Obol's mission is to evolve DVT by building a crypto economic protocol and diverse community that can enable the primitive to become a sustainable public good, increasing the security and resiliency of public blockchain networks. They believes a more robust and secure Ethereum can be realized through a collaborative infrastructure protocol that mitigates correlated risk by enabling finality to happen regardless of the downtime or disappearance of a few network operators. This can be achieved by utilizing the DVT primitive, which includes cryptographic primitives such as threshold signing and distributed key generation, which can enable a group of network operators to act as one single validator together – something Obol like to call a multi-operator validator.

Distributed Validator Technology

DVT enables validators to configure clusters with active-active redundancy, an improvement on the widely used configuration of active-passive redundancy.

DVT enables a new kind of validator, one that runs across multiple machines and clients simultaneously but behaves like a single validator to the network.

This is achieved by being able to split a validator key across multiple independently operating instances and utilizing threshold signing to perform consensus duties.

Can DVT help with Decentralization?

Obol's mission is to enable and empower people to share the responsibility of running the network. If you are part of a distributed validator cluster, and your machine dies overnight, the other operators in your cluster will have your back. You'll cover for them some other time when they go on holidays for a week and their node falls out of sync. If we can share the responsibility of running nodes, we can open a new frontier of decentralisation.

Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) enables a new kind of validator, one that runs across multiple machines and clients simultaneously but behaves like a single validator to the network. This enables your validator to stay online even if a subset of the machines fail, this is called Active/Active fault tolerance. Think of it like engines on a plane, they all work together to fly the plane, but if one fails, the plane isn't doomed.

Distributed Validator Technology can increase the decentralization of ETH 2.0 or other PoS chains by dividing the one operator into smaller validators and distributing their validator signing power across a distributed collection of active redundant nodes, while also greatly reducing the probability of validator failure and associated downtime penalties.