Welcome to Obol’s second official testnet, Bia. Thanks for taking part in building the next generation of Ethereum staking.
In our first testnet, Athena, we put DVT to the test by running 200+ distributed validator clusters across the world. The performance we saw from those validators was comparable in most cases with larger institutional operators. This was the main purpose of Athena, to verify that DVT could enable better validator resiliency while also achieving better operator decentralization.
With Bia we want to take our learnings from Athena and test DVT at scale, leveraging our Distributed Validator Launchpad.
<aside> 💡 During Bia, we want to test the ability of everyone in the community to be able to activate and run high-performance distributed validators at scale.
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To achieve this, we want to activate more DV clusters globally and see how self-sufficient people can be throughout the entire process. In early December, we officially launched the public beta of our Distributed Validator Launchpad to make it easier to set up new clusters. During this testnet, we will be putting the DV Launchpad to the test by enabling the community to configure clusters fully through a visual flow.
<aside> 🎯 Our goal is to see >500 active clusters with >5000 participants activated through the launchpad and successfully running for >30d.
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We will also be stress-testing Charon, our DVT Middleware, to try to simulate as many different conditions as possible. In order to do so, we will be encouraging clusters to test with different node configurations in their DV clusters. These variables include different clients, different geographies, and different hosting environments (i.e. at-home, cloud, etc.). We want to allow as much diversity as possible in configurations as this contributes to the impact DVT middleware can have on anti-correlation, resiliency, and decentralization.
The journey of the testnet will be as follows (dates subject to change):
The purpose of Obol is to build a middleware that enhances Ethereum (and other PoS chains) as a public good. Obol does not have a token. We are looking to partner with people in the ecosystem that are looking to improve staking and the future resiliency of the Ethereum network.
As such, Bia is an unincentivized testnet.
However, with that said, we will be providing some benefits to Bia participants in other means. For some, these benefits could outweigh any pure monetary incentive.
<aside> 🎯 Bia will be the first testnet contributing directly to the Obol Ambassador Program
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We will be rewarding 1 Technical Ambassador Obol Network Credential for each of the following activities/milestones: