Definition of Fault Tolerant Staking (FTS)

On the Ethereum Network, the Obol Network is a Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) network that enables the supply of trustless infrastructure.

Without the need to integrate numerous providers or build complex infrastructure configurations, institutions, self-stakers, and pool operators can establish superior fault tolerance, resiliency, and robustness in their own staking settings. Obol is designed to encourage network operators to collaborate, allowing for a much-needed economic paradigm shift in how blocks are submitted and validated on Ethereum.

• Obol's main goal is to create trustless validation for public networks as a permissionless good.
• Obol isn't meant to be used as a staking pool; it's meant to be built on top of.

Some advantages of FTS:

• Using Secret Shared Validators (SSV) technology, Obol Network provides trust-minimized staking on Ethereum. SSV is a novel infrastructure concept that allows a validator key to be shared amongst many independently operating validator instances, allowing for Active Active redundancy in Eth2 infrastructure installations.

• This enables your validator to function as a multisig, reducing single points of technological failure such as outages and key theft.Instead, SSV splits a single Ethereum validating key among four or more eth2 beacon node instances, allowing them to reach an agreement on what should be signed by the validator.

• Threshold signature approaches are utilized, which allow for a percentage of the instances to be offline (for example, 2 of 7) and so provide better fault tolerance than current validator setups. The whole private key for a validator never exists with a divided validating key.

What are the disadvantages?

• It's complicated to how the Ethereum network penalty for shareholders in a split key will be calculated, if more than one-third of the validators are offline.

• When more than a third of the validators are unavailable potentially, it's possible that the past's troubles have not yet been fully resolved.

What problems FTS might help solve.

Individual stakers and staking providers, as well as the Ethereum protocol itself, gain from widespread usage of SSV. Centralized ETH staking is a serious issue due to the considerable financial and technical costs associated with running a validator. ne of eth2's goals is to allow as many users to run validators and join the network as feasible. Given that the 32 ETH staking barrier implies an initial investment of more than $100k per validator, however, there is still potential for improvement. The health of Ethereum is threatened by centralized staking in two ways:

1. The protocol's key aggregation rules force users to entrust their stake to a single operator, facing severe fines.

2. When a staking service controls more validators, the broader the impact across the entire network will be if they fail as a group. When substantial portions of a network go down at the same time, it can invite coordinated attacks, resulting in the chain's failure to complete.

Anyone who meets the Obol Network's labor criteria can run eth2 infrastructure without using their own ETH and earn a portion of the ETH rewards generated by the validators they assist. This will make eth2 the world's most decentralized and secure network, allowing nearly anyone to run a node.

Sources:

• https://docs.obol.tech/docs
• https://medium.com/@viktorbunin/advising-obol-114f66d1bd