Hello hello. How's the sound?
We have a big crowd or a big group of speakers today.
I guess we'll slowly kick it off and we'll slowly get into it and let more people join and see how it goes.
So the call today is I guess it's quite a loose discussion of SimpleDBT in general, both in general and then from a LIDO perspective, LIDO contributor perspective.
We'll start the discussion on SimpleDBT, speaking primarily with Will and Perry, who will introduce themselves next.
And then we'll follow this up by a talk on the Community Lifeguards Initiative, which was launched by the LIDO grants organization a few months back.
So we'll talk about, I guess, how this got up and running, how it's going so far, if there are any exciting experiences or events that can be shared.
And then, yeah, I guess we'll talk about what's next for all of us in 2024. So start the year strong.
So let's start with a quick round of introductions. We have a few of us here. Will, do you want to kick it off?
Yeah, sounds good. I'm Will. I'm a contributor to the LIDO DAO in the node operator mechanisms work stream.
Basically, this is the work students responsible for helping with node operators, both the existing curated set, also LIDO on Polygon and LIDO on Ethereum,
and then also very involved with things related to perspective node operators.
So whether it comes to the curated set, simple dbt, and the future community staking module, we spend a lot of time on all of those things and everything related to validator policy.
Thanks, Will. Hey, everyone. I'm Perry, a sparkling. I'm also a contributor on the node operation mechanisms team working alongside Will and some of the initiatives that he mentioned.
Eridion, do you want to introduce yourself next?
Oh, yeah. Hi, I'm Eridion. I'm the community staking lifeguard coordinator. So work with the community lifeguards to promote everything around getting more homestakers, solo stakers,
people involved with LIDO to move from the idea of a curated set to permissionless set. And how do we get there? That's what we're trying to achieve.
Isaac, do you want to join or go next?
No, I'm Isaac. I'm one of the community lifeguards alongside Eridion and Sam. And just like how Eridion said, we are focused on growing the amount of solo stakers here in LIDO.
Hey, guys, this is Sam, AKA Stakersaurus. So I am also one of the community lifeguards.
And basically, I create content and work on initiatives, often with other local web3 communities in Southeast Asia to expand the talent pool of
theorem node operators in this region. My mission is to empower solo stakers and to allow them to harness node operations as a skill set to uplift the less privileged.
So together with Eridion and Isaac, we cover a broad range of geographies to really expand the pool of solo stakers.
Hi, everyone. My name is Luca. I'm the CEO and founder at Serenita. We are a staking as a service provider. We run like minority clients only because of the current super majority situation we're having.
And yeah, we are taking part in the simple DVD trials with LIDO.
Perfect. Thanks for that solid lineup we have here today. So we'll make a phone call. So I stated we'll start with a quick discussion on simple dbt and how that's going.
And I think none better to present this than Mr. Simple dbt himself will.
For those of us completely new to this area of Ethereum, can you give us a quick TLDR on simple dbt?
Yeah, sure thing. I'm taking it high level, right? So dbt or distributed validator technology. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but for those that don't know, I think the best way to think about it is like using a multisig to run a validator.
So instead of one person in one node being responsible, you have multiple parties and multiple nodes contribute to coming together in consensus to run a validator. There's a lot of benefits to like potential benefits, at least to decentralization.
And all these different nodes can be in different geographies. They can be using different kinds of infrastructure types. So, you know, one person could be in the public cloud. One person could be in a bare metal data center. Two people could be running from their homes.
So you have a lot of infrastructure, redundancy from that perspective, and then they all could be using different clients as well. So lots of benefits here. And in general, when it comes to the Lido side of things, we've been running dbt test nets for the past couple of years. Lido provided grants via the Lego grants org about two and a half, three years ago now to both obel and SSV. And we've been paying a lot of attention to the dbt space because, you know, there's a lot of benefits here.
This seems to be making like a lot of sense in terms of how validators will be run with a lot more resilience and then decentralization benefits in the future. So the simple dbt module is the upcoming second module pending Dow vote.
That will be deployed to the Lido protocol. This basically combines groups of node operators using both oval and SSV based dbt to run validators through the protocol.
So the simple dbt module is using clusters with seven people total of these seven people, five people need to keep their nodes active for the validators to come to consensus, which is really great from a redundancy perspective. And it's really great because we're now able to include solo stakers, community stakers, in addition to professional node operators that people are generally familiar with when you consider the Lido curated set.
It also benefits from the things I talked about from a decentralization perspective, because now we're able to combine people running validators from different countries. In some cases, different regions around the world completely.
People are able to use different kinds of clients. And so there's a whole host of benefits that we can see here. In general, we're running two test nets.
Currently, the oval one is wrapping up and all the validators have just exited in the last couple of weeks. The SSV trial is ongoing. And we had over 350 participants across both of them. About 196, I believe finished on the oval side. We have about 180 something that are participating on the SSV side currently.
And we're going through the process to hopefully get as many of these people onto mainnet running validators via the Lido protocol within the next month and a half, two months. So we can talk more about timelines and everything. But yeah, that's the high level one. I'm simple with you.
Awesome. Sounds good. We share more context on like, who are these people? Who are the people that participate, make up these clusters?
Yeah, so it's been it's been really encouraging. There's a ton of interest. We received hundreds of applications to participate for these first two simple, simple dbt specific test nets.
In general, on the oval side, there is over 100 solo stakers and community stakers that are participating. The balance then is filled with generally more professional node operators as well. Within the clusters themselves, we've really strived to have a balance within the clusters.
And so this is like, from my perspective, pretty important because, you know, people in general, I think at the beginning, there was some thought like, okay, Lido is going to bring in dbt, but they're going to have, you know, the entire consensus filled by curated node operators.
And that's really the opposite of what we've done. There's one Lido and Ethereum curated node operator in each cluster. But that means that you need four people that haven't gone through that curation process to actually come to consensus.
And combining that with the fact that, you know, over 100 of the almost 200 participants are actually solo and community stakers. It's a it's a really huge percentage of the participants that are running these validators just personally.
And, you know, their hobbyists, they're interested in furthering the decentralization of Ethereum. They want to participate in this via dbt, which is a really great way, great way to get started running validators.
So I believe that there is generally per cluster, the one solo or the one curated node operator, generally two to three community stakers or solo stakers per cluster, and then usually about two other professional node operators that are in all these clusters.
That's the same for both oboe and SSB. In general, in terms of like the way clusters were formed, there was a focus on keeping people within the same regions because latency is generally a limiting factor.
And in terms of performance. But we do have a bunch of cross continent clusters as well. There's a blog post that'll be coming out in the next week or so discussing the wrap up of the oval trial.
And it's pretty exciting to hear that we had participants from every single continent except for Antarctica. So hopefully we'll get that one soon. But that may be the next test.
It's a little a little disappointing to not have Antarctica included, but we're working on it.
You mentioned SSB and oval a few times. Can you touch on them and who they are and what their role is?
Definitely. So oboe and SSB are both the main dbt providers that exist. Currently both are starting to scale on mainnet.
There are a couple other dbt providers as well. SafeStake and Diva. But the oboe and SSB teams have really spent the last couple of years refining their technologies.
And honestly, the performance for both has been really, really solid. We spent the last two years running test nets with these teams and just the progress that they've made in the last two years is pretty huge.
So, for example, in the last test net, we didn't have any boost to test. We're now testing that with with oval and SSB and performance at the end of it was really, really solid.
We're still undergoing the test net for SSB. But in the case of oval, for example, you know, they achieved all of the minimum benchmarks and SSB is currently tracking to do the same, although we're still a little earlier in that process.
But I'm definitely confident that they will surpass them as well.
They both have different flavors and there's pros and cons, I think, in general to both of them and less, less pros and cons, but maybe areas where they have different advantages.
But in general, both really do a great job of adding additional redundancy to validators and also do a great job of helping us to further decentralize the participants that are running validators via the protocol.
Got it. That makes sense. Let's see. We have both SSB and oval listening in. So, yeah, thank you for joining and go follow them if you don't already.
And so circling back a bit in the recent blog post that I think you helped author, you mentioned a or you touch on a phased rollout for simple dbt.
Can you expand on this? And yeah, why we're taking this approach to launching it?
Yes, for sure. So the main intentions with the simple dbt module were sort of two things.
It's one to battle test running dbt on mainnet via the protocol and then two to add many more node operators to the protocol because dbt really allows us to do this in a trust minimized way that just running a normal vanilla staking setup doesn't.
So for the phased approach, the proposal outlined a few key aspects.
The first is this testnet phase that is currently in progress. All participants that would like to participate on mainnet need to participate in the testnet first.
So, like I mentioned, the oval test and it's now wrapped up. They've surpassed all the benchmarks. The SSB testnet is in progress.
That should hopefully be wrapped up by the end of February for the oval side.
And the steps will be the same at this point once the SSB testnet wraps up, assuming they do reach those performance benchmarks, which I think they will.
The Lido node operator subgovernance group, which is the subcommittee of the Dow that's responsible for helping the Dow onboard new node operators generally.
And in the past, this has always been for the Lido on Ethereum, the Lido on Polygon, Lido on Solana curated sets.
But now we'll be expanding to simple dbt as well. So the LNSG will examine the performance of all the participants, all the clusters, the aggregate across all these participants and the technology running in this testnet.
They'll also be looking at qualitative factors that the participants provided through surveys, so figuring out where people are running their validators from, what clients are able to support, what kind of infrastructure they're able to launch on.
And collecting all this, the LNSG will propose 12 clusters for both oval and SSB each, so 24 total, to the Dow, to onboard in the first stage that'll go to mainnet.
If there's no issues from the Dow after a week, there's a committee called the Simple dbt module committee that will add these clusters to mainnet.
And once they are ready to go, raise their key limits each to five validators. So we'll have 24 clusters with at least six net new node operators per cluster.
That's about 144 new node operators to Lido that will be added likely within Q1, hopefully within March. That's the goal.
That would be a massive increase versus the 36 current active node operators that are on the Lido and Ethereum curated set.
If after 30 days performance looks good, we'll raise key limits for these 24 clusters, probably somewhere in the 10, 15, 20, 25 range.
That is still being determined and will very much depend on what the performance looks like from these clusters.
But then importantly, we'll also add probably another 20 clusters.
So at that point, there will be almost 300 new participants coming into the protocol within, you know, maybe three months of launch.
And so at that point, we can we'll continue monitoring performance updates will be given to the Dow and as performance is monitored.
And we see how many participants are in the pool from test nets that come in the future will add more clusters and raise key limits.
There's also a phase that will take place basically after a few months where we're able to monitor performance on mainnet.
And this introduces the something we're calling advanced node operators.
But this is really just a categorization for node operators that have performed on the test nets, they've performed on mainnet, haven't had issues.
And if they've had issues, been able to resolve them quickly, generally cooperative within their clusters,
because there is a fair amount of coordination in the DB cluster that needs to take place with all the different members to come to consensus that there's anything that needs to happen.
So this categorization will basically be for highly performing operators.
If a cluster has over 50% of the node operators within it with this categorization of advanced node operator, then key limits can be raised a lot further.
The proposal talks about somewhere in the realm of 100 validators, which is really, really a material amount of validators for seven people to be sharing.
When you consider that this is open for anyone to join as long as they just have a bit of experience, they come, they participate on a test net.
And now you're running mainnet validators via the line of protocol in a DB cluster that basically is impossible without the technology that Oval and SSP provide at this point.
It's a really great opportunity for people to come into Ethereum and run validators in a meaningful way.
Okay, so you mentioned it being open for anyone to join.
Out of curiosity, what would be the motivation for people to join this or for the solo stake of community stake to jump in and take part in a simple TV team module?
Is it mainly ideological and wanting to contribute to the decentralization of Ethereum?
Is there a fee element or reward element?
What's the motivation here?
Sure, so there's multiple elements, and I think it very much depends on the individual themselves and what is important to them.
So there's definitely huge benefits to the decentralization of the network and furthering the decentralization of the LIDO protocol,
bringing in this many net new node operators to the protocol is extremely meaningful, right?
Thinking that we could have 300 plus net new node operators within six months versus a base of 35 would be a really huge achievement.
And I think a great first step for DVT on LIDO is more scalable and more permissionless modules are introduced to the protocol that also run on DVT.
From a node operator's perspective, if that's not enough, you are performing a service.
That service is running a validator.
And so there are network rewards that can be generated just from like running a validator.
So that's also definitely a factor for some people.
Got it. So you heard it here first, everyone.
Send Will a message and get on board it.
Is there anything else you want to touch on regarding the testnet status?
Yeah, I think I'll just highlight on the OBL side.
So I've mentioned that that testnet is now complete.
We'll have a blog post with a lot of information going out next week on this testnet.
And once the SSV trial is wrapped up, we'll do the same for SSV.
But just wanted to call out that the OBL trial.
So for both OBL and SSV, there's a series of minimum testnet success characteristics that needed to be achieved.
This basically included uptime of over 95%, a block proposal success rate of over 70%,
and then the network attestation effectiveness rate, which was related,
like surpassing the average of the network attestation effectiveness rate, which was about 79%.
So OBL beat all of these.
Uptime was almost 98% versus the 95%.
Block proposal success was 71% versus the 70%.
And attestation effectiveness was 85% versus the 79%.
So really, really encouraging.
The block proposal success rate, we had a bit of a saga,
which we've talked about in the forums, and you'll be able to read more in our report, in OBL's report.
A lot of this is related to just the early stage nature of Halesky.
This last testnet was actually the first testnet that any DVT or liquid staking provider has had on Halesky.
So there was a bunch of learnings that we had to take from that and a lot of help from great partners on the relay side,
like Eden, Flashbots, and Titan, who deployed infrastructure on Halesky,
Protofire, who deployed safe with a grant from LIGO.
And so in general, it was a really great experience.
Eager to get the SSV1 wrapped up and then on to Mainnet, hopefully within the next month.
But yeah, I think that's all I'd have to share.
Exciting. Thanks for that.
So I guess this question might be more suited to what's Harry.
So what's next here? What can you tell us about the next testnet?
Yeah, for sure. So we'd love to have as many solo stakers participate in the upcoming testnet.
So just to kind of share some info around that.
We're aiming for OBL testnet number four to start in March or early April.
So definitely keep an eye out.
We'll have an interest form and an application that we'll be sharing over social media.
I think this is a great opportunity for any solo stakers who want to get involved with this testnet,
who didn't get the chance in the past or did participate in previous testnets.
I think it's really nice because the last testnet we had,
testnet number three was the largest testnet with 32 clusters.
So we're actively looking to have as many people participate as we can.
And then just some thoughts on being best suited for this testnet.
We'd really ask all the solo stakers to have some prior experience running OBL and SSV validators.
If not, it's not that big of a deal.
There's a lot of resources that exist to help you get set up.
So I want to do a quick shout out to Aridian.
He recorded the OBL validator setup and the SSV validator setup as part of the Lido community staking education series.
So if anyone's a solo staker and wants to get set up with that,
please watch the videos on YouTube and we can definitely link them out.
And yeah, just keep an eye out for any interest forms.
We're going to get started in late March and early April.
And this is a great opportunity for solo stakers to participate and potentially get onward onto mainnet
as SimpleDVT makes this push to mainnet.
I guess that makes for a smooth transition to the community lifeguards initiative
and the work that not just Aridian, but a number of people on this call have been accomplishing over the last few months.
And yeah, I guess we can start with you, Aridian, if you're up for it.
If you can tell us a bit about the community lifeguards initiative.
I guess what the objective was, why it's important to the Lido DAO.
And yeah, I guess what we're trying to achieve here.
Of course, yes. So yes, I said at the start, the community lifeguard initiative was conceived to kickstart a community.
So the phrase I use at the start was like, you can't really have a community if there's no reason for people to join and nothing for them to do when they get there.
So going from Lido as a creative set of operators with mostly professionals and kind of companies and moving to a model where it's more permissionless
and people can join and there's a lot more support involved around education of solo stakers and things like that.
So the community lifeguard proposal encompasses lots of those things, starting with lifeguards in different regions.
We've got myself in the Europe region and Asia and the Americas.
So trying to cover a lot of geographies as well to make sure it's as spread out as possible and covering different languages and different styles of education from videos to blogs.
So yeah, it's just about hopefully showing people that being a validator and being part of the Lido operator set is possible.
And the goal being that if you're already a solo staker and you have your machine, that you would be able to validate for Lido in addition to solo staking.
So increasing the resilience of the network even further.
All right. I guess for everyone who's new to the community lifeguards initiative, Iridium has a wildly popular podcast up on the Lido YouTube channel, which I encourage you to go check out.
Taking it back, one step. Can you tell us a bit about, I guess, your entry into not just Ethereum, but the staking space?
Yeah, of course. So it was probably about two years ago now, it was learning about Ethereum and crypto in general.
And as I'm sure everyone feels when they get into crypto, I was very late to the party.
I felt like everything had already been happening five years before I joined and I was just reading about it.
But there was this upcoming thing called the merge, which was actually happening right then.
And I was able to get involved in test nets.
So some of the kiln, I think it was a Robson test net for the merge.
And I was able to get involved with that through Eath Staker.
And through that just continued my experience onto mainnet and wrote a bunch of documentation around that, the stake knowledge base.
And just from there, carried on looking at ways for people to expand and continue, particularly solo stakers, how to level the playing field with professional operators.
So not just kind of get left behind or be told like, oh, you can only be performant if you're in the same AWS data center as everyone else.
So just breaking down some of those misconceptions.
But yeah, mainly to encourage solo stakers so that there was more in a year's time than there was right now.
That would be that's been my goal.
And now, after having been here for a few years, do you still feel like you're late to the crypto party or?
But that doesn't mean there's not a lot to do.
No, I think it's just that there's always like new narrative and new things, particularly around DVT was a big area that was up and coming over last year.
And it was particularly being on mainnet now that's just starting to see some of the utility.
So, for example, simple DVT couldn't have happened without that.
So it's all starting to come together now.
I think that that will just enable a huge number of solo stakers and home stakers to participate with the biggest barrier being the the ETH to to become a staker with Lido able to solve that part of the problem.
Yeah, education and actually encouraging people and having public platforms like this where everyone can learn about it.
That's that's what we need more of.
And we're well on our way, I think.
And I guess let's let's extend that same question to to the new community lifeguards, Sam and Isaac.
Do you want to talk about how I guess how you got involved with this and what your experience has been like so far?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.
So I think a reading was the one I read in both early and easy reached out to me to with regards to this community lifeguards independent contributor role.
And then I decided that, hey, you know, I've been doing education in Southeast Asia regarding solo staking activities anyway.
So and one of the biggest challenges in getting people galvanized and excited about running it didn't validate the nose about being a solo sticker is that incentives are not comparatively attractive as compared to, you know,
backdrop farming or like looking for the next 100 X token.
So I would say that, you know, initiatives like simple DVDs, right, provide additional incentives for news, aspiring solo stickers to take up the reins.
But the thing is, there is much work to be done to promote these initiatives to the underrepresented regions.
So it's been an exciting journey so far.
You know, we got officially on board at the end of last year.
And we're working on a couple of exciting plans that will be announced very soon.
But I would say, you know, for the people who are listening now, right, as a participant in the ongoing cohort of the simple DVD trials, I really highly recommend solo stickers or even aspiring solo stickers was still only on the testnet to participate in the upcoming course.
And there are two reasons I say this, you know, because number one is that you get to pick under the hood and acquire hands on experience on how to create configure and also coordinate DVD clusters, which is very valuable knowledge and it is highly transferable to other similar DVD programs.
And this is what applies if you are looking to use DVD tooling, such as SSV and oboe directly and and all this all the while, you know, being handheld with proper guidance by the Lido team and also the institution of the professional operators along the way.
And the second reason is that you as a solo sticker who was maybe previously anonymous, right, it is a great way for you to get to know other solo stickers and even institutional operators be reported and open up yourself to opportunities for future collaboration.
Yeah, so it's about I guess the role of community like us, a big part of it is, you know, promote all these benefits of being a solo sticker today to the region that we cover and, of course, promote the the opportunities provided by initiatives by Lido of simple DVDs and upcoming community staking module to the regions that we cover.
Sounds good. And yeah, lots of work for us to do here, it seems.
Isaac, do you have a similar experience?
Well, how do you get to be a community lifeguard?
Last year, me and some friends sort of started a small group to explore staking, so the staking experience, especially from a point of view of Latin America, for example, and how from economic and also technological barriers, but also language and educational resources.
It wasn't as easy. And we started just going around projects, contributing some we got to translate a few knowledge bases and a few resources.
And once by looking at the Lido forum, I came across the community lifeguard initiative and thought that it was quite honestly the thing we were looking for.
Just being able to first, of course, bring more solo stickers into Ethereum, but also have the resources and means to do that in an appropriate way and with the support of a project like Lido, I think was was really important.
So, yeah, that's pretty much how I came across that. I applied and like Sam said, we were on board in December.
Now we are indeed working on some some cool stuff. I think this is going to be a very good year for both Lido and Ethereum.
And quite frankly, I think the community stake initiative in Lido, more specifically, Simple DBT is probably one of the best opportunities for any solo staker to sort of jump in, have experience and grow in a way where they can even hopefully keep it sustainable without having the huge barrier that 32 Ethereum is right now.
So I would just like everyone else, really encourage everyone to have a look at it and apply. It's really easy.
Perfect. And we'll share some resources after the call for anyone that wants to get involved here.
And Luca, last but not least, you tell us a bit. Yeah, I guess circling back to the Simple DBT discussion that we had before.
Can you tell us a bit about why you decided to join the testnet, the Simple DBT, Simple DBT testnet, sorry. And I guess what the experience has been like for you so far.
Yeah, sure. So the story begins last year when we began building experience with DBT with Ogle.
We started running DBT validators ourselves at Serenica. We had a good experience with it and we wanted to join Lido in its efforts to decentralize its operations. So that's when we applied for the DBT trials, Simple DBT trials.
Yeah, we started out back in November with the Ogle testnet. I was a coordinator for our cluster. We ran a node out of South Africa.
I know that one other participant ran a node out of Asia and the rest were running nodes spread across Europe. And it was pretty interesting to see how that worked and performance was really, really good.
Despite this, like, relatively high latency between some of the cluster participants.
So, yeah, oboe cluster is wrapped up now. We're currently still running the SSV cluster.
There were a few more issues with that one, but in the end, everything's being resolved by the SSV network team. So that's going well as well.
I did want to say something about the performance. We at Serenica are currently the top performing node operator over the last week on Haleski.
And so I was wondering how good the performance of our SSV cluster was. So I ran the numbers and it turns out over the last week, Serenica missed 7% of the head votes of attestations.
And our SSV cluster that we're running through the SimpleDVT trial only missed 7.2. So really, really, really, really close.
It's almost the same as the top performing operator on the network. So that just gives us great confidence in the technology and the trial.
Looking forward to what the results are going to be like. I'm sure we'll see.
Yeah, very solid. You mentioned both working with oboe and SSV. Can you touch on the experiences of working with each one?
I guess you just mentioned the SSV results were fantastic. Are they comparable with oboe? Is the experience with both?
I don't have the exact numbers for oboe, but from what I've seen during the trial, they were definitely good and not subpar or anything.
They were comparable to the validators we run ourselves. So yeah, definitely very good on both clusters, both oboe and SSV.
Perfect. Good to hear. And a shout out to Oboe again. Still listening.
So we have some Discord questions as well that I wanted to ask the community lifeguards before we let you go, if that's all right.
So we'll start with one question that we got for Iridion. Talking about, I guess, general staking misconceptions.
What are some misconceptions that you've stumbled upon or that you've heard of that you would be interested in clearing up, if any?
Of course, yeah. So this is something I'm really passionate about, making sure that the right information is out there.
So yeah, the first big one that I'll touch on is slashing and this big scary name that it's been given to something that is actually incredibly unlikely to happen.
And the big myth is that you can be slashed for being offline, which is false, which is not true. You cannot be slashed simply by being offline.
The penalties of being offline, even with a standard validator, are very low. So if your validator is online for a day, you earn a certain amount of rewards.
And if you're then offline for that day, you lose about the same amount of rewards. Now, there is the potential that you'll miss a block in that time.
But again, a lot of proposals aren't that common, depending on how many validators you're running. Now, if you add something like DVT into that equation, then even if you are offline, your cluster, if there's four of you, for example, in a three out of four threshold, if just you are offline for a few hours or a day, then the validator itself won't even miss any attestations or proposals.
So that's something that's really important. It's that the network itself has been built to be incredibly resilient and forgiving for solo stakers and DVT on top of that makes it even more secure and easier.
So that's something that really people shouldn't be worrying about. And then another misconception to touch on is the idea of the hardware requirements.
So something that maybe professional operators kind of take for granted is like, oh, yeah, we're going to spin up another machine or another set of validators.
We'll just we'll just set up a new BPC and just start paying for that on our AWS budget or something, or we'll just buy a new hardware. It's only a couple of thousand dollars. That's not a problem.
Well, so I think don't always have that as an option. And I wouldn't even recommend it. I would say that with a single machine that cost in the region of five hundred to a thousand dollars, you can do you can validate solo validators.
You can run DVT clients, you can run multiple clients, be part of different protocols, initiatives, all with the same hardware. So that's also something not to worry about.
There are even tools like Dapnode that provide a really nice UI for for accessing that. And you can install that on pretty much any machine as open source software.
And then from that, you can just click which packages you want to install. You could be running your tekibasu, Lighthouse get, whichever you want for your client diversity, and then install the Obol package, the SSV package on top of that.
So I just really appreciate these points that staking, server staking and DVT staking is a lot safer and a lot easier than people expect. And the hardware requirements are a lot lower.
So I'd encourage people to investigate more if they're interested.
Well, that's what we like to hear. And then moving on to you, Isaac. So you're here representing the Latin American community.
And the Latin American community is currently somewhat underrepresented in terms of validators.
Can you touch on why you think this is what bottleneck might be? And I guess what you're doing as a community lifeguard to try to fix this?
Yeah, I think there's a few issues. First of all, in one one issue that's been thankfully resolved is latency in regions where you don't have as many nodes running stuff like that, you have a fair amount of latency, which affects performance and all that.
And so, thankfully, we there's a new an operator that recently joined the Lido Valley State as well and was able to spin up a bunch of nodes.
So now latency of nodes across Latin America, I think they have in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, maybe healing somewhere else. And just because of that, the performance has increased a lot.
So that's that's one part. And I think that's good. Then as per Soul Stakers specifically, I think there's a bunch of misconceptions, just like a lot of what Edie and you said.
And there's like there's not as many resources for Soul Stakers. There's more every day, of course, but there's not that many. And there's even less in Spanish.
So just imagine going down this rabbit hole in a language that's not your native language that may be a bit more complex.
That's another thing. And then, of course, there's stuff like 32 ether, which is quite a bit of money. That's like 10 times the minimum wage here in most countries around here.
And also having to buy hardware and things like that. And also even a lot of countries have power outages and some issues of that nature.
So, for example, some things that luckily have been also happening this year is about this is be coming up. That's that's solving some of the issues with the economic side, but also performance in avoiding outages and all of that for the validator.
And as per the community lifeguards initiative, we am right now doing some trainings to have people sort of acquired experience with DBT and hopefully have them apply for this or an upcoming trial if there's any upcoming.
And just in general, making a bunch of content and all that. I think we've seen or I've seen good progress with that. There's quite a bit of new operators here that are really excited to just test out some of the staking and enjoying pools like simple DBT or other protocols as well.
So the pie here is definitely growing.
Okay, that sounds good. And I also hear rumors that Will is learning Spanish, so maybe he can jump in and help here a bit.
And I guess maybe not quite last, but the question for Sam, how would you recommend someone getting started here at the running a validator joining the simple DBT testnets maintenance?
What's the next step for someone listening here that wants to take part?
Yeah, I think the first step for any aspiring node operators listening here is to get your hands dirty.
You know, there are a lot of guides, a ton of guides out there. You know, everything has his guide. I have my guide. I'm sure Isla is going to have a Spanish guide soon.
There's a ton of publicly available resources that you can just get started. And then there's even more support channels that you can seek help from.
And to be honest, being a node operator is not hard. One of the biggest misconceptions in Southeast Asia is that they think that node operators are equivalent to smart contract developers.
But that's not the case. It's fairly easy to get up to 80% of the way there. It's the final 20% of marginal improvements that is very difficult.
So once you get some basic knowledge of how to spin up your own home-based validator node on the testnet, then you can very easily just explore the DBT, the SSV tooling, the O-Bone SSV tooling.
And once you have those experiences under your belt, you can easily apply to initiatives like simple DBT. You can even take part in O-Bose, a testnet initiative.
I'm sure that GP who is listening here will be more than happy to help you. So the point is, there's a lot of initiatives that you can take part in that you will receive a lot of handheld guidance for.
And that will rapidly increase your skill level from the 80% to the 90%. So that's my general advice. Get started and then put yourself out there.
Good advice. You guys make it sound very simple. So yeah, fingers crossed we see a lot of involvement here.
And Luca, lastly for you, you mentioned the work that you've been doing with SSV and Oval as part of Serenita. Can you touch a bit more on this and I guess just in general what you're doing at Serenita?
Well, we're just the traditional professional node operators. So not that interesting, I suppose, from the point of view of solo stickers. But yeah, we've been trying to run validators through both solutions last year on Girly.
Yeah, we ended up running about 500 validators on Girly through Oval and it went great. So yeah, and we are currently an operator on SSV network as well.
So yeah, but I think this simple dbt trials is like a completely different thing. And it's very nice to see all of these homestakers participating. So that that's yeah, what I'm saying is it's just something completely different.
I really like to see this and even personally just see more like people participating instead of companies.
Luca, just to respond to that, you helped me a lot with some of the technical testing as well. So that information did get out to solo stickers just indirectly through some of the demos and trials that I did.
And Luca, shout out to you as well for the people in Southeast Asia.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's also it's all I like the initiative a lot. The only thing that I would like to see a little bit more of is client diversity, like dbt allows us to basically have a very diverse cluster in terms of client diversity.
So that hasn't been the case, I think, especially in the oval case, because there was a prepared like Docker Compose repository that everybody probably used and it used cat. So that's something that I would like to see improved in the next trial. But apart from that, really like what what is these trials are doing for the for the whole Lido sphere.
That's good. And I guess there's a lot of props to both you and surrender at the end.
I will appreciate anything.
Anything you want to add to to wrap up?
Nothing other than definitely just sign up to participate in the next testnet. The requirements really easy. It's easy to get started with the oval and SSV and would highly encourage anyone that's even somewhat interested to definitely fill out the form and and join and hopefully start running validators via the protocol on mainnet in the next few months.
Perfect, you heard it there. We'll be sharing some more resources below. Yeah, for anyone that wants to get started.
And yeah, we can take it from there. Thanks a lot for joining.
I guess we can give it a minute to see if there are any questions that pop up.
But otherwise, I think we're good to go. And thanks a lot. Enjoy the rest of your Thursday.
Okay, thanks, everyone. Have a good one.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you.