits.
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From Devcon 6, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.
Transcript
foreign [Music] thank you for joining us so I'm Pablo as Juan David said and I'm going to talk about client diversity so um this is the clearest image of the universe that it was taken by Telecom web like three months ago uh so imagine if instead of this the universe will be like this with a lot of black hole doesn't make a
lot of sense right well that's that's exactly how we humans collaborating in the ethereum validation of the network are working together like uh most of the notes uh worldwide are in Europe and in the US and very few in other regions so for geographically decentralization is super important from all of us to to make sure that we collaborate and make a better Network together if if you go to ethernotes.org you can see that in the top 20 countries you know number one is the US and there's no single country in
Latin America or in or in Africa uh as a stop as top 20 in in notes in the in their regions then we have a second centralization point which is with client as you know most of the notes are hosted with a get and prism in execution and consensus clients which is also a kind of centralization so first we have geographically centralization secondly uh client centralization and then we have the Amazon centralization most of the 50 of the nodes were wide are hosted in Amazon web
services so again at the end of the day we are building a decentralization network super centralized in this case in Amazon so is the third centralization point and then we have the fourth one which is uh the providers of staking worldwide as you know most of them are concentrated um in Lido and centralized exchanges like like uh coinbase Kraken binance so again uh we think there's an opportunity to to change all of this together um so this is a little bit what is going on right now
um in terms of of no deployment worldwide so um my talk today is to bring awareness and Consciousness on how important is to really think when we stake uh to take uh to take care of these four different pain points and what we can do is make conscious choices like make sure where you stay your eat you know if you if you can do it with a non-custodial solution a decentralized solution where are the notes of that node operator hosted um Diversified jurisdiction is also super important as you know what
happened with tornado cash a couple of months ago in the US so again diversity is so important here also with hosting providers and execution um and consensus layers so what we are doing uh last minute what we are doing from Sensei node we are the first and only node operator in Latin America so we just launched a smart contract uh a non-custodial solution where anyone can deploy a node in the region so basically you just connect with your metamask wallet and you can send 32 each and have your node uh in
Latin America helping diversity of geographically diversity also data center diversity in Latin America the data center industry is super fragment which means that there are a lot of local and Regional providers so we work with all of them to make sure we promote the centralization so with that smart contract a certify of deposit we are giving an nft where you have your 32 each plus all the rewards generated and it's also the liquidity that can be selling any nft Marketplace so this is our approach to decentralization and how we want to help
um so yeah so now thank you very much and I'm happy to be here thank you Paolo we have three to four minutes for any questions why is important diversity client diversity geographically and in general uh good day I only wanted to know that you can't you unite all the validators to the light or coinbase because light is different validators and coinbase uh don't share who is the sub workers for uh validate the theme to nodes so on your slice it slide it's like 29
percent mostly it's like more than 30 different validates there inside light or you say it's not the light it's like Unity of independent validators yes they uh that's correct but you're talking about life in particular that they have 28 different node providers yes and coinbase have the same situation only they don't have uh clear information on the public sites yeah in the case of Lido yes they work with different no providers but there's a single point of failure in the smart contract potentially yeah but you okay okay but I think that this screenshot that is on your
presentation is not correct that's only my you know which one this one yes uh is taken from huh sorry so well you can yeah you can tell Julian that it's not a correct slide but it's over there hello oh nice hi thanks so much for uh this talk I wanted to ask you who are the sorts of people you're finding in Latin America that are beginning to run nodes for the
first time are beginning to stake and what sort of um is this in any way helping with adoption or is this mostly like for technical people um and I asked this question because I'm trying to do something similar in the Middle East thank you you're welcome um so nowadays as you know worldwide there are many node operators but we are the the only one deploying notes in the region and also for centralized exchanges in Latin America we have a lemon bits or ripio and they do not offer staking Services yet okay so that's also a constraint because most of Latin American users are on
those exchanges and they start the second service is not in in their in their wallet or exchanges so I think this will change in the next six months eight months probably when when the when the the exchanges that concentrated most of the Latin American uh people uh will be available to stake one more question we still have time those are the perks to be the last one they can go a big upper the clock here hi and I would like to I would like to now
um how every time if you're a smart Contour being audit updated for security yeah we have been through two audits one of them with coinspect and yeah and we are we are launching next week this smart contract so we are just starting with it yeah coin inspect is your auditor foreign s okay all right Pablo thank you so much we need to improve that map to have more points below
absolutely thank you you're welcome big round of applause for Pablo thank you thank you