DVT and how it helps keep ethereum staking decentralized and censorship resistant

Transcript

check hello everyone great to be here my name is Ariel from SSV Network and I'm very excited to be here today let's begin by making some noise if you haven't heard about the term DVT hopefully there will be a lot more after this one so at SSV Network we're building distributed validator technology also known as DVD our Grand Vision is to help the decentralized ethereum with the core belief that ethereum security should be in the hands of as many people or as many entities or as many node operators as we can but vulnerable to none of them and I think this notion really set ups this stage in order to understand

exactly what DVT enables to do but I would like to start first with the question of why do we even need it so looking at the current state of ethereum it's pretty obvious that stake centralization is a big issue and a risk factor there's a few entities controlling the majority of the stake which is very problematic not only because of the amount of stake that they manage but also due to the fact that the bigger they are the bigger the systematic risk on ethereum on the ethereum ecosystem which really affects all of us also single entities are more susceptible to censorship and regulation risks I think we all witnessed a couple of weeks ago when the state came

cracking down on a kraken's staking program and due to economics of scale and staking they're just not enough incentive in place for large providers to distribute their infrastructure which really affects client diversity and contribute to potential single points of failures so what is DVT and how does it help us transition to a more decentralized ethereum so distributed validator technology is a new technological primitive in the evolving ethereum stack that enables multiple non-trusting parties to run an ethereum validator collaboratively it works by splitting a validator key into a set of key shares and distributing those key shares to operators within

something we call a cluster or a validator cluster now each operator in that cluster has a share out of the complete key and once a duty comes in they each sign it partially they all aggregate the signatures to reconstruct a full and valid duty to be broadcasted to the Bitcoin chain now each operator in the cluster has a share in a way that it doesn't have or we can reconstruct the full key which means that you don't need to have your signing key in a hot wallet anymore put it in Cold Storage follow a key management best practices it basically means that it's a lot more secure also these operators can run using different setups right like different clients different Hardware

Hardware different data centers different Cloud providers so you can achieve greater client diversity and also because that we use threshold signing and a consensus protocol you kind of have a fault tolerance built in inside of this thing so if an operator will be to go offline it will not affect the overall performance of the validator as long as the threshold is met it will continue to function as normal meaning it's a lot more resilient so with that said the benefits of DVT are pretty substantial the shift in the validator operation dramatically increase the liveness and security of the network while also significantly reducing slashing downtime and centralization risk when you compare

this to the traditional validator setups and by improving the resiliency of validators and ethereum consensus layer we can help transition ethereum into a more decentralized and secure network for the rest of us so what can you do with this thing because after all it's a infrastructure an infrastructure is supposed to be used in some way so you can build a great staking pools like liquids taking pools using DVT you can have greater operator participation meaning the risk is shared between more people um also in a way that gives higher performance and we translate to more optimized Rewards going forward going next institutions and taking a providers can use DVT to

decentralize their infrastructure and mitigate risk associated with a high-scale single validator setups but also in a way that reduced their operational costs because you can run more validators on the same setups stakers who wants to solo stake can leverage DVT to access the performance of experience and reputable operators they can choose them to manage their violators in their behalf and not have to run their own infrastructure which is a huge barrier but also do it in a way that they remain in full custody and lastly but at least Dao's groups and communities can come together and run their own validate those in a very trust minimized and reduced risk weight so now that we learned about DVT let's

Circle back to SSV SSV is not a consumer staking application it's a DVD infrastructure provider designed for building high performance secure and decentralized taking applications on the way that we decided at sap to implement DVT is as a multi-cluster DVT Network and we did it out of the notion that a safer ethereum is a multi-cluster we see the future ethereum is going to have a long tail different and use taken application this taking application will not use the same operators they'll have different operator sets a lot of variations of clusters and to support this future we build DVT as a network

and we did this by adding two more core components firstly robust peer-to-peer Pub sub network but we also added a smart contract layer on top for coordination why did we do it like this or what are the benefits of doing it as a network well in SSV operators and stakers can join the network at any time in a permissionless way using a smart contract call having smart contracts means that their zero coordination needed in case you need to manage your validate level in case you want to avoid the network in case you want to change your operator set um due to for example competitiveness of other Alternatives or for performance reasons

also being a network allows the participant of the networks to enjoy networked effects right so any tool you will develop for a specific cluster can be benefited by the entire ecosystem and I think this really reduced the development cost for across the board going for the network approach instead of an isolated one also gives you greater transparency right as a network you can see your operator performance in the validator level and not just the cluster one which means we can all make better decisions regarding who we choose to manage our operators and the best for last it's a reusable infrastructure meaning you can use the same network the same setups the same

operators over and over again and the cost of integrating SSV is practically nothing it's literally a smart contract call and I think that's pretty amazing because building infrastructure for staking it's very hard very complex it takes a lot of expertise and resources and now that we have this available this infrastructure available as a service it means that the teams building on top of SSB can focus on their business focused on their application but not on the infrastructure beneath which means that for the teams we'll build the next rocket pool it will take three months and not three years and we know this firsthand because we already have teams building exactly this in those time

frames so a little bit about where are we now and where do we come from as we started about two years ago when we received a grant from the ethereum foundation to develop an SSV node which was later than termed DVT we then formed the SSV Dao it's very important for us to be Community Driven to be transparent to have a lot of people involved and to have these levers in place for the check and balances for a protocol with this impact we on board and more than 40 different contributors around the world who share our passion for staking and decentralization and for the last 18 months we've been running on testnet during which we had participations from

over 3 000 operators out of which 100 of them are verified operators and by that I'm referring to a reputable and experience taking providers some of them are the biggest in the industry that are experimenting and testing this technology with intention to adopt it in the future they are currently running a test net SSV node which you can pick and try out today we also accumulated more than twenty thousand validator it was not important it was important for us not to only see that it works in scale but also that it works in par and better than the current Benchmark and I'm very happy to say that it does now around all of this time we also put a lot of focus on building a very

healthy and vibrant ecosystem around that protocol from leading staking providers from strategic Partners from staking application and as you can see behind me we already have more than 25 different teams building application dedicated to use DVT and SSV as their infrastructure which really shows that the state of ethereum which I talked about in the beginning of my talk will look a lot more different indeed in the future to come now I want to use this opportunity to call out all devs here to check out our funding programs we recently launched a 50 million Grand ecosystem fund with the goal to support teams building dvt-based

applications so if you're interested in staking if you're a serious team if you know how to execute come talk with us we would love to partner with you I personally think that with the Shanghai update just around the corner there's never been a better time to capitalize on this and get into staking so with this said um where are we going from here so as I said we this has been in the development for the last two years currently we are in the last stages of finalizing our V3 testnet launched supposed to be launched in April V3 testnet is our release candidate and with audits scheduled and underway I can safely say that Divinity will see mainnet this year and even

sooner than you might expect so keep an eye out on our progression if you want to hear more about us check out our site Marco from our team will be having a presentation later this day about DVT and liquids taking pools very clear interesting come check him out also if you have any questions or want to talk and we are having a booth or in the Dow section throughout the conference and my team and I will also be outside for any questions you might have thank you for listening and have fun this week bye [Applause] [Music]