Obol Technologies Raises $ 6.15 Million to Create Crypto Staking Protocol

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Collin Myers, former head of Global Product Strategy at ConsenSys, has been working on a new project since April this year. He is building a “minimum trust” crypto staking protocol in his startup Obol Technologies.

Sharing the news exclusively with The Block, Myers, founder and CEO of Obol, said the project raised $ 6.15 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by Ethereal Ventures, a venture capital fund created by ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Acrylic Capital and many others.

With new capital on hand, Obol plans to expand its three-member team to around 12. The project also aims to soon launch a test network for staking on Ethereum 2.0 and support more public blockchains at the future, Myers said.

The Obol network uses Shared Secret Validation (SSV) technology, a primitive conceptualized in collaboration with researchers at the Ethereum Foundation. SSV helps divide a validator key (actually the password to operate a validator) among multiple operators. A validator is similar to a miner on a proof-of-work network, but invests funds in order to process transactions on a proof-of-stake network.

“SSV is a bit like the concept of a multi-signature wallet,” Myers said. “But now it’s applied to a validator and something we call a multi-operator validator.”

The Obol network will essentially allow staking with several validation operators. “The longer term vision here is to prevent the failure of a single operator,” Myers said. “So in the future, as if an individual staking provider or two or three providers go down, the Ethereum network should always continue to finalize and it should always continue to validate.”

Myers said he believes projects like Lido will end up migrating their validation infrastructure to a protocol like Obol. Lido is currently the largest liquid staking provider on Ethereum. Last month, Lido awarded an LDO grant of $ 100,000 to Obol to further research and build the protocol.

The Obol network testnet is expected to be launched early next year. After a successful test, the project will decide on a timeline for launching the mainnet, Myers said.

Lubin called Obol a “very important” project in a statement. He said that “soon the majority of staking in public networks will be done in a multi-vendor way, via SSV construction”.

“SSV will be a basic primitive of Web3’s information infrastructure, and Obol is uniquely configured to create the industry-leading SSV solution, having been deep in space for years,” added Lubin.

2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.

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