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Is Ethereum 2.0 a new cryptocurrency? Ethereum 2.0 is not a new coin, and your holdings of ETH will remain unchanged. In terms of Ethereum vs Ethereum 2.0, Eth2 is merely an improvement to the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum 2.0 is a new version of the Ethereum blockchain that will employ staking to validate transactions using a proof of stake consensus process. The staking method in Ethereum 2.0 will replace the proof of work approach, in which cryptocurrency miners utilize powerful computers to fulfill difficult mathematical computations known as hashes. In proof of stake validators secure the network, in proof of work, miners.
The blockchain is a public record of every transaction made by every address. An address, on the other hand, is just a number; it does not reveal anything about the identity of the person using it, like a street address can. The Ethereum user is safe as long as this number is never tied to an identity.
Ethereum is modeled after some of the design principles of Bitcoin, the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency, but with numerous improvements. On a peer-to-peer shared record, a decentralized cryptocurrency maintains track of all transactions by all addresses. The Blockchain divides the record of transactions into blocks, each of which is cryptographically linked to the preceding one. Smart Contracts, code scripts recorded on the blockchain that run when certain circumstances are satisfied, are one of Ethereum's breakthroughs.
Restaking is an emerging concept that has quickly become a central theme in the current crypto cycle. However, this concept is not new; the earliest example of restaking can be traced back to Polkadot’s Parachain system. Each Parachain can have its own specific use case, governance model, and tokens, but they all benefit from Polkadot’s shared security model, meaning they don’t need to secure their own networks. Instead, they rely on the Relay Chain for security, allowing the stake on Polkadot to secure other chains.
This concept has also been adopted by Cosmos through Interchain Security. The concept of Replicated Security involves one blockchain serving as a security provider for other blockchains. The blockchain that provides security is referred to as the Provider Chain, while the blockchains inheriting the full security and decentralization of the Provider Chain are called Consumer Chains.
More recently, the concept has been brought to Ethereum via EigenLayer, and projects like Symbiotic and Karak have also emerged, actively competing within Ethereum's ecosystem. On Cosmos and Polkadot, restaking is embedded directly within the protocol, in contrast on Ethereum, restaking is facilitated via smart contracts, creating a more open market where restaking marketplaces can operate independently. Here, the idea is to use ETH, ETH LSTs, or ERC20s to secure other networks, known as Actively Validated Services (AVS), in order to earn additional yield while accepting additional risks, such as slashing (which would come in the future). With Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap and the growth of Layer 2s, liquidity and dApps are increasingly shifting away from Ethereum Layer 1 to L2s. As a result, the core value proposition of Ethereum Layer 1 will become its economic security and large market capitalization. EigenLayer, along with other restaking marketplaces like Symbiotic and Karak, capitalizes on this by offering economic security to Ethereum-aligned external networks.
In this paper, we will provide an overview of the restaking market on Ethereum as it stands today, explore its business model and economics, and discuss the future of the restaking landscape and its challenges.
In the Ethereum restaking space, 3 prominent platforms have emerged: EigenLayer, Symbiotic, and Karak. EigenLayer has taken the lead as the first restaking marketplace to launch on Ethereum Mainnet and continues to dominate in terms of Total Value Locked (TVL), with over 4.17 million ETH equivalent.
On June 19, 2024, EigenLayer reached its peak TVL, hitting an all-time high of 5.43 million ETH equivalent before experiencing a slight decline.
Symbiotic began accepting deposits on June 11, 2024, quickly reaching its initial deposit cap of 41,290 wstETH in just 5 hours. A second cap of 210,600 wstETH was set on July 3, 2024, and was also reached within 4 hours. The last cap was introduced on August 14, 2024, coinciding with the launch of BTC deposits. These different deposit caps are clearly visible in the graph below.
Currently, Symbiotic has approximately 644,000 ETH equivalent deposited on its platform.
Note: Symbiotic has not yet launched its mainnet, users can only deposit funds at this stage.
Karak successfully launched its mainnet on October 18, 2024, marking a significant milestone for the platform. However, the protocol has attracted slightly fewer deposits compared to both EigenLayer and Symbiotic, with around 205,000 ETH equivalent deposited.
In this competitive market, despite the emergence of new platforms, EigenLayer remains the clear leader, holding approximately 6x more TVL than Symbiotic and 20x more than Karak.
A significant portion of EigenLayer's TVL is driven by Liquid Restaking Protocols (LRTs). Our analysis of the major LRTs on EigenLayer shows that they currently account for approximately 75.37% of the platform's TVL, with an all-time high of 75.46% in July 2024. This indicates that more than 75% of the TVL in EigenLayer comes from users interacting with Liquid Restaking protocols rather than directly through the EigenLayer application.
The protocols included in our analysis are EtherFi, Renzo, Puffer Finance, Kelp DAO, Swell, and Bedrock.
When examining the composition of each LRT, we can see that EtherFi is the largest LRT contributor on EigenLayer, followed by Renzo and Puffer.
There are several reasons why LRTs have become the primary liquidity source for EigenLayer and restaking platforms in general:
Looking at Symbiotic, a similar pattern emerges, with approximately 61.61% of the TVL coming from Mellow vaults and EtherFi. This highlights that a large portion of liquidity is funneled through external protocols rather than directly through Symbiotic itself.
Only about 38.39% of the total TVL has been deposited directly via the native Symbiotic app.
For Karak, the situation is a bit different. It appears that there is only one major LRT on Karak, which is EtherFi with around 17% of the TVL, while 83% of the Karak TVL has been deposited on the native app.
Let’s dive into recent movements in the restaking space. A quick look at the inflows and outflows between EigenLayer and Symbiotic suggests that large inflows into Symbiotic correspond with outflows from EigenLayer.
Based on a recent analysis from Gauntlet, covering the period from June to September 2024, approximately 1,011,000 ETH was withdrawn from EigenLayer during this time. Of this, around 170,000 ETH was moved directly to Symbiotic. However, users didn’t just transfer this amount, they added another 37,000 ETH on top, making a total of 207,000 ETH deposited into Symbiotic.
The 207,000 ETH deposited into Symbiotic accounts for about 42.20% of the 488,000 ETH locked in Symbiotic at that time, meaning that approximately 42.20% of Symbiotic's TVL came directly from withdrawals on EigenLayer.
However, it’s important to note that only 16.5% of the ETH withdrawn from EigenLayer has remained within the restaking ecosystem, while the other 83.5% has exited the market entirely for now.
EigenLayer and Symbiotic flows, Source: Gauntlet
Restaking is supposed to allow networks, commonly known as Actively Validated Services (AVSs) in the restaking ecosystem, to quickly bootstrap a validator set and get a certain level of economic security with minimal time investment.
In this model, platforms like EigenLayer, Symbiotic, and Karak act as marketplaces where restakers, operators, and AVS entities come together. However, their goals are not the same. Here’s a breakdown:
At this point in the market, very few AVSs have clearly defined how much economic security they need or how much they are willing to offer to attract operators and restakers.
Who is restaking meant for?
Restaking has not yet found a clear product-market fit. It isn’t particularly suited for high-value, high-FDV networks, as these networks are large enough to offer large incentives, manage their own validator sets, and provide additional utility for their native tokens (for example, staking the native token to earn a staking yield, rather than paying restakers who hold a different token). It’s difficult to imagine large networks like Monad or others using restaking.
That said, restaking seems more suitable for small to medium-sized projects that don’t yet have the resources to bootstrap a totally sovereign network. Restaking allows them to grow, mature and find product-market fit before being totally sovereign without relying on 'rent' payments to holders of other tokens. However, there are also some AVSs that use restaking for very specific purposes and are not intended to be sovereign, as they bring services and value to the underlying Layer 1.
EigenDA stands out as the first AVS to distribute yield to both restakers and operators. Currently secured by around $10 billion in economic security, it has become a significant player in the emerging restaking ecosystem. However, the economics of maintaining such a network pose several challenges and require a closer examination.
Yield Distribution and Economic Security
EigenDA currently offers 10 ETH per month in rewards to restakers and operators. With a TVL used for economic security of around $10 billion, the total annual amount distributed to operators and restakers corresponds to $300,000 assuming the price of ETH at $2,500. Assuming an economic security of $10 billion, this represents a gross APR of just 0.003%.
This low yield highlights a key challenge in the restaking model: balancing the need for economic security with adequate incentives for participants.
The Cost of Running an AVS
The cost of operating an AVS varies based on the specific infrastructure and requirements needed for it, but on average, we estimate the monthly infrastructure cost to run at around $400 per AVS. Over the course of a year, this represents approximately $4,800 for a single AVS. With 18 AVSs currently in the market, the annual cost for one operator to run all of them comes to $86,400. It’s important to note that this figure does not account for additional expenses such as the salaries of the DevOps teams required to maintain and secure the infrastructure.
EigenLayer currently has 340 operators running at least one AVS each. If an AVS wants to fully leverage the economic security provided by EigenLayer while ensuring that operators cover their infrastructure costs, the financial commitment grows significantly. The formula is simple:
• $400 per month per operator
• 340 operators
This results in a total annual infrastructure cost of $1.63 million. And that’s just for maintaining the infrastructure by 340 operators, it doesn’t include the incentives that need to be paid to restakers.
Cost for an AVS to cover infrastructure costs
EigenLayer has introduced programmatic incentives to maintain its TVL on the platform. You can track the yield from these incentives here. EigenLayer is distributing 16,736,467 EIGEN to Eigen restakers and operators over one year, and 50,209,400 EIGEN to ETH and ETH LST restakers. This not only supports the restaking economy but also helps AVSs to take the time to find ways to incentivize operators and restakers.
In most cases with restaking, AVSs that aren’t yet generating revenue will likely introduce a native token to incentivize restakers. This means they will use their native token to compensate ETH restakers or other ERC20 restakers. As a result, restakers who may simply prefer their rewards in ETH or a specific ERC20 token, are likely to automatically convert these AVS rewards back into their preferred tokens.
Economically, this model is fundamentally weaker than a traditional Proof of Stake system. In traditional staking, participants buy the native token, show commitment to the project, and stake to earn rewards. Since they’ve invested in the native token, they are more likely to hold onto their staking rewards longer than restakers who receive AVS rewards.
In today’s restaking market, there are also auto-compounding products that automatically convert restaking rewards into ETH to boost the restaked position, which encourages immediate selling of AVS tokens.
As slashing goes live, we expect restakers to pay closer attention to the operators they select, particularly the quality of services offered. Additionally, TVL growth will likely be driven by operators’ ability to deliver the best risk-adjusted returns.
Marketplaces are expected to become more flexible, with leading AVSs establishing caps on the amount of security they require or incentivize. The evolution of TVL numbers for AVSs is likely to change as soon as the activation of slashing and yield mechanisms will encourage each AVS to set limits on the TVL they incentivize. This implies that delegations to each AVS will be limited, or yields will be diluted, as AVSs aim to avoid paying for excess security they don’t need.
The introduction of a new security model that distinguishes between "unique" and "total" stake will reshape distribution.
We anticipate different methods by which AVSs will compensate operators for providing security:
At this stage, we believe the leading node operators will benefit in two key ways:
This change in economic conditions could impact major Liquid Restaking Protocols. They attracted substantial liquidity thanks to their own incentives in native tokens, but they now have billions in economic security to provide to AVSs, which, on the other hand, will be difficult to incentivize given the high amount to incentivize for the AVSs. What we see is the following:
To be sustainable, the best LRTs must offer at least the Ethereum staking yield and compete directly with Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs). This is why many LRT protocols accept native ETH (such as EtherFi, Renzo, Swell, etc.). Even if the restaking yield isn’t significant, users still gain exposure to an LST+ protocol, meaning they receive the benefits of liquid staking as a baseline, with potential upside if the restaking yield becomes attractive.
The Ethereum restaking ecosystem has unlocked new possibilities, enabling small to medium-sized projects to leverage Ethereum’s economic security. While restaking offers significant advantages, its current economic model and design face some challenges. As Ethereum restaking continues to evolve to address these issues, we can expect increased collaboration between AVSs and leading operators, fostering a stronger and more sustainable ecosystem for restakers.
Chorus One is one of the largest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for over 60 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Near, and others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry, offering easy-to-use, enterprise-grade staking solutions, conducting industry-leading research, and investing in innovative protocols through Chorus One Ventures. As an ISO 27001 certified provider, Chorus One also offers slashing and double-signing insurance to its institutional clients. For more information, visit chorus.one or follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram.
Our latest episode welcomes Bo Du, Founder of Polymer Labs! 🔥
In this episode of the Chorus One Podcast, hosted by our Research Analyst, Kam Benbrik, Bo shares his journey from Web 2.0 to DeFi and discusses the mission of Polymer Labs in enhancing blockchain interoperability.
Key topics include the intricacies of rollup mechanisms (OP stack vs. Arbitrum), the importance and challenges of blockchain interoperability, and Polymer's integration with the Cosmos ecosystem. Bo also explores the future of scalable infrastructure, the trade-offs in decentralizing sequencers, the economic implications of ZK technology, and the incentivization of relayers in the IBC ecosystem.
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About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the largest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for over 60 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Near, and others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry, offering easy-to-use, enterprise-grade staking solutions, conducting industry-leading research, and investing in innovative protocols through Chorus One Ventures. As an ISO 27001 certified provider, Chorus One also offers slashing and double-signing insurance to its institutional clients. For more information, visit chorus.one or follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram.
In the context of Ethereum and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) is often presented as a clear and accessible measure of validator performance. As a summary statistic, APR seeks to answer a straightforward question: If I stake 32 ETH today, how much can I expect to have after one year?
However, APR is fundamentally an oversimplification of a highly complex system. Its role as both a measure of past returns and a forecasting tool obscures the intricate dynamics that govern validator rewards on Ethereum.
For example, using APR to predict future returns is like:
- > Using a small sample of stocks from the S&P 500 to estimate the average yearly return —similar to how APR behaves for small validators.
-> Using just 1-2 years of S&P 500 data to forecast long-term returns —similar to relying on short-term APR data like 7-day or 30-day rates.
This article aims to unpack the underlying biases of APR, explore the stochastic nature of validator rewards, and propose alternative metrics that offer a more accurate assessment of node operator performance—metrics which align more closely with operational realities. Finally, we will examine how Chorus One’s approach, incorporating our proprietary MEV-boost fork, Adagio, captures a more refined understanding of Ethereum staking dynamics. By optimizing the interaction with Ethereum’s proposer-builder separation, Adagio allows us to consistently improve validator efficiency, resulting in tangible improvements in performance without relying on the variability of APR metrics.
Ethereum validators are compensated through two primary reward streams:
While the attestation process is deterministic, rewards from block proposals and MEV are inherently probabilistic. This variability introduces a fundamental challenge: APR assumes a uniform distribution of rewards across validators, which is far from reality. The skewed nature of the reward distribution makes APR a poor proxy for expected returns, especially over shorter time horizons.
The central flaw in using APR as a measure of validator performance lies in its failure to account for the randomness that defines much of the reward structure. To illustrate this, consider the following:
As these rewards are driven by skewed distributions, their mean value—a key input for APR—becomes a biased estimator. Skewness is a measure of how asymmetrically data is distributed , see e.g. here. In probability theory, the mean of a skewed distribution is a poor representation of the typical outcome. Validators who are fortunate enough to receive multiple block proposals or sync committee assignments will see a disproportionately higher APR compared to validators who, through no fault of their own, are assigned fewer opportunities.
To further understand how randomness impacts APR, it is useful to visualize the reward distribution for validators operating at different scales.
The plot above shows how reward skewness changes based on the number of validators controlled. Precisely, higher is the skewness, longer is the upper tail, indicating that the overall distribution is asymmetric on the right. The consequence is that the mean is higher than the median. MEV rewards are the most skewed (bottom-right), meaning they vary the most between validators. Sync committee selection also has a significant impact (top-left), while block proposals have the least skew (bottom-left).
What’s clear is that as the number of validators increases, the skewness in rewards drops significantly. This means larger validator sets see more consistent rewards, while smaller sets face more variability due to randomness. The same holds true even by accounting for only a smaller time period instead of the whole year data.
-> This highlights why APR, when viewed in isolation, is not a reliable measure of performance, particularly for node operators running fewer validators.
This plot shows the distribution of simulated APR assuming different number of validators controlled. It is evident how the APR becomes reliable only when the number of controlled validators is high compared with the number of active validators (purple and cyan histograms). This is because, as we saw earlier, when more validators are controlled, the skewness in rewards decreases, making APR more reliable.
It is worth noting that, the aggregate APR of an entity controlling more validators is not the APR of a single customer, usually holding a lower number of validators. In this case, the APR of the small subset is affected by higher variance as in the case of low number of validators controlled.
However, when rewards are pooled—such as in solutions like Chorus One’s ETH staking vault on Stakewise —this variance is minimized. By pooling rewards across many validators, customers gain exposure to the performance of top-tier node operators while benefiting from a more consistent and stable APR.
In light of these insights, what should we look at when evaluating a validator’s true performance? A more reliable framework involves focusing on the operational aspects that are within the control of the validator:
These metrics provide a far more grounded understanding of validator performance than APR, which often serves more as a reflection of stochastic luck than actual skill or operational consistency.
At Chorus One, we approach Ethereum staking with a deep commitment to performance optimization. While APR figures may fluctuate due to the randomness of block proposals, we have developed sophisticated tools to maximize validator returns and minimize variance.
Central to this approach is Adagio, our internally optimized MEV-boost client. Adagio improves Execution Layer rewards by optimizing the way we interact with block builders. Specifically, we have introduced latency parameters that allow us to extract higher MEV rewards without compromising slot accuracy. This gives our validators a distinct advantage in capturing Execution Layer rewards, effectively smoothing out the variability that undermines traditional APR metrics.
Moreover, our focus on uptime and effectiveness ensures that our validators consistently outperform industry benchmarks. By maintaining near-perfect operational performance and leveraging cutting-edge tools like Adagio, Chorus One is able to deliver superior returns over the long term, irrespective of the randomness that defines APR calculations.
Source: Ethereum Network
Source: Chorus One
Over the past 30 days, Adagio has delivered an 8.45% increase in MEV rewards compared to a standard configuration without Adagio.
For real-time tracking of Adagio's MEV rewards and to explore its performance further, visit our live dashboard: Adagio Dashboard.
APR, while often used as a shorthand for node operator performance, is a fundamentally flawed metric. Its reliance on skewed distributions and random events, such as block proposals and sync committee participation, makes it a biased estimator for expected returns. Instead of focusing on APR, a more reliable approach to evaluating validator performance involves analyzing metrics like effectiveness, uptime, and frequency of fulfilled duties.
At Chorus One, our focus on operational precision and technical advancement allows us to consistently deliver reliable performance. With solutions like Adagio, we enhance reward optimization, offering staking outcomes that navigate the inherent volatility and randomness of APR-based assessments.
Staking ETH with Chorus One is effortless—just a few clicks, and you’re on your way to earning rewards. No hassle, just seamless staking.
Start staking today: https://opus.chorus.one/pool/stake/
Or, speak to our team to learn more.
Learn more about MEV and Ethereum node operator performance:
MEV:Metrics that Matter
Timing Games and Implications on MEV extraction
Check out all our research reports
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the largest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for over 60 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Near, and others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry, offering easy-to-use, enterprise-grade staking solutions, conducting industry-leading research, and investing in innovative protocols through Chorus One Ventures. As an ISO 27001 certified provider, Chorus One also offers slashing and double-signing insurance to its institutional clients. For more information, visit chorus.one or follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram.
Ethereum’s continuous drive for innovation has brought us through various transformative upgrades over the years. From the transition to Proof of Stake with The Merge to the improved fee structures of the London hard fork, Ethereum has proven time and again that it can adapt, scale, and evolve. Now, the Ethereum community is on the cusp of something even more significant: the Pectra upgrade—Ethereum’s most ambitious overhaul yet.
The Pectra upgrade, poised to begin its roll out in early 2025, promises to push the boundaries of Ethereum's scalability, security, and efficiency, each focusing on different aspects of Ethereum’s architecture. These enhancements will ensure Ethereum is equipped to handle the next phase of decentralized applications and economic activity.
This introductory article will give you a comprehensive overview of Pectra, explain the rationale behind splitting the upgrade into two phases, and provide a sneak peek into the key staking oriented Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that will shape the network’s future. In subsequent articles, we will dive deeper into each major EIP, exploring their implications for both developers and users.
The decision to split Pectra into two phases—Pectra A and Pectra B—was driven by the growing complexity of the planned upgrades. To manage this scope without introducing bugs or security risks, Ethereum developers opted for a phased approach, with Pectra A launching in early 2025 and Pectra B following later in the year. This approach allows for a smoother, more controlled rollout, giving developers the time to test and refine each change thoroughly.
Pectra A focuses on critical improvements such as reducing node data storage through Verkle Trees, which will lessen the load on validators, as well as introducing "smart account" features and other staking changes, like MAX-EB.
Pectra B, while not yet finalized, is expected to include PeerDAS, a feature aimed at enhancing Layer 2 scalability, along with changes to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Each phase of Pectra comes with its own set of EIPs, aimed at enhancing Ethereum’s performance, security, and developer experience. Some key staking-related EIPs confirmed for the first phase include:
For the full list of Pectra-related EIPs, visit this link.
The Pectra upgrade is more than just a technical enhancement—it represents the future of Ethereum. By addressing critical issues such as scalability, transaction costs, and decentralization, Pectra prepares the network to handle the demands of tomorrow’s decentralized applications.
In the following articles, we'll explore these EIPs in greater detail. From streamlining staking operations to the benefits of "MAX-EB," we’ll examine how these changes will impact the ecosystem, particularly in the realm of staking, and why they’re crucial to Ethereum's continued growth.
Stay tuned as we unpack each EIP and see how Pectra will redefine Ethereum for the years to come.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the largest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for over 60 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Near, and others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry, offering easy-to-use, enterprise-grade staking solutions, conducting industry-leading research, and investing in innovative protocols through Chorus One Ventures. As an ISO 27001 certified provider, Chorus One also offers slashing and double-signing insurance to its institutional clients. For more information, visit chorus.one or follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram.
In the blockchain industry, where the balance between decentralization and efficiency often teeters on a knife's edge, innovations that address these challenges are paramount. Among these innovations, preconfirmations stand out as a powerful tool designed to enhance transaction speed, security, and reliability. Here, we’ll delve into what preconfirmations (henceforth referred to as “preconfirms” ) are, why they matter, and how they’re set to transform the blockchain landscape.
The idea of providing a credible heads-up or confirmation that a transaction has occurred is deeply ingrained in our daily lives. Whether it's receiving an order confirmation from Amazon, verifying a credit card payment, or processing transactions in blockchain networks, this concept is familiar and widely used. In the blockchain world, centralized sequencers like those in Arbitrum function similarly, offering guarantees that your transaction will be included in the block.
However, these guarantees are not without limitations. True finality is only achieved when the transaction is settled on Ethereum. The reliance on centralized sequencers in Layer 2 (L2) networks, which are responsible for verifying, ordering, and batching transactions before they are committed to the main blockchain (Layer 1), presents significant challenges. They can become single points of failure, leading to increased risks of transaction censorship and bottlenecks in the process.
This is where preconfirms come into play. Preconfirms were introduced to address these challenges, providing a more secure and efficient way to ensure transaction integrity in decentralized networks.
Before jumping into the preconfirms trenches, let’s start by clarifying some key terms that will appear throughout this article (and are essential to the broader topic).
Builders: In the context of Ethereum and PBS, builders are responsible for selecting and ordering transactions in a block. This is a specialized role with the goal of creating blocks with the highest value for the proposer, and builders are also highly centralized entities. Blocks are submited to relays, which act as mediators between builders and proposers.
Proposers: The role of the proposer is to validate the contents of the most valuable block submitted by the block builders, and to propose this block to the network to be included as the new head of the blockchain. In this landscape, proposers are the validators in the Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, and get rewarded for proposing blocks (a fee gets paid to the builder from the proposer as well).
Sequencers: Sequencers are akin to air traffic controllers, particularly within Layer 2 Rollup networks. They are responsible for coordinating and ordering transactions between the Rollup and the Layer 1 chain (such as Ethereum) for final settlement. Because they have exclusive rights to the ordering of transactions, they also benefit from transaction fees and MEV. Usually, they have ZK or optimistic security guarantees.
Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s dive into the concept of preconfirms.
At their core, preconfirms can provide two guarantees:
These two guarantees matter. Particularly for:
Speed: Traditional block confirmations can take several seconds, whereas preconfirms can provide a credible assurance much faster. This speed is particularly beneficial for "based rollups" that batch user transactions and commit them to Ethereum, resulting in faster transaction confirmations. @taikoxyz and @Spire_Labs are teams building based rollups.
Censorship Resistance: A proposer can request the inclusion of a transaction that some builders might not want to include.
Trading Use Cases: Traders may preconfirm transactions if it allows them to execute ahead of competitors.
Now, zooming in on Ethereum.
The following chart describes the overall Proposer-builder separation and transaction pipeline on Ethereum.
Within the Ethereum network, preconfirms can be implemented in three distinct scenarios, depending on the specific needs of the network:
Builder preconfirms suit the trading use case best. These offer low-latency guarantees and are effective in networks where a small number of builders dominate block-building. Builders can opt into proposer support, which enhances the strength of the guarantee.
However, the dominance of a few builders means that onboarding these few is key. However, since there are only a few dominant builders, successfully onboarding these players is key.
Proposers provide stronger inclusion guarantees than builders because they have the final say on which transactions are included in the block. This method is particularly useful for "based rollups," where Layer 1 validators act as sequencers.
Yet, maintaining strong guarantees are key challenges for proposer preconfirms.
The question of which solution will ultimately win remains uncertain, as multiple factors will play a crucial role in determining the outcome. We can speculate on the success of builder opt-ins for builder preconfirms, the growing traction of based rollups, and the effectiveness of proposer declaration implementations. The balance between user demand for inclusion versus execution guarantees will also be pivotal. Furthermore, the introduction of multiple concurrent proposers on the Ethereum roadmap could significantly impact the direction of transaction confirmation solutions. Ultimately, the interplay of these elements will shape the future landscape of blockchain transaction processing.
Commit-boost is a mev-boost like sidecar for preconfirms.
Commit-boost facilitates communication between builders and proposers, enhancing the preconfirmation process. It’s designed to replace the existing MEV-boost infrastructure, addressing performance issues and extending its capabilities to include preconfirms.
Currently in testnet, commit-boost is being developed by a non-ventured-backed neutral software for Ethereum with the ambition of fully integrating preconfirms into its framework. Chorus One is currently running commit-boost on Testnet.
Chorus One has been deeply involved with preconfirms from the very beginning, pioneering some of the first-ever preconfirms using Bolt during the ZuBerlin and Helder testnets. We’re fully immersed in optimizing the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) pipeline and are excited about the major developments currently unfolding in this space. Stay tuned for an upcoming special episode of the Chorus One Podcast, where we’ll dive more into this topic.
If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to us at research@chorus.one.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the largest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for over 60 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Near, and others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry, offering easy-to-use, enterprise-grade staking solutions, conducting industry-leading research, and investing in innovative protocols through Chorus One Ventures. As an ISO 27001 certified provider, Chorus One also offers slashing and double-signing insurance to its institutional clients. For more information, visit chorus.one or follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram.
We’re excited to announce the launch of our latest product, the Obol DV Vault, through which stakers can participate in the Obol Collective’s new Contributions Program. By staking on distributed validators using the Chorus One DV vault, stakers meaningfully take part in the Obol Collective’s mission—to scale Ethereum by securing and decentralizing the consensus layer. With Obol DVs contributing 1% of daily staking rewards to the Obol retroactive funding program focused on scaling Ethereum infrastructure, stakers’ contributions will be tracked and serve as a basis for future governance and ownership of the Obol Collective.
The Obol DV Vault joins our MEV Max Vault as Chorus One's suite of ETH validation options. Both vaults are built on the Stakewise V3 and support staking without any minimum ETH requirements and the optional minting of osETH.
🌟 Our customers have have the flexibility to choose between our MEV-Max Vault and the new Obol Vault. You can stake to this vault directly via Stakewise or effortlessly through our ETH staking dApp, OPUS Pool, which also enables restaking with EigenLayer or Symbiotic.
The Collective is fueled by Obol’s economic model, which directs 1% of staking rewards from DVs to ecosystem projects via retroactive funding - a positive flywheel to accelerate adoption of DVs and scale the consensus layer.
To accelerate the adoption of DVs and grow participation in the Obol Collective, those staking on distributed validators and thus making contributions to the Obol RAF will be tracked and recognized.
The aim is to encourage continuous participation and sustained support in the health and growth of Ethereum consensus. The Obol Contributions program is thus built to be fair and transparent, without arbitrary gimmicks that promote short-term interest at the cost of long-term participation.
Contributions are tracked in an off-chain centralized database, and will serve as the basis for future community ownership of the Obol Collective.
Learn more about the Contribution program at Obol.org/contributions.
Learn more about Obol Collective’s Obol retroactive funding program here.
The Obol Vault is relevant for:
The Obol Vault benefits ETH stakers by:
Users can join the Obol Contribution Program by staking ETH through our Obol DV Vault on OPUS Pool, where they can also easily track their contributions.
Chorus One validators automatically make contributions based on the rewards in gwei that are received in a day, with 1% of these going to the Obol Collective’s retroactive funding program. Each address that is present in a reward splitter will be recognized for their contributions based on the percentage of the rewards received for each DV cluster. The lowest level at which contributions are made is at the validator level which can be aggregated into addresses, clusters, operators, and protocol if relevant. For more information, visit Obol’s docs.
Chorus One is proud to be at the forefront of enhancing Ethereum’s security and decentralisation through our partnership with the Obol Collective. The launch of the Obol Vault represents a significant milestone in our mission to support the Ethereum ecosystem and we invite all ETH stakers, institutional investors, and ecosystem contributors to join us in this exciting initiative. Together, we can build a more secure, resilient, and decentralized Ethereum for the future. Let’s make Ethereum stronger, together.
For more information on how to get started with the Obol Vault, please reach out to us at https://chorusone.my.salesforce-sites.com/WebToLead or email at staking@chorus.one, or visit obol.org/contributions.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 60+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
We are thrilled to introduce our latest product, Chorus One SDK. This advanced toolkit is set to transform how our customers integrate staking functionalities into their applications. As the leading staking provider with the most extensive network support in the industry, robust security features, and comprehensive transaction management, our SDK (Software Development Kit) is poised to become an essential tool for institutions and developers, enabling them to leverage enterprise-grade staking solutions across all major networks including Ethereum, Solana, TON, Avalanche, Cosmos, NEAR, and Polkadot with unparalleled ease and efficiency.
The Chorus One SDK is an all-in-one toolkit for building staking dApps or implementing programmatic native staking into your product. It supports non-custodial staking on various networks validated by Chorus One. With this SDK, our customers can build, sign, and broadcast transactions, as well as retrieve staking information and rewards for user accounts.
Chorus One has the most extensive network support for staking in the industry. Currently, the Chorus One SDK provides support for the following networks, with plans to expand to even more in the future:
The Chorus One SDK is designed for a diverse audience, including:
By using the Chorus One SDK, our customers can easily integrate programmatic native staking, access detailed staking position data, and minting of osETH LST to offer flexible staking options to their end users.
At Chorus One, we prioritize security, transparency, and user control. Our decision to develop an SDK over a traditional API was driven by the following considerations:
Enhanced Security
Verifiable Trust and Transparency
Open-Source and Auditable
💡 Why does it matter?
Choosing the Chorus One SDK means prioritizing security, transparency, and user empowerment. With local transaction building and signing, and open-source transparency, users can confidently participate in staking activities across supported networks.
Our SDK offers a robust suite of tools for managing staking operations on various networks. Here’s a high-level overview of its functionality:
Comprehensive Transaction Management
Detailed Information Retrieval
Integrated Validator Support
Command Line Interface (CLI)
For more detailed information on how our SDK works and technical guides, explore the following resources:
The launch of Chorus One SDK marks our commitment to simplifying staking. By equipping our customers with all the necessary tools, we enable them to effortlessly integrate and deliver an exceptional staking experience to their end users.
If you’re an institution, wallet provider, asset manager, or developer looking to integrate staking into your product or would like to learn more, reach out to us at staking@chorus.one.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 60+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
This article is extracted from the Q1 2024 Quarterly Insights. To read the full report, please visit https://chorus.one/reports-research/quarterly-network-insights-q1-2024
Authors: Michael Moser, Umberto Natale, Gabriella Sofia, Thalita Franklin, Luis Nuñez Clavijo
On PoS networks, the financial aspect of staking is equivalent to the computational power committed on PoW networks. If we were to make an analogy with PoW, shared security could be compared to “merge mining”, a mechanism that allows a miner to mine a block in one blockchain, by solving the cryptographic challenge on another chain.
As a generalization, shared security technologies imply, at least, one security provider chain and, at least, one security consumer chain. To guarantee security, the shared security solution must allow for misbehavior in either the provider or consumer chains to be penalized, and that can be even by slashing the capital used for security of the provider chains. Different approaches are being used to optimize for the specific needs of each ecosystem. We will review the approaches most advanced in terms of development, and highlight the incentives and risks associated with the adoption of those technologies.
Although one may argue that Ethereum has pioneered the concept of shared security with L2s - like Arbitrum and Optimism, other blockchains have been exploring “the appchain thesis” and experimenting with more customized solutions:
The motivation behind shared security is twofold:
Rollups solutions are the main contenders for Layer 2 (“L2”) scalability in the Ethereum (the “L1”) path to modularity. This strategy allows the execution, in terms of computation and memory, to be processed “off the main chain”. The settlement properties of the state are kept on the L1 chain, which pools the security of the ecosystem through its validator base, and “rolled” from the L2 in batches (thus the name “rollup”).
This aggregation of transactions helps to minimize execution costs for each individual transaction. To maintain an ordered control of the state and upcoming transactions, rollups can make use of different architectures: historically we’ve seen a growing trend of optimistic (e.g. Arbitrum, OP, Base) or zero-knowledge (“ZK”, e.g. Starknet, Scroll) rollups, both of which have achieved limited levels of maturity in their proving mechanisms.
New architectures or upgraded versions of past ideas have also taken flight in the past months. Validiums have been brought backto the spotlight with new developments such as X Layer, and a particular flavor deemed “Optimium” (that uses the OP stack) now powers contenders such as Mantle, Mode Network, Metis, etc. The innovation, however, continues to thrive. The idea of “Based rollups” was first introduced in March by lead EF researcher Justin Drake,a simple design that allows L2 sequencing to be defined by L1 validators in their proposed blocks, thus deepening the shared security model between the layers.
It is safe to say that the rollup ecosystem continues to be the leading product in the shared security environment, with a TVL of $45.49 billion (counting canonically bridged, externally bridged, and natively minted tokens). In the last 180 days, transactions per second on the rollups have dwarfed activity on Ethereum mainnet, and the number of active users (considering distinct wallets) has risen meteorically in comparison to the L1.
The idea behind shared security has captured extraordinary attention with EigenLayer, the restaking protocol built on Ethereum that has become a leading narrative within the network’s large staking community. In fact, restaking might as well become a larger sector than even the entire industry of single-asset staking. Driven by growing demand from stakers (seeking increased returns on their investments) and developers (sourcing security), the industry is witnessing an unprecedented shake up with capital flowing to secure multiple chains in aggregate. Concretely, EigenLayer’s TVL has managed to reach the 5 million ETH milestone at the time of writing.
Since we first identified restaking as a fundamental trend in our Q1 2023 edition, we’ve discussed EigenLayer at length and become deeply invested in the future success of the protocol: our research has focused on finding optimal risk-reward baskets for AVSs - total risk is not simply a combination of linear risks, but needs to take correlations into account.
As a result of our experience on the Holesky testnet and as mainnet operators for several AVSs, we publicized our approach to AVS selection. The thesis is straightforward: to identify and onboard the AVSs that have chances of being break-out winners, while filtering out the long tail of AVSs that merely introduce complexity and risk.
Much of what’s left to flesh out has to do with reward mechanisms and slashing conditions in these restaking protocols. As EigenLayer and other shared security models evolve and reach maturity, more information surfaces. Most recently, the Eigen Labs team presented their solution for the slashing dilemma (at least partially): $EIGEN. Current staking tokens have limitations in a model such as the AVS standard, due to the attributable nature of the slashing conditionson Ethereum. In other words, ETH can only secure work thatis provable on-chain. And since AVSs are by definition exogenous to the protocol, they are not attributable to capital on Ethereum.
Enter $EIGEN, the nominal “universal intersubjective work token” that intends to address agreed faults that are not internally provable. The slashing agreements under this classification should not be handled through the ETH restaked pool (as they necessitate a governance mechanism to determine their validity) but this second token, thus fulfilling the dual staking promise that the team had previously outlined. Currently, EigenDA is in its first phase of implementing this dual-quorum solution, and users can restake and delegate both ETH and EIGEN to the EigenDA operators.
Replicated security went live on the Cosmos Hub in March 2023as the initial version of the Interchain Security protocol (“ICS”). Through this system, other Cosmos chains can apply to get the entire security of the Cosmos Hub validator set. This is accomplished by the validator set of the Cosmos Hub running the consumer chain's nodes as well, and being subject to slashing for downtime or double signing. Inter-Blockchain Communication (“IBC”) is utilized to relay updates of validator stake from the provider to the consumer chain so that the consumer chain knows which validators can produce blocks.
Currently, all Cosmos Hub validators secure the consumer chains. Under discussion is the “opt-in security” or ICS v2, an evolution of the above, that allows validators to choose to secure specific consumer chains or not. Another long-awaited feature is the ability for a consumer chain to get security from multiple provider chains. Both, however, introduce security and scaling issues. For example, the validator set of a consumer chain secured by multiple providers can have poor performance, since it will grow too large.
Solving most of the concerns around Replicated Security, Mesh Security was presented by Sunny Agarwal, the co-founder of Osmosis, in September 2022. The main insight is that instead of using the validator set of a provider chain to secure a consumer chain, delegators on one blockchain can be allowed to restake their staked assets to secure another Cosmos chain, and vice versa...
With Mesh Security, operators can choose whether to run a Cosmos chain and enable features to accept staked assets from another Cosmos chain, thereby increasing the economic security of the first one. This approach allows one chain to provide and consume security simultaneously.
BabylonChain uses Bitcoin’s economic value to secure PoS chains. Specifically, Bitcoin has several properties that make it particularly for economic security purposes, prominently its large market cap, and beyond this, the fact that it is unencumbered, less volatile, and generally idle and fairly distributed.
Staking is not a native feature of the Bitcoin blockchain. Babylon implements a remote staking mechanism on top of Bitcoin’s UTXO model, which allows the recipient of a transaction to spend a specific amount of coins specified by the sender. In this way, a staking contract can be generated that allows for four operations: staking, slashing, unbonding, and claiming coins after they have been unbonded.
Blocks are processed natively on the PoS chain using BabylonChain for security first, and then in a second round, validators provide finality by signing again using so-called extractable one-time signatures (EOTS). The central feature of this key type is that whena signer signs two messages using the same private key, it is leaked.
Therefore, if a validator signs two conflicting blocks at the same time, the corresponding private key is leaked, allowing anybody to exit the staked BTC through a burn transaction.
Separately, BabylonChain protects against so-called long-range attacks by timestamping, where the PoS chain’s block hashes are committed to the Bitcoin chain. Such an attacked would occur when a staker unbonds but is still able to vote on blocks, i.e. could attack a chain costlessly. Through timestamping, the set of stakers on Bitcoin is synchronized with the blocks of the PoS chain, precluding a long-range attack.
When exploring the evolution of different solutions to shared security, it becomes clear that it improves one of the dimensions of security in PoS chains - the financial commitment behind a network, resulting in a higher cost of corruption, or the minimum cost incurred by any adversary for successfully executing a safety or liveness attack on the protocols. As a natural challenge to modularity, some networks are born with optimized solutions to how different projects would be able to leverage a validator set. That is the case for Avalanche and Polkadot, for example. On the other side, there are solutions being built as an additional layer on top of existing networks, like EigenLayer and Babylon. And there is the Cosmos ICS, which leverages IBC, and is modular enough to not form part of either of the previous two groups.
In the set of analyzed projects, two categories emerged: restaking and checkpointing. The former aims to unlock liquidity in the ecosystems, while the latter works as an additional layer of security to a protocol, without directly changing the dynamics for stakers nor node operators. In the end, those projects also have secondary effects on the networks. For example, restaking reduces the need for scaling the validator set in the Cosmos, while checkpointing has the potential to minimize the unbonding period for stakers.
Shared security can also change the economic incentives to operate a network. Particularly related to restaking, the final rewards for validating multiple networks are expected to be higher than validating only one. However, as always, return scales with risk. Shared security can compromise on the decentralization dimension of security, opening the doors to higher levels of contagiousness during stress scenarios, and it also adds new implementation and smart contract risk.
In the context of decentralized networks, shared security is the idea of increasing the economic security of a blockchain through the use of resources from another - one or multiple - networks.
Shared security can also change the economic incentives to operate a network. Particularly related to restaking, the final rewards for validating multiple networks are expected to be higher than validating only one. However, as always, return scales with risk. Shared security can compromise on the decentralization dimension of security, opening the doors to higher levels of contagiousness during stress scenarios, and it also adds new implementation and smart contract risk.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
We're excited to announce that Chorus One has partnered with E Money Network, a pioneering MiCA-compliant blockchain for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. This collaboration brings together two companies committed to driving accessibility and trust in the digital assets space.
Through this partnership, E Money Network will integrate Chorus One's OPUS software development kit (SDK), enabling E Money wallet users to effortlessly stake their Ethereum (ETH) and earn rewards while maintaining liquidity. The OPUS SDK provides a secure and seamless way for institutions like E Money to offer staking services within their platform.
For E Money users, this integration unlocks new opportunities to grow their crypto holdings simply by holding assets in their wallet. Staking ETH has never been easier - users can earn passive income without complex setup or compromising access to their funds. This aligns perfectly with E Money's mission of bridging liquidity between traditional and decentralized finance.
Chorus One is excited to work with an innovative and compliance-focused platform like E Money. This partnership allows Chorus One to expand staking services to E Money Network’s user base while exploring possibilities in the emerging RWA tokenization space. RWA tokenization, led by E Money Network, could unlock liquidity for staked assets in the future.
"We're thrilled to partner with E Money Network and bring seamless staking to their community of users," said Sam Khler, Head of Business Development at Chorus One. "E Money's regulatory strengths and RWA capabilities create exciting opportunities as we work together to make staking more accessible."
Both Chorus One and E Money Network place a major emphasis on regulatory compliance, security and building trust with users. E Money Network has KYC and AML compliance integrated at the infrastructure level, while Chorus One is a pioneer in secure, regulated staking services for institutions.
"Partnering with an industry leader like Chorus One is a major milestone towards seamless accessibility for crypto staking," said Raj Bagadi, CEO of E Money Network. "E Money Network prides itself on compliance and user security; together we can provide a staking experience that prioritizes trust and simplicity."
As the crypto ecosystem continues evolving, strategic partnerships like this pave the way for real-world use cases and adoption of blockchain technology. The future is collaborative, compliant and user-friendly - and this alliance puts that vision into practice.
Our OPUS SDK allows any institution to seamlessly integrate secure Ethereum staking into their product with up to 90% reduced development time. It comes packed with institutional features like liquid staking and restaking to maximize yields. OPUS abstracts away the complex staking infrastructure while prioritizing security and compliance. With our industry-leading solution, you can effortlessly offer trusted ETH staking services to drive blockchain adoption for your users.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
Before getting started with this edition of the Restaking Synopsis, we’d like to take a moment to highlight our uniqueAVS Selection Framework, that we announced on Thursday, May 9th!
TL;DR:
Since EigenLayer launched, operators have been busy onboarding every AVS out there. But there’s only 1 problem with that - this may not be a wise long-term approach.
We've detailed why in an article (linked below), and to summarize, here's what sets our approach apart:
🛑 No "Onboard All" Promise: We prioritize AVSs with breakout potential, filtering out those with complexity and risk.
✅ Rigorous Criteria: Our selection filters are based on strict engineering, security, and economic factors.
🎖Quality Over Quantity: Only AVSs that meet our criteria will be onboarded.
This reflects our customer-first principle and long-term vision for the EigenLayer ecosystem.
Feel free to check out the full article for more details on our AVS Selection Framework, why we're taking this unique approach, and why this approach is an important consideration for EigenLayer users.
Read the entire article here: https://chorus.one/articles/the-chorus-one-approach-to-avs-selection
🌟BONUS: Here's a meme-thread explanation of our AVS Selection: https://x.com/ChorusOne/status/1788928433461903496
OPUS Pool enables you to seamlessly stake ETH, restake a variety of LST’s and delegate your restaked assets to Chorus One on a single platform.
✅ Stake, Restake, and Delegate using just a few, simple clicks
✅ Completely permissionless
✅ Easily view/download your entire historical staking rewards report
✅ View and track your restaked asssets
✅ All on a single platform
Visit OPUS Pool: https://opus.chorus.one/pool/stake/
Your guide to OPUS Pool: https://chorus.one/articles/your-guide-to-opus-pool-stake-mint-oseth-and-restake-with-eigenlayer
As of May 10, you can claim your EIGEN, restake it (if you haven’t already) and choose to delegate to an EigenLayer Operator for future rewards!
The steps?
1. Claim EIGEN here: http://claims.eigenfoundation.org
2. Restake it (if you haven’t already): http://app.eigenlayer.xyz/restake/EIGEN
3. Delegate your restaked assets to Chorus One: https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/operator/0xf80b7ba7e778abf08a63426886ca40189c7ef48a
Note: You can currently only restake and delegate your EIGEN via the EigenLayer dashboard.
If you’re interested in learning more about staking/restaking with Chorus One, simply reach out to us at staking@chorus.one and we’ll be happy to get back to you!
Additionally, if you’d like us to share further resources on any topic, please let us know!
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
Our EigenLayer strategy is to onboard all the AVSs that have chances of being break-out winners, while filtering out the long tail of AVSs that introduce complexity and risk. With this combination, we aim to deliver the best risk-adjusted reward APY to users delegating their restaked assets to by Chorus One. The first section covers our thesis, the second our onboarding policy and the third our track record.
The EigenLayer ecosystem will have hundreds of AVSs and be the leading mechanism for Ethereum to scale and service billions of users.
We expect individual AVSs to follow a power law distribution in competency and success, similar to the patterns observed elsewhere in crypto. For Cosmos, an application-specific ecosystem similar to EigenLayer, this data-set shows 6 chains have over $1 billion circulating market cap, 16 are between $100 million and $1 billion, and 42 are under $100 million. Most Cosmos chains never achieve significant success, with market caps exceeding $100 million. The median chain barely gains traction and struggles for attention and impact. In the broader crypto market, there are ~14,000 tokens (from CoinGecko). The median token is illiquid. All the realized alpha in crypto lies in the outliers - the top 500 chains with market caps above $90 million and sufficient liquidity. AVSs will be similar - all the returns will exist in the top 20% of AVSs.
Not only are successful AVSs the exception, but there is major alpha in early participation in promising projects with no defined market value. Most AVS projects will spend significant time in a pre-launch phase where the mainnet service does not exist. Testnets are rolled out while the developers build functionality and product features. During this phase, there is no clarity on the economics of reward delivery of the AVS. There is also no market cap, token supply, or token price information to rely on. There are likely also caps on the number of operators that can be enrolled by the project developers for testing. Because of the lack of information and transparency in the market, the overall ecosystem of Node Operators (NO’s) and restakers cannot perfectly judge the project. Hence, outsized yields, can be produced. The EIGEN token delivers the best example of such an opportunity - it delivered returns to early restakers in the 30%-60% range, depending on when exactly the restakers participated and how trading markets stabilize.
It is possible (and a mistake) to onboard the entire long-tail of AVSs. Such an approach will radically boost infrastructure complexity and risk. Complexity and risk lead to the need to charge high commissions, thus reducing the risk-adjusted APY for restakers. Eventually, it accentuates slashing risk. Technical due diligence, that tests for originality and legitimacy of software work, as well as application of software development best practices has always been and continues to be the best method for filtering out the long tail, and narrowing focus on the break-out winners.
We will apply our infrastructure effort in a subset of chains that pass our strict filtering criteria. When multiple AVSs pass our filtering criteria concurrently, our internal prioritization will look at the positive signals from the projects.
Our filtering criteria focuses on evaluating the software engineering of projects. Our method for evaluation consists of 3 parts:
Our filtering criteria focuses not on the easily molded exteriors of the project - the website, the podcasts or the marketing - but rather on the hard to change signal-rich factors that usually accompany a winning project in crypto.
When multiple AVSs cross our filter and require prioritization, we will prioritize them depending on the following signals:
We’ve applied a similar framework for our onboardings across Cosmos and in our venture investments. Chorus One is the most successful validator venture investor counting early participation in Solana, Lido, Celestia, Dymension, Saga, Wormhole, GogoPool, Neutron and Osmosis. In addition, we have infrastructure certifications highlighting the care with which we operate the networks.
Cosmos is the best example of an alternative application specific eco-system similar to EigenLayer. Our selection process, applied over 6 years has consistently picked all the top 20 chains, except two. On Cosmos, we have the best track record on participating with the governance processes of application specific chains.
Our early experience in EigenLayer, which includes research on network wide risk and slashing cascades, reinforces our belief in our onboarding process. We’ve encountered AVSs with plagiarized code, closed source code, and AVSs with key management systems that would expose our entire EigenLayer setup (operator key) to attack. These experiences have made it impossible for us to follow an “onboard all AVSs” path.
As a restaker with Chorus One, you derive the following benefits with our approach:
We will never be the operator with the most number of AVSs onboarded. And that works because it is far more critical to be early supporters of the break-out successes. Here’s to finding the gems early!
Seamlessly restake with Chorus One using OPUS Pool: https://opus.chorus.one/pool/stake/
Here's a step-by-step guide to using OPUS Pool: https://chorus.one/articles/your-guide-to-opus-pool-stake-mint-oseth-and-restake-with-eigenlayer
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
The EigenLayer ecosystem has emerged as a crucial driver of innovation and expanding the capabilities of the Ethereum network. As a leading node operator, we have taken a strategic, Safety over Speed approach to identifying and onboarding some of the most exciting Actively Validated Services (AVSs) that are set to transform the industry.
Let's dive into the first batch of EigenLayer AVSs that Chorus One is registering:
1. EigenDA: Scaling Data Availability for Rollups [Onboarded]
At the heart of the scalability challenges faced by Ethereum lie the complexities of data availability. EigenDA aims to tackle this problem head-on by providing a secure and scalable data availability solution for optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups. By leveraging the restaking primitive developed by EigenLabs, EigenDA empowers rollups to access lower transaction costs, higher throughput, and robust security across the EigenLayer ecosystem.
Why we onboarded EigenDA: As the first AVS to launch on the EigenLayer mainnet, and its impressive $1 billion in total value locked (TVL), we see immense potential in supporting EigenDA and positioning it as a preferred solution for leading Layer 2 ecosystems, including the OP Stack.
2. Brevis: Trustless Co-Processing for Data-Rich Applications [Onboarded]
Brevis belongs to a class of solutions that thrive within the EigenLayer ecosystem – co-processor networks. These specialized networks extend the functionality of a stack to handle computationally intensive tasks, such as verifying complex data points for decentralized applications (dApps).
Brevis tackles the challenge of "data-rich" use cases, where retrieving and validating on-chain data can be both time-consuming and costly. By leveraging a novel "propose-challenge" model, Brevis generates ZK proofs to ensure the accuracy of its results, empowering applications in DeFi, user-segment optimization, and beyond to operate in a truly trustless manner.
Why we onboarded Brevis: Our decision to onboard Brevis as its second AVS was driven by the project's open-source codebase and the alignment with the team's vision. As a modular and efficient solution, Brevis aligns perfectly with Chorus One's commitment to driving innovation and supporting the growth of the decentralized ecosystem.
3. Eoracle: Bringing Transparency and Security to Oracle Networks
One of the biggest hurdles in the crypto industry has been the "oracle problem" – the challenge of reliably and securely bringing real-world data onto blockchain networks. Eoracle aims to address this issue by creating an Ethereum-native oracle solution that leverages the decentralization, transparency, and security of the Ethereum network.
Why are we onboarding Eoracle: As the "Data Validator" AVS operated by Chorus One, Eoracle connects node operators to compute, validate, and publish off-chain data to dApps in a secure and trustless manner. By tapping into the Ethereum validator set through EigenLayer, Eoracle represents a crucial step towards building a more robust and reliable oracle infrastructure for the decentralized ecosystem.
4. Lagrange: Cryptographically secured proofs for the Multichain Future
Inspired by Ethereum’s Sync Committee, Lagrange’s State Committee seeks to provide a robust, scalable, and shared security solution for cross-chain interoperability. This works by enabling multiple protocols to derive security from a shared security zone made up of a single, dynamic set of Ethereum nodes. Operators can deploy the Lagrange State Committees in combination with restaking through EigenLayer, to address the challenges with current approaches to cross-chain interoperability.
Why we are onboarding Lagrange: As the first zero knowledge AVS on Eigenlayer, we are excited to work with an innovative solution like Lagrange. With 15+ committed professional operators and over $2 billion in pledged security by leading LRTs, we feel confident in supporting Lagrange in addressing the security question in cross-chain interoperability.
5. AltLayer: Bridging the Rollup Ecosystem
AltLayer offers two key services that are highly relevant to the Ethereum ecosystem. The first is their Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) solution, which enables the fast and customized deployment of rollups. The second, and more pertinent to Chorus One, is their "Restaked Rollups" – a vertically integrated suite of three AVSs that leverage EigenLayer's shared security to support decentralized rollups.
Why are we onboarding AltLayer: AltLayer's Restaked Rollup solution addresses key challenges facing decentralized rollups, such as the need for a decentralized sequencer (SQUAD), a robust verifier (VITAL), and fast finality (MACH). By onboarding this comprehensive suite of AVSs, starting with their MACH AVS in this iteration, we aim to provide critical infrastructure and support to the broader rollup ecosystem, accelerating the growth and adoption of scalable decentralized applications.
6. Witness Chain: Incentivizing Fraud Proofs for Optimistic Rollups
Optimistic rollups offer a promising path to Ethereum scalability, but their security properties have been limited by the lack of clear incentives for validators to diligently search for and submit fraud proofs. Witness Chain addresses this challenge with its Watchtower protocol – a programmable, trustless, and decentralized service that uses a novel "proof of diligence" mechanism to incentivize validators to support optimistic rollups.
Why are we onboarding Witness Chain: By onboarding Witness Chain as an AVS, we aim to continue our ongoing commitment to strengthening the security and decentralization of the L2 ecosystem, which is a crucial component of Ethereum's scalability roadmap. As optimistic rollups continue to gain traction, Witness Chain's services will play a vital role in ensuring the long-term viability and trust in these scaling solutions.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, where we'll explore the additional exciting AVSs that Chorus One is onboarding to the EigenLayer network, further expanding the potential of the EigenLayer and Restaking ecosystem.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
EigenLayer recently upgraded to M2 Contract. This made it necessary for EigenPods created prior to this to be upgraded. So if your EigenPod was created prior to Stage 2, you will need to upgrade your EigenPod per the steps below. EigenPods that were created prior to M2 contract upgrades are required to have their balances reset to zero, then generate the proofs through the EigenLayer app in order to ensure proof accounting is accurate.
Note: This guide is useful for the native restaking users who want to delegate to Chorus One operator but don’t see any restaked tokens. This can happen when you restaked before the M2 upgrade. Following this guide you will start seeing your restaked tokens which can then subsequently be delegated to Chorus One
1. Go to https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/restake and connect your wallet
2. You will see a button to upgrade your EigenPod. Click Upgrade Eignepod
3. You will be shown a fee recipient warning, review the warning and click Continue
4. In case you have accrued any Consensus Rewards you might be asked to queue the withdrawal of the rewards before you can upgrade your EigenPod. Click Confirm.
5. Observe the Restaking Activated confirmation and explanation that Restaking will be available after the next beacon state update.
6. You can wait for the amount of time mentioned in the message. Come back later and hit the restake button to Restake your ETH
7. Once you restaked your ETH you can follow the steps in this delegation guide to delegate your restaked ETH to Chorus One operator
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
We are thrilled to share the latest update from the EigenLayer ecosystem – a highly anticipated upgrade that promises to provide stakers with greater control and flexibility over their staked assets. Effective today, April 9th, the EigenLayer mainnet launch unlocks a suite of new features and functionalities for both stakers and node operators.
EigenLayer M2 builds upon the existing M1 contracts that have been operational on the Ethereum mainnet. This major upgrade introduces a crucial new capability: the ability for users to delegate their restaked Ethereum (ETH) or liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to the node operator of their choice.
And as one of the leading node operators, we’re thrilled to announce that users can now delegate their restaked Ethereum (ETH) and Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) to Chorus One!
Delegating to Chorus One is a seamless and secure experience. Users can easily delegate to Chorus one via any of the following options:
OPUS Pool is designed to make the restaking process effortless for our users. Here's a quick guide on how to delegate your assets through the OPUS Pool:
You can find the detailed, step-by-step guide for OPUS Pool here: https://chorus.one/articles/your-guide-to-opus-pool-stake-mint-oseth-and-restake-with-eigenlayer
Note: Restaking LSTs with EigenLayer is currently on hold and will resume once the deposit cap is raised. In the meantime, you are welcome to use OPUS Pool to stake any amount of ETH, mint osETH, and delegate your existing restaked LSTs.
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Alternatively, you can directly delegate your assets to Chorus One via the EigenLayer dashboard. Here's how it works:
By choosing either OPUS Pool or Chorus One’s operator profile on the EigenLayer dashboard, you can seamlessly delegate your assets to Chorus One and benefit from our tailored approach, enhanced MEV rewards, and top-tier security measures.
Please Note: The upgrade doesn't yet allow Operators to earn yield for services provided to an AVS or to be at risk of slashing for Operator misbehaviors.
At the heart of the M2 upgrade is the introduction of delegation capabilities, empowering stakers to choose the node operator they wish to delegate their assets to. Specifically, the M2 contracts will enable users to deposit their Ethereum (ETH) or liquid staking tokens (LSTs) into EigenLayer through the StrategyManager (for LSTs) or the EigenPodManager (for beacon chain ETH). Additionally, stakers will now be able to withdraw their assets via the DelegationManager, regardless of the asset type.
For node operators, the M2 upgrade introduces the ability to opt-in to providing services for Actively Validator Services (AVSs) using the respective AVS's middleware contracts. However, the current iteration of the M2 contracts does not yet enable node operators to earn yield for the services they provide to AVSs or expose them to the risk of slashing for any potential misbehaviors.
In contrast to node operators who may prioritize onboarding as many AVSs as possible, Chorus One has adopted a more strategic and selective approach. Security is of paramount importance to us, and we meticulously vet each AVS before providing infrastructure support.
Our dedicated team thoroughly assesses the technical architecture and risk profile of every AVS under consideration. We leave no stone unturned, carefully evaluating factors such as the robustness of their systems, the soundness of their security protocols, and their overall risk appetite. Only those AVSs that meet our stringent criteria are granted access to our staking infrastructure.
This selective approach ensures that our users can have the utmost confidence in the management of their assets. By entrusting their stakes to Chorus One, our customers can rest assured that their funds are being handled with the highest levels of diligence and care, safeguarded by our rigorous vetting process.
To learn more about Chorus One's tailored approach to restaking, we encourage you to reach out to our team at staking@chorus.one. Our team will be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Ready to get started? Visit OPUS Pool and follow our detailed guide to easily delegate your assets to Chorus One.
The technical details of the M2 upgrade can be found in the official EigenLayer documentation, available at https://github.com/Layr-Labs/eigenlayer-contracts/tree/dev/docs. As the EigenLayer ecosystem continues to evolve, this latest milestone towards Mainnet promises to empower stakers and node operators alike, ushering in a new era of flexibility and control.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
OPUS Pool, powered by Stakewise, enables you to stake any amount of ETH with Chorus One, mint osETH, and directly deposit into EigenLayer in one flow. With the launch of Delegation on Eigenlayer you can now easily delegate your restaked position to Chorus One with a single click of a button.
Not only that, users may bring in liquid staking tokens (LST's) from any external platform, including osETH, wbETH, rETH, cbETH, stETH, oETH , ankrETH , swETH, ETHx, and directly restake with EigenLayer if they wish to do so.
Start using OPUS Pool to stake ETH. Visit https://opus.chorus.one/pool/stake/
OPUS Pool facilitates greater participation in securing the network but also allows a wider range of Chorus One stakers to earn rewards and gain access to a suite of benefits, including top-tier MEV yields, low fees, and the assurance of enterprise-grade security, among others.
Opus Pool brings in a host of benefits for users. Let’s take a brief look at what you stand to gain.
1. Stake any amount of ETH and mint osETH
OPUS Pool enables a user to stake any amount of ETH (no 32 ETH minimum requirements) and receive rewards instantly. Additionally, users have the ability to mint osETH, a liquid staking derivative, and use it in DeFi or deposit into EigenLayer to gain additional rewards directly on OPUS Pool in one go.
2. Low Fees
OPUS Pool sets itself apart from current liquid staking protocols by offering users the advantage of highly competitive staking fees. At just 5%, our fees are among the lowest in the industry, making it more accessible for a broader spectrum of users to stake their ETH and earn rewards.
3. Top-tier MEV Rewards
As pioneers in MEV research, our latest ace, Adagio - an MEV-Boost client, allows for more efficient interactions with Ethereum’s transaction supply chain, directly enhancing MEV rewards for stakers. Fully integrated with OPUS Pool validators, Adagio ensures that anyone staking on OPUS Pool can benefit from these increased MEV rewards.
Want to learn more about Adagio and its mechanics? Read all about it here.
4. Restake osETH, stETH, cbETH, rETH with EigenLayer in One Go.
OPUS Pool offers a unique feature: users can deposit not only osETH minted through OPUS Pool but also liquid staking derivatives like stETH, cbETH, and rETH minted on other platforms, directly into EigenLayer.
The OPUS SDK: In addition to the benefits mentioned above, our Institutional clients can leverage the OPUS SDK to integrate ETH staking directly into their UI, providing their customers with all the benefits of the OPUS Pool seamlessly. To know more, please reach out to staking@chorus.one.
Now, let’s move on to the guide.
1. To start staking, head over to https://opus.chorus.one/pool/stake/ and connect your wallet.
2. Select your desired wallet. Note that you can use WalletConnect if you want to connect through Ledger Live.
3. Once connected, make sure you are on the Stake tab. You can see all the tabs on the left-hand-side of the screen.
3. Enter the amount you would like to stake. You can see the estimated amount of daily/monthly/yearly rewards you will earn with this amount of stake.
4. Hit Confirm and Stake button and sign the transaction in your wallet
5. Congratulations, you have now successfully staked your ETH! As a next step you can go to the dashboard to look at the summary of your staking position or you could head over to the Mint osETH section under Staking tab to mint some liquid staking tokens for your staked position
1. In case you want a liquid token representation of your stake you can head over to the Mint osETH section under the Staking tab on the left of the screen. You will see the amount of ETH you have staked. You will also see the amount of osETH you have already minted (if any).
2. Enter the amount of ETH you would like to use to mint osETH.
3. Click on Mint button and approve the transaction in your wallet
4. Congratulations! You have successfully minted osETH for your staked ETH. You can now head over to the dashboard to view your staked position and osETH summary. You can alternatively restake your osETH to Eigenlayer.
5. In case you want to reverse the minting process, you can burn your osETH to get ETH back. Select the Burn osETH section under the Staking tab on the left menu, enter the amount you would like to burn and hit Burn
6. Once you click on Burn, you will be prompted to sign the transaction in your wallet. Upon signing, you will have successfully completed the burn process
1. To deposit your osETH, or any accepted staked ETH into EigenLayer including wbETH, rETH, cbETH, stETH, oETH , ankrETH , swETH, ETHx, click on ‘Restake’ in the menu bar and select the asset you wish to deposit.
2. Note: EigenLayer intermittently pauses staking when the limits for restaking have exhausted. They usually announce the lifting of the limits on their Twitter and discord. You might encounter the following screen when there is a pause by the Eigenlayer team.
3. In case deposits into Eigenlayer are live you may select the LST that you possess, enter the desired amount that you would like to restake and hit the Restake button
4. You will be prompted to approve the restaking transaction first and then finally sign the restaking transaction in your wallet.
5.Once you sign, you will have successfully restaked to Eigenlayer. In case you delegated to Chorus One operator earlier, your restaked assets will be automatically delegated. If not, you can go back to the dashboard to delegate your assets to Chorus One or view the summary of your staked position.
1. Eigenlayer recently launched their delegation manager contract and enabled staker delegations. This will allow anyone with restaked ETH or restaked LSTs to delegate their restaked position to an operator of their choice. To delegate your stake to Chorus One, head over to the dashboard by clicking on the Dashboard button on the left navigation bar.
2. In case you have not already delegated to another operator, you can click on the Delegate to Chorus One button.
3. You will be prompted to sign a transaction in your wallet. Once you sign, you will see the following screen. Congratulations your restake position is now successfully delegated
4. Alternative, you can go directly to Eigenlayer App - https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/operator and search for Chorus One operator
5. Click on the Chorus One card that shows up
6. If you have not previously delegated to any operator, you will see a Delegate button on the right of the screen. You will also see a message “You currently have a restaked balance that is not delegated”. Click on the delegate button and sign the transaction in the wallet.
7. Congratulations you have successfully delegated your stake
Switching node operators means moving your restaked funds from supporting the original node operator supported AVSs to Chorus One supported AVSs.
Note: Switching operator requires you to sign 3 transactions. The first transaction queues the withdrawal of your restaked assets. This is a prerequisite of the Undelegation function. The second transaction undelegates your restaked position. The final transaction delegates to Chorus One. You will need to restake your assets again after you switch the operator. You may not be able to restake your assets until Eigenlayer reopens the deposit cap.
2. Click on Switch Operator and sign the transaction in the wallet
3. You will see another transaction pop up to undelegate from the operator. Sign the undelegation transaction
4. Finally you will see your wallet prompt you to sign the delegation transaction which delegates to Chorus One. This is the final transaction in this process
5. Once the transaction is confirmed you will have successfully delegated to Chorus One. Make sure to go back to the restaking tab and start restaking your assets
*Note: For the time being, please use https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/ to unstake osETH from EigenLayer.
1. To unstake from OPUS Pool, go to the Unstake Section under the ‘Staking’ tab in the menu on the left navigation bar.
2. Enter the amount of ETH you would like to unstake and hit the Unstake button
Note: If you minted osETH at any point any time against your staked position, you might have to burn that amount to unstake all your ETH
3. You will be prompted to sign the unstake transaction in your wallet. You have successfully unstaked your position. Once you unstake your ETH enters the withdrawal queue. You will see a progress bar right below the success message that lets you know the status of your withdrawable stake. Once it becomes ready for withdrawal you will see a button to claim the stake back into your wallet.
4. You can come back to the Unstake tab at a later point and check the status of your withdrawal.
2. Select the LST you want to unstake and enter the amount
3. Hit the Unstake button and sign the transaction in the wallet
4. You have successfully unstaked.
2. You will be prompted to connect your wallet. Click on the button and select your preferred wallet
3. You will be shown a screen with terms and conditions. You will need to sign the terms and conditions using your wallet
4.
5. After you sign you will be shown your connected wallet. Click on NEXT to view your Claim Eligibility
6. You will be shown the number of tokens you got.
7. Click on CLAIM NOW button to initiate the claim transaction. Go ahead and sign it in your wallet
8. Once you sign the transaction you will see the success screen as shown below
9. Your EIGEN token will start reflecting in your wallet. You can see the token contract here - https://etherscan.io/token/0xec53bf9167f50cdeb3ae105f56099aaab9061f83
10. Congratulations, you have claimed your EIGEN drop. In the next few steps, we will take you through how to restake these tokens and delegate to your favorite operator to boost your gains
11. Now you have two options. You can either use the EigenLayer guide and their instructional video OR, you can simply connect with OPUS Pool here - https://opus.chorus.one/pool/restake/ and go to the Restake page under the Eigenlayer tab.
12. You will see your EIGEN token allocation. Select the token and enter the amount you want to restake
13. Once you click on Restake you will be asked to Approve first before staking
14. Once you approve, you will be prompted to sign the actual restaking transaction
15. Congratulations you have restaked your EIGEN tokens. If you already delegated to Chorus One earlier you will see the following
If not, you can scroll up and see how to delegate to Chorus One operator
16. You can go back to the Opus dashboard to look at your assets
If you are not eligible for the airdrop you might see the following screen. Stay tuned to Chorus One twitter to get the latest updates.
Resources
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
Welcome back to the another edition of the (Re)staking Synopsis, your go-to source for the latest in Ethereum staking, presented by Chorus One.
Cutting right to the chase: EigenLayer now holds the second spot in Total Value Locked (TVL) for a protocol, boasting over $12.8 billion USD (~3.6 million ETH) restaked. Impressively, nearly 2 million ETH has been natively restaked via EigenPods, marking a significant surge in restaking activity.
Additionally, the EigenLayer and EigenDA Holesky Testnet is live and thriving, with a staggering total of 157,433.0897 ETH already restaked! After a seamless testing phase on Goerli, we're thrilled to support this new phase as we progress towards Mainnet operations.
With a meticulously crafted AVS strategy, we prioritize the safety of the funds delegated to Chorus One. Learn more about restaking with Chorus One: https://forum.eigenlayer.xyz/t/operators-mainnet-campaign/12828/145?u=chorusone
Without any further ado, let’s dive in.
(Source: Dune Analytics)
OPUS Dedicated enables you to set up dedicated ETH validators, and directly restake your staked ETH with EigenLayer in a few clicks.
Note: At present, you can only deposit your staked ETH into EigenLayer; the option to delegate to Chorus One will be possible upon the EigenLayer Mainnet.
We will notify you once the delegation feature on EigenLayer becomes operational, indicating that it's time to delegate your restaked ETH. At that point, you will be able to delegate to Chorus One with just a few clicks.
How to restake ETH with EigenLayer
OPUS Pool enables you to stake any amount of ETH, mint osETH, and restake a variety of LST’s including osETH, cbETH, stETH, and more directly with EigenLayer in a just a few clicks.
Note: Restaking LSTs with EigenLayer is currently on hold and will resume once the deposit cap is raised. In the meantime, you are welcome to use OPUS Pool to stake any amount of ETH and mint osETH.
Visit OPUS Pool
How to Stake ETH and mint osETH
Read it here.
MEV-Boost targets the highest bid for Ethereum block space. However, a glitch arises when blocks include withdrawals, distorting the MEV valuation and making some bids appear more valuable than they really are, leading to losses for proposers.
Beyond individual losses, this issue has wider implications for the Ethereum ecosystem, inflating proposers' profits, cutting down overall transactions and gas usage, and consequently, decreasing ETH burning.
Our research team analysed the full impact of this bug, originally published on ETHResearch.
We explore how Ethereum's resilience is shaped by client diversity, offering an in-depth analysis of two of its most prominent Consensus Layer (CL) clients: Lighthouse and Teku.
Read it here.
If you’re interested in staking/restaking with Chorus One, or learning more, simply reach out to us at info@chorus.one and we’ll be happy to get back to you!
Additionally, if you’d like us to share further resources on any topic, please let us know!
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
As Ethereum restaking gains momentum, we wanted to take a moment to enumerate some of the risks that you as a user might be exposed to when choosing to restake your tokens. While restaking’s innovative consent can offer benefits to Ethereum staking, like generating more value for your staked tokens, it is also important to think clearly and consider some of these potential risks:
Slashing
As with any staking activity on Ethereum, your pledged ETH is subjected to networks rules that can result in the partial or total loss of your tokens, in the case of proven malicious activity that targets the network. Although slashing is a relatively rare occurrence (and has never happened to any of Chorus One’s validators), it is still the biggest risk you might be subjected to. When users are able to delegate tokens, they would be susceptible to slashing penalties from both Ethereum and Actively Validated Services (AVS's).
Smart contract risk
A more common source of risk is related to the smart contracts that govern the protocols and services on Ethereum, as they are susceptible to bugs on their code that can be exploited, as well as unexpected behavior under untested conditions. Projects built on Eigenlayer (like our OPUS 'Pool' restaking fuctions) ultimately secure their funds within the contracts of Eigenlayer. In the event of an attack on the Eigenlayer contract, the funds of associated projects may be jeopardized. This would be true as well of the code associated with different AVSs.
Eigenlayer has been audited twice in the past, a first audit done by Consensys Diligence, and a second audit done by Sigma Prime. You can read more about the auditing process here: https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/eigenlayer/security/audits
Additional risks
Although the first two would be the most definitive scenarios that could have a direct effect on your restaked assets, there’s another suite of known (and possible unknown) risks that can be linked to this new technology:
Chorus One puts a premium on the security of all its users, recognizing its paramount importance in fostering trust and peace of mind. Through our comprehensive security framework, we ensure that your investments are well-protected: both, in our OPUS Pool and OPUS Dedicated products, in our underlying infrastructure, and at every step when deciding to onboard a network or protocol.
ISO 27001:2022 Certification
Chorus One adheres to stringent regulatory requirements, safeguarding your assets in accordance with data protection and privacy laws. In October 2023, we attained the coveted ISO 27001:2022 certification ensuring world-class security for all our customers.
Resilient infrastructure
We guarantee our high-quality of service with minimal disruptions, due to a strategic combination of multiple availability zones for our infrastructure; and network security procedures such as stringent access control, encrypted connections, firewall fortifications and security configurations. Our team is trained and provided with security awareness workshops to ensure our best line of defense.
Careful research process
Our dedicated research team conducts in depth due diligence on all the networks and protocols we onboard, to understand any potential risks we can be exposed to when participating on the systems. We go above and beyond to build a more security-minded ecosystem and to promote professional standards in the industry.
Learn more about Chorus One’s commitment to security here: https://security.chorus.one/
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
The following article is a summary of a recent ETHResearch contribution by Chorus One Research, which describes a bug we've encountered in mev-boost, the standard software validators used to solicit blocks from sophisticated, specialized entitites called builders on Ethereum. This bug is not specific to Chorus One; it can affect all Ethereum validators running mev-boost.
To read the full paper, please visit: https://chorus.one/reports-research/mev-boost-withdrawal-bug
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Chorus One runs a proprietary version of mev-boost, dubbed Adagio, which optimizes for mev capture by optimizing latency. Our commitment to Adagio obligates us to have an in-depth understanding of mev-boost and Ethereum's PBS setup in general. As such, we decided to dive deeper, and to make our findings available to the Ethereum community.
In practice, mev-boost facilitates an auction, where the winning builder commits to paying a certain amount of ETH for the right to provide the block that the validator proposing the next slot ("proposer") will include. This amount then accrues to an address provided by the validator, referred to as the "fee recipient".
Proposers and builders do not communicate directly, but exchange standardized messages via a third party called a "relay". The relay can determine the amount paid for a block by comparing the balance of the fee recipient at certain fixed times in the auction.
We have observed that in instances where the block in question coincidentally includes reward withdrawals due to the fee recipient, the relay has been unable to separate these withdrawals from the amount paid by the builder. This leads to an inflated value for the auction payment. This inaccuracy can negatively reflect on the Ethereum network under its current economic model (EIP-1559). Specifically, it may decrease the amount of transactions processed and decrease the amount of ETH burned, thus manifesting a small but measurable negative net outcome for the network overall.
For a deep dive, please visit: https://chorus.one/reports-research/mev-boost-withdrawal-bug
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Proto-danksharding, blobs, and data availability are terms becoming increasingly familiar in the Ethereum community, all leading up to the Dencun Upgrade – Ethereum's most significant update since Shapella.
With less than a month to the upgrade, Chorus One is here to provide you the essential information about this pivotal event, including three key staking/validator based Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) involved, with a special focus on the much-anticipated EIP-4844.
In April 2023, we explored the post-Shapella landscape in our blog article "Beyond Shapella," highlighting the significant impact of the Shapella upgrade on Ethereum staking. This upgrade introduced the flexibility to withdraw staked ETH and rewards, captivating institutional interest in Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
The Shapella upgrade marked a turning point, boosting ETH's staking appeal among institutional investors. Since then, Ethereum's roadmap has seen several developments, leading us to the brink of another major milestone - the Dencun upgrade. This forthcoming hard fork is set to advance Ethereum's evolution, promising to tackle existing challenges and open up new opportunities.
In fact, Ethereum jumped 28% since the start of February and rose above $2,900 at the time of writing, as the Dencun upgrade approaches and transaction numbers on L2s climb up.
The Ethereum Cancun-Deneb (Dencun) Upgrade, scheduled for March 13, 2024, is a pivotal hard fork aimed at enhancing the network's scalability, security, and usability. This upgrade, incorporating key Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) such as EIP-4844 for proto-danksharding, is set to improve network efficiency and lower transaction costs. Building on the achievements of prior updates like the Shanghai upgrade, Dencun seeks to fortify the infrastructure for decentralized applications and elevate the Ethereum user experience.
At its heart, the Dencun Upgrade integrates advancements from the Cancun upgrade on the execution layer with those from the Deneb upgrade on the consensus layer, employing a dual approach to refine Ethereum's protocol rules and block validation procedures. The inclusion of various Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), especially Proto-Danksharding, is geared towards enhancing scalability from different dimensions.
Additionally, the upgrade will introduce a series of other EIPs, including EIP-4788, EIP-6780, and EIP-5656. While this article will concentrate on the most crucial proposal, EIP 4844: Protodanksharding, it will also touch upon three staking and validator-centric improvements within the Dencun Upgrade: EIP-7044, EIP-7045, and EIP-7514.
EIP 7044: Perpetually Valid Signed Voluntary Exits
The introduction of EIP-7044 marks a significant advancement: exit messages will have indefinite validity, removing the need for continual updates and ensuring a smoother withdrawal process. This EIP specifically targets the challenge posed by the limited lifespan of signed voluntary exit messages, simplifying the staking landscape, especially in cases where the staking operators and fund owners are not the same.
TL;DR: EIP-7044 makes it easier to withdraw staked funds by ensuring that exit requests don't expire. This removes the hassle of having to update these requests regularly, especially helpful when the staking operators and fund owners are different.
EIP 7045: Increase max attestation inclusion slot
EIP-7045 modifies the timeline for attestations, extending the inclusion period from one rolling epoch to two fixed epochs. This adjustment gives validators additional time to incorporate their attestations into a block, thereby enhancing the security and stability of Ethereum's Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The expansion of maximum attestation slots contributes to quicker block confirmations and bolsters the consensus mechanism's resistance to short-term censorship attempts.
TL;DR: EIP-7045 changes how long validators have to get their approvals into a block, extending it from one flexible time period to two set time periods. This extra time helps make Ethereum's system for confirming transactions more secure and stable, speeds up the process of confirming blocks, and makes it harder for anyone to temporarily block or censor transactions.
EIP-7514: Add max epoch churn limit
EIP-7514 proposes to change how fast new validators can join the Ethereum network. Instead of the current system where the number of new validators can grow quickly (exponentially) because the amount of new validators accepted also grows, this proposal suggests a steady (linear) increase by setting a limit of 8 new validators per epoch (~6.4 minutes). This means no matter how many people want to become validators and how big the active set grows, only 8 will be able to join in each epoch. This approach aims to make the network more manageable, especially when a lot of people are waiting to stake their ETH. It helps prevent the network from getting overloaded and keeps everything running smoothly.
TL;DR: EIP-7514 plans to limit the number of new validators joining the Ethereum network to 8 every 6.4 minutes. This change aims to control growth and prevent the system from becoming overloaded, ensuring it runs smoothly even when many people want to stake their ETH.
EIP-4844, known as Proto-Danksharding, is a key update to Ethereum that introduces a new type of transaction called "blobs", for better data storage efficiency. This allows for more cost-effective data posting to the Ethereum mainnet by Rollup sequencers, without overloading the network, due to the controlled size and quantity of blobs in each block. The innovative aspect is the temporary storage of blob data in Ethereum's consensus layer, not its execution layer, which boosts scalability while keeping the network decentralized. Proto-danksharding sets the stage for further scalability enhancements, such as full Danksharding, by improving gas consumption and network resource management.
Proto-danksharding allows these rollups to employ data blobs for posting grouped transactions more affordably, greatly decreasing operational expenses and enhancing scalability.
The Dencun upgrade is set to significantly enhance Ethereum's appeal, making it more attractive for developers, builders, and investors, by boosting transaction efficiency and cutting costs.
At Chorus One, we've been diligently preparing for this upgrade, ensuring our clients and software are updated in a timely manner to prevent any impact on our users. Our proactive approach underscores our dedication to facilitating a smooth transition and maintaining strong staking support after the upgrade.
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Step 1: Visit the EigenLayer Dapp and create an EigenPod.
Step 2: Login to your OPUS ‘Dedicated’ account at https://opus.chorus.one/.
Step 3: Create your validator/s with the withdrawal credentials pointing to your EigenPod.
Step 4:Once your validators are live, you can restake your ETH on EigenLayer.
Step 5: Click on ‘Restake’.
Step 6: Confirm transaction!
Step 7: Delegate to Chorus One.
Eigenlayer revolutionizes the Ethereum network by introducing "restaking," an innovative concept that enhances cryptoeconomic security. This novel approach allows ETH, whether staked directly or via liquid staking tokens like stETH, rETH, cbETH, and LsETH, to be rehypothecated within the consensus layer. This enhances the utility and security of staked assets.
Users engaging in Ethereum staking, either directly with ETH or through various liquid staking tokens (such as stETH, rETH, cbETH, and LsETH), have the opportunity to participate in EigenLayer's smart contracts. By opting to restake their assets, users can amplify cryptoeconomic security beyond Ethereum itself, extending it to a multitude of other applications on the network.
To learn more about EigenLayer and its technology, please visit https://www.eigenlayer.xyz/
Note: Restaking LSTs with EigenLayer is currently on hold and will resume once the deposit cap is raised. In the meantime, you are welcome to use OPUS 'Pool' to stake any amount of ETH and mint osETH. Visit OPUS 'Pool' here.
Engaging with EigenLayer by depositing your staked ETH enables you to accumulate ‘Restaked Points’, reflecting your contribution to the EigenLayer ecosystem's collective security. These points are calculated based on the duration and amount of your staking participation.
By accumulating ‘Restaked Points’, you not only enhance your rewards on your staked ETH but also become eligible for potential airdrops!
Note: Please be aware that although staked ETH deposits into EigenLayer are currently accepted and can be withdrawn at any time, rewards can only be redeemed after the launch of EigenLayer’s Mainnet and once the Activated Validator Services (AVSs) utilizing EigenLayer's pooled security become operational.
Chorus One makes the staking and restaking process straightforward and efficient.
Users can restake ETH with Chorus One using OPUS ‘Dedicated’, our ETH staking platform that supports the customization of validator withdrawal addresses to enable native staking with your EigenPod.
This underscores the importance of judiciously selecting a node operator to delegate your staked ETH to, taking into account their specific restaking and AVS strategies.
Additionally, please be aware that before restaking your ETH deposit's, withdrawal address is set only once and cannot be changed after the staking deposit. Please Choosing EigenPod Address as the withdrawal address means you accept the risks of the EigenLayer smart contract and acknowledge that Chorus One cannot alter this address.
Below, we have provided a step-by-step guide to help walk you through the process of setting up an EigenPod, creating your validator/s, depositing staked ETH into EigenLayer, and delegating to Chorus One.
Step 1: To start restaking your ETH to EigenLayer, you’ll need to first create an EigenPod on EigenLayer by visiting EigenLayer Dapp.
To begin restaking, you will first need to create an EigenPod address. This address will connect with your wallet and be used as the withdrawal address when you create a validator from the stakefish Ethereum staking dashboard.
1. Start by visiting EigenLayer Dapp and connect your wallet, making sure you’re connected to the Ethereum Mainnet. You will be prompted to sign the terms of service using your wallet. Click on Sign to enter the EigenLayer Dapp
2. Then proceed to connecting your wallet.
3. Once you have connected your wallet, click on ‘Restake your Tokens’.
4. Next, click on ‘Create EigenPod’.
The EigenPod address created is responsible for all subsequent restaking and withdrawal operations from that EigenPod.
5. Upon submitting the transaction for creating Eigenpod you will see Metamask pop up.
6. Once you have confirmed the EigenPod creation on your wallet, you will see the following screen:
7. Your EigenPod Address is now available, and will have to be used as your withdrawal address on the OPUS portal. Copy the EigenPod Address into your clipboard.
Step 2: Restaking with Chorus One
8. Login to your OPUS ‘Dedicated’ account by visiting https://opus.chorus.one/portal/login
9. Once you have entered the portal, the first step is to connect your wallet.
10. Once you have connected your wallet, you’ll need to create a validator by clicking on ‘Stake ETH’.
11. Select the amount of ETH you would like to stake.
12. Then, make sure to click on ‘Change rewards withdrawal address’, and click on ‘Edit’ .
13. Now, paste the EigenPod Address as your Withdrawal Address.
14. Once you have confirmed the addresses, click on ‘Confirm and Stake’
15. Once you confirm your transaction on your wallet, you have set up your ETH validator Chorus One.
Step 3: Restaking in Eigenlayer
16. If you have correctly set your withdrawal address as the EigenPod address, the Eigenlayer interface will start reflecting your total staked amount as restaked into Eigenlayer. Note: You do not have to perform any extra steps for restaking.
17. Note: At present, you can only deposit your staked ETH into EigenLayer; the option to delegate to node operators is not yet available.
We will notify you once the delegation feature on EigenLayer becomes operational, indicating that it's time to delegate your restaked ETH. At that point, you will be able to delegate to Chorus One with just a few clicks.
18. To delegate, click on ‘Dashboard’ and then ‘Delegate your Stake’.
19. Then, search for ‘Chorus One’ validator and click on ‘Manage’.
20. Then, click on ‘Delegate’.
21. Once you confirm your transaction on your wallet, you have successfully delegated to Chorus One!
To get started restaking, please visit the:
EigenLayer dApp at https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/
OPUS ‘Dedicated’ at https://opus.chorus.one/
If you’re interested in staking/restaking with Chorus One, or learning more, simply reach out to us by responding to this email and we’ll be happy to get back to you!
Here are some useful resources for your benefit:
Additionally, if you’d like us to share further resources on any topic, please let us know!
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
We're excited to announce the launch of "Staking Synopsis", a series dedicated to keeping Ethereum stakers and enthusiasts informed about the latest updates in ETH staking, including the developments at Chorus One.
With the highly anticipated launch of EigenLayer's Mainnet scheduled for April, and its rising prominence in the Ethereum community, we're kicking off the series with a special focus on Restaking.
As frontrunners in Ethereum research, we're focused on developing a carefully curated restaking strategy to optimize the benefits of this technology for our users.
So, our series will cover everything you need to know about our approach, which positions us as a top choice for ETH staking and restaking among node operators.
Let's dive into our first edition!
Engaging with EigenLayer by depositing liquid staking tokens (LSTs) or your staked ETH enables you to accumulate ‘Restaked Points’, reflecting your contribution to the EigenLayer ecosystem's collective security. These points are calculated based on the duration and amount of your staking participation.
By accumulating ‘Restaked Points’, you not only enhance your rewards on your LSTs or staked ETH but also become eligible for potential airdrops!
Note: Please be aware that although staked ETH deposits into EigenLayer are currently accepted and can be withdrawn at any time, rewards can only be redeemed after the launch of EigenLayer’s Mainnet and once the Activated Validator Services (AVSs) utilizing EigenLayer's pooled security become operational.
Chorus One makes the staking and restaking process straightforward and efficient.
Here’s how it works:
Delegating your restaked ETH to Chorus One
At present, you can only deposit your staked ETH into EigenLayer; the option to delegate to node operators is not yet available.
We will notify you once the delegation feature on EigenLayer becomes operational, indicating that it's time to delegate your restaked ETH. At that point, you will be able to delegate to Chorus One with just a few clicks.
Visit OPUS ‘Dedicated’ to get started.
Note: Restaking LSTs with EigenLayer is currently on hold and will resume once the deposit cap is raised. In the meantime, you are welcome to use OPUS 'Pool' to stake any amount of ETH and mint osETH.
Visit OPUS ‘Pool’ to get started.
Chorus One aims to make restaking as accessible and simple to all users as possible. In doing so, we have a tailored AVS and restaking strategy that makes this possible in the following ways:
Selective AVS Strategy: Contrary to other node operators who may aim to onboard as many AVSs as possible, Chorus One adopts a more strategic approach.
We prioritize security and are currently in the process of carefully vetting AVSs for which we provide infrastructure. Given any risks associated with restaking, we believe it's crucial to conduct thorough research on each project we support.
Enhanced Rewards with Adagio: As pioneers in MEV research, Chorus One stands out by utilizing an in-house Ethereum MEV-client, Adagio. This unique tool enhances the MEV yield for all ETH validators we run by implementing strategic timing games. Learn more about Adagio here.
By choosing to stake and restake with Chorus One, your validators benefit from using Adagio, yielding higher rewards compared to alternatives.
Top-Tier Security with ISO 27001:2022 Certification: Chorus One is among the select few node operators to achieve the ISO 27001:2022 certification, a globally recognized standard for security.
This certification isn't just a formality for us; it's a reflection of our deep commitment to maintaining the highest levels of security in our staking infrastructure, operations, and systems, ensuring our customers' peace of mind.
(Source: Dune Analytics)
An EigenPod is a user-managed smart contract designed to aid in the administration of balance and withdrawal statuses within the EigenLayer protocol.
When organizing your EigenPod and delegating your restaked ETH to a node operator, consider the following: You may point multiple validators to a single EigenPod.
This underscores the importance of judiciously selecting a node operator to delegate your staked ETH to, taking into account their specific restaking and AVS strategies.
If you’re interested in staking/restaking with Chorus One, or learning more, simply reach out to us at staking@chorus.one and we’ll be happy to get back to you! Here are some useful resources for your benefit:
Additionally, if you’d like us to share further resources on any topic, please let us know!
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Summary
A technical in-depth guide of our OPUS Pool to demystify pooled staking with Stakewise and restaking osETH on Eigenlayer with Chorus One.In a nutshell, the steps are as follows:
These simple steps will get you ready to participate in the restaking ecosystem. If you’re interested in reading more about what happens in each step, below we will unravel what happens under the hood.
Go to Opus Pool, connect your wallet and deposit some ETH into our Stakewise vault. Traditional staking usually requires a staker to deposit 32ETH to spin up a validator on Ethereum in order to start earning rewards. Our 1-click staking experience enables users to stake any amount, powered by Stakewise. Stakewise v3 offers a permissionless, non-custodial pooled staking solution enabling any node operator to create a “vault”. A vault is essentially an isolated staking pool managed by the node operator and providing an automated process for ETH deposits, reward distribution, and withdrawals. You can learn more about Stakewise in our extensive guide here.
Under the hood: On a more technical level, when you stake into our Stakewise Pool, the flow works as follows:
A user deposits ETH into our MAX-MeV Stakewise vault. Once enough ETH has accrued (32 ETH), we can deposit a new validator in our vault. This is done by running an additional piece of software, stakewise v3-operator, alongside our usual Ethereum validator infrastructure, which listens to Deposit events and initiates the validator registration process. This architecture offers some very unique features. For one, the permissionless onboarding. Stakewise makes it possible to create your own vault with customized experiences, such as a private vault- only allowing stake from whitelisted addresses, a public vault- allowing stake from everyone, MEV smoothing and many more. Secondly, the ability to initiate a forced-exit by the Stakewise DAO. The Ethereum protocol requires validator exit messages to be signed with the validator signing key (the key held by the node operator required to operate the validator for signing blocks and attestations).
This means that, until EIP-7002 is implemented to support signing exit messages with withdrawal credentials (the key the staker holds to withdraw their funds), users depend on the node operators to exit validators on their behalf. To remediate this potential attack vector in a fully permissionless environment, there are certain steps a node operator must go through when registering a new validator. They submit shards of their signing keys to all Oracles through a process known as Shamir-secret sharing, a secret sharing algorithm which enables trustless and secure sharing of distributed, private information. Moreover, the pre-signed exit transaction messages are sent to the oracles in an encrypted manner. This allows the DAO to exit a validator on their behalf, should a node operator go rogue. Once oracles have approved registration, the operator sends the validator registration transaction to the so-called Keeper contract- essentially the brain in the architecture- which executes the deposit on-chain. EIP-7002 is still in its design phase, but it will open up new solutions to remove the need for Oracles by enabling the execution layer to trigger validator exits under certain conditions.
After a successful validator registration process, we’re ready to run a validator and collect rewards in our vault. Similarly to other liquid staking protocols, Stakewise relies on several oracles to fetch rewards from the Beacon Chain. Since The Merge, Ethereum’s architecture consists of the Consensus Layer (“Beacon Chain” which contains the consensus state and validator management) and the Execution Layer (“the EVM” which handles execution payloads, maintains a mempool of transactions). While combining both layers facilitated an easy transition to a Proof-of-Stake chain, it left the communication between both layers via Engine API somewhat limited- the Consensus Layer can query the Execution layer, but not the other way round. Essentially this means there’s no trustless way for the EVM to connect to the Beacon Chain to e.g. fetch validator rewards data. As a workaround, Stakewise employs trusted Oracles which regularly fetch rewards data from the Beacon Chain and vote for the rewards/penalties from all vaults. The vault rewards are saved as a Merkle tree and uploaded to IPFS, e.g see this example. The Merkle root is saved in the Keepers contract, again, the brain of our architecture. If you’re not familiar with Merkle trees, proofs and roots, they are one of the founding blocks of how Ethereum works, here’s a recommended read.
Essentially, it’s a data structure that helps us verify data consistency and make efficient proofs of inclusion (Merkle-proofs) to verify a piece of data is in the tree. More concretely, since the Merkle root is stored in the Keepers contract, it’s easy to verify that the stored Merkle tree hasn’t been tampered with.
To keep a vault’s state up to date, the Keeper contract needs to be “harvested”, meaning that the vault can fetch the Merkle root from the Keeper and derive validators rewards/penalties to update its state. If the state isn’t updated in a specified timeframe, any user interaction will be blocked.
With EIP-4788, which is implemented in the upcoming Dencun Upgrade (currently being rolled out to all testnets), the parent (previous) beacon block root will be included directly into the execution block enabling the EVM to access the block root from a trusted source, and thus removing the need for an Oracle and instead, enshrining it in the protocol. The way it will work is similar to the implemented workaround- the parent beacon block root represents the hash of the entire header of the previous block. A smart contract deployed on Ethereum will hold a limited number of parent beacon block roots, such that the execution layer can derive the consensus state in a trustless manner.
With this foundational knowledge in mind, let’s look at a specific example transaction of someone depositing 0.01 ETH into our Stakewise vault:
You can see the address which deposited 0xe46825... calls the deposit function on the Chorus One vault address 0xe6d8d8… . As we mentioned in the previous section, the v3-operator listens to DepositEvents emitted. Looking at the event logs, we get a good glimpse into what happens when you deposit into a vault:
The address is recorded along with the amount of your stake (assets), resulting in a number of “shares”which are calculated as follows: assets * total shares in vault / total assets in vault, see contract code for reference. The calculated shares will be the indicator how much of the rewards accrued by the Ethereum validator will be paid out to the staking address.
Once you’ve deposited successfully in our Stakewise vault, you can go ahead and mint your osETH in 1-click. The minted osETH should be visible in your wallet after the transaction was successful. If it’s not visible, you may need to add the token manually, e.g. for MetaMask see this resource.
Under the hood: As mentioned above, Stakewise offers a liquid staking token called osETH to provide liquidity to its stakers. This is a fantastic improvement on the staking experience, because you get a representation of your staked ETH which you can use to earn additional yield in the DeFi world. During vault setup, a node operator may choose to configure a vault that allows to mint an ERC20 token or whether the vault is tokenless. The issued liquid staking token- osETH- is overcollateralized, meaning the underlying assets in the vault are worth more than the osETH issued in order to cover potential losses from slashing. The biggest risk for staking is the risk of getting slashed, e.g due to double signing, which could result in losing part of the stake. Slashing is usually the consequence of bad key management practices that optimise for speed rather than consistency. It’s therefore important for node operators to apply sound security and key management practices, in order to minimize the risk.
One interesting feature of osETH is that it has a built-in slashing protection mechanism for its stakers. During the minting process you might have noticed that you can only mint up to 90% of the staked ETH. The excess backing insures stakers against poor staking performance or slashing events. Such penalties are absorbed by the excess backing.
To keep track of this, Stakewise defines a certain parameter known as “position health” which monitors the value of osETH minted relative to the value of their ETH currently staked in the Vault (see in screenshot above). The value can be Healthy/Moderate/Risky/Unhealthy. A “Healthy” position means that minted osETH doesn’t exceed 90% of the staked ETH. If the value of minted osETH grows faster and suddenly exceeds 92% of the staked ETH in the vault, the position status will move to “Unhealthy”. Let’s look at a concrete example: Imagine a user minted osETH against a staked position worth 100 ETH in Vault X. Suddenly, Vault X decided to increase its fees much higher than other vaults. During an incident, the node operator was forced to migrate their keys and started producing inconsistent attestations and downtime causing inactivity leaks all resulting in penalties and lower profit accrued in the vault. On top of that the bull market hits and demand for Ethereum validator exceeds current supply making the validator activation queue extremely long, but still growing overall TVL. A month later the minted osETH is now worth 92.01 ETH, making the user's position status "Unhealthy" and opening up for liquidation because the value of minted osETH relative to their ETH stake exceeds the liquidation threshold, i.e. is >92% enabling the DAO to liquidate a vault (if you remember, they have the ability to exit validators on a node operator's behalf), in order to ensure the excess backing of osETH.
The final step in our OPUS Pool journey let’s you restake your freshly minted osETH and other liquid staking tokens with EigenLayer.
Now what’s Eigenlayer and why will it bring more yield? To sum it up: “Restaking offers stakers the flexibility to contribute to the security of multiple networks, potentially earning rewards, verifying trust, or engaging in blockchain events. Users that stake $ETH can opt-in to EigenLayer smart contracts to restake their $ETH and extend cryptoeconomic security to additional applications on the network”. To read more about how it works, head to our blog article on Eigenlayer.
Under the hood: As of the time of writing, no AVS are live on mainnet yet. Until the EigenLayer protocol goes live with EigenDA (AVS developed by the EigenLayer team), restakers will receive restaked points as a measure of the user’s contribution to the pooled security, while securing the opportunity to be rewarded as an early restaker. Once AVSs go live, you will be able to delegate to Chorus One and receive rewards from your restaked ETH or Liquid Staking Tokens. This graph below shows what will happen once we enter this Stage:
The (re-)staker deposits their osETH (or other Liquid Staking Tokens) into the EigenLayer StrategyManager contract, which is responsible for accounting and allowing restakers to deposit LSTs into the given strategy contract. When users deposit into the StrategyManager, the funds are transferred to the respective LST’s StrategyBaseTVLLimits contract e.g. osETH or stETH, which returns shares proportionally to the users stake. The number of shares is calculated using an internal exchange rate which depends on the total number of deposits.
Here’s an example transaction of a user depositing osETH into the StrategyManager via our OPUS Pool. The event logs show the address where the funds were deposited from (depositor), the address of the token contract (in this case osETH token contract), and the address of the strategy contract (the address of the osETH strategyBaseTvlLimits contract).
Once the AVSs go live on mainnet, restakers will be able to delegate their LSTs to Chorus One. This is done by calling a function on the DelegationManager which manages delegation and undelegation of the stakers to operators. As of now, this functionality is paused, so stay tuned for the next EigenLayer mainnet upgrade and don’t miss your chance to delegate your restaked tokens to your favourite node operator.
A step-by-step guide to staking ETH on OPUS Pool
Restake with EigenLayer Seamlessly via Chorus One's OPUS Pool: A Detailed Guide
Learn more about Adagio, Chorus One’s pioneering Ethereum MEV-Boost client
MEV Max - Introducing Chorus One’s Liquid Staking Pool on Stakewise V3
Considerations on the Future of Ethereum Staking
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Chorus One's newest offering: the OPUS Pool. Until recently, a minimum threshold of 32 ETH was required for users to stake ETH on OPUS. But not anymore! Going forth, users may stake any amount of ETH directly via the OPUS Pool, mint osETH, and deposit into EigenLayer in one go.
Users have the extra benefit of depositing not only osETH, but any other accepted liquid staking tokens (currently, wbETH, rETH, cbETH, stETH, oETH , ankrETH , swETH, ETHx) into EigenLayer through the OPUS Pool!
Additionally, Institutional clients can leverage the OPUS SDK to integrate ETH staking into their offerings, providing their customers with all the benefits of the OPUS Pool seamlessly.
Start using OPUS Pool to stake ETH. Visit https://opus.chorus.one/pool/stake/
In this article, we’ll dive into why we launched the OPUS Pool, its benefits, how it’s different from existing liquid staking options, and how you can deposit various liquid staking tokens including osETH, wbETH, rETH, cbETH, stETH, oETH , ankrETH , swETH, ETHx into EigenLayer in a single move on the OPUS Pool.
Liquid staking is a mechanism that enhances traditional staking by introducing liquidity to staked assets. Unlike traditional staking, which necessitates locking up cryptocurrency to support a network’s operations and security, liquid staking allows participants to retain the fluidity of their assets. Through liquid staking, users stake their crypto with a liquid staking protocol and receive a token in return—this token symbolizes the staked amount and any accrued rewards or penalties.
The critical distinction lies in the usability of these new tokens: they can be freely traded or utilized within the DeFi ecosystem, thus allowing stakers to earn additional yields or use them as collateral in various financial protocols. This creates a dual advantage by enabling participation in network validation and security processes, akin to traditional staking, while simultaneously providing liquidity and opportunities to compound rewards in the broader DeFi space.
The OPUS Pool democratizes access to staking rewards by removing barriers such as minimum staking requirements and the need for technical infrastructure, making it an attractive option for a wider range of investors.
The OPUS platform, initially requiring a 32 ETH minimum for validator node operation, has evolved. Now, anyone can stake any amount of ETH (and even restake them) with Chorus One, using our OPUS Pool.
The OPUS Pool, powered by Stakewise smart contracts which have undergone rigorous auditing by esteemed security firms, not only facilitates greater participation in securing the network but also allows a wider range of Chorus One stakers to earn rewards and gain access to a suite of benefits, including top-tier MEV yields, low fees, and the assurance of enterprise-grade security, among others.
As previously mentioned, the OPUS Pool enables any user to stake any amount of ETH and receive rewards instantly. Additionally, users have the ability to mint osETH, a liquid staking derivative, and use it in DeFi or deposit into EigenLayer to gain additional rewards directly on OPUS Pool in one go.
The OPUS Pool sets itself apart from current liquid staking protocols by offering users the advantage of highly competitive staking fees. At just 5%, our fees are among the lowest in the industry, making it more accessible for a broader spectrum of users to stake their ETH and earn rewards.
As pioneers in MEV research, our latest ace, Adagio, is an MEV-Boost client that changes how transactions are handled for increased MEV capture.
Adagio's design allows for more efficient interactions with Ethereum’s transaction supply chain, directly enhancing MEV rewards for stakers. Fully integrated with OPUS Pool validators, Adagio ensures that anyone staking on OPUS Pool can benefit from these increased MEV rewards.
Want to learn more about Adagio and its mechanics? Read all about it here.
OPUS Pool offers a unique feature: users can deposit not only osETH minted through OPUS Pool but also liquid staking derivatives like osETH, stETH, cbETH, and rETH minted on other platforms, directly into EigenLayer.
This flexibility allows users to either mint osETH with OPUS Pool and deposit it into EigenLayer, or bring in any accepted liquid staking derivatives and seamlessly deposit them into EigenLayer in a single step.
Before we delve into the specifics of starting your staking journey with OPUS Pool, let's first understand what restaking is and how it's executed through EigenLayer.
Restaking in the context of Ethereum, as defined by Vitalik Buterin, is a process that allows Ethereum stakers to extend their staked assets' utility beyond the Ethereum network. It means that while your ETH remains staked on Ethereum, you can also leverage its staking power across other blockchain networks. This innovative approach enables new blockchain networks to utilize Ethereum's established validators and staked tokens for securing their trust systems.
Restaking offers stakers the flexibility to contribute to the security of multiple networks, potentially earning rewards, verifying trust, or engaging in blockchain events. It represents an evolution in blockchain participation, broadening the scope and impact of staked assets without requiring additional token allocation.
EigenLayer revolutionizes this concept by implementing smart contracts on Ethereum to facilitate restaking.
It creates a market-driven ecosystem where security is pooled and governed by supply and demand. Users that stake $ETH can opt-in to EigenLayer smart contracts to restake their $ETH and extend cryptoeconomic security to additional applications on the network. Part of EigenLayer’s potential, therefore, lies in its ability to aggregate and extend security through restaking and to validate new applications being built on top of Ethereum.
Actively Validated Services (AVS), essentially new projects or applications building on Ethereum, can tap into this pool, consuming security based on their needs while validators contribute at their discretion, weighing risks and rewards. This system negates the need for AVSs to establish their own validator networks, instead allowing them to utilize Ethereum’s existing security infrastructure.
For a more comprehensive overview of EigenLayer and how it addresses current challenges in Ethereum security, please read our latest blog.
Currently, there are two ways in which you can use the OPUS Pool. The first method involves minting your osETH through OPUS Pool and depositing it directly into EigenLayer, while the second method enables you to skip minting osETH and directly deposit any accept liquid staking tokens (osETH, cbETH, stETH, rETH) directly into EigenLayer on the OPUS Pool.
Both methods are made as simple as possible to enhance your staking experience, and can be completed in just 3 steps, as described below:
Step 1: Connect your wallet on the OPUS Pool page and deposit some ETH into the pool.
Step 2: Once deposited successfully, you can now mint your osETH in 1-click.
Step 3: Deposit your osETH into EigenLayer.
Step 1: Go to the OPUS Pool page, select Restake and connect your wallet
Step 2: Select token of your choice (osETH/stETH/cbETH/rETH ) and enter amount to Restake
Step 3: Deposit your tokens into EigenLayer
Our institutional customers may opt in to leverage the OPUS SDK to integrate ETH staking into their offerings, providing their customers with all the benefits of the OPUS Pool seamlessly.
This allows our institutional client’s customers to benefit from all the features offered by the OPUS Pool, including no minimum ETH required to stake, top tier-MEV yields, high rewards, and direct restaking with EigenLayer.
For a more detailed, step-by-step explanation of how you can stake your ETH and deposit into EigenLayer, please view our guide here.
To start staking on OPUS Pool, visit https://opus.chorus.one/pool/stake/
For institutions interested in learning more about the OPUS Pool SDK, please get in touch with our team at staking@chorus.one
Resources
A step-by-step guide to staking ETH on OPUS Pool
Restake with EigenLayer Seamlessly via Chorus One's OPUS Pool: A Detailed Guide
Learn more about Adagio, Chorus One’s pioneering Ethereum MEV-Boost client
MEV Max - Introducing Chorus One’s Liquid Staking Pool on Stakewise V3
Considerations on the Future of Ethereum Staking
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Summary
EigenLayer’s mainnet is just around the corner and has been the talk of town lately. In a nutshell, EigenLayer is a new primitive that democratizes access to restaked rewards by aggregating and propagating cryptoeconomic security to a broad suite of applications being built on top of Ethereum.
Chorus One has long been immersed in the ecosystem, and has now proudly launched our newest solution to further simplify ETH staking - OPUS Pool. This new product allows any user to easily stake ETH, mint osETH, and integrate with EigenLayer seamlessly, streamlining the process for both new and existing customers.
Additionally, users have the extra benefit of depositing not only osETH, but any other accepted liquid staking tokens (currently, stETH, cbETH, and rETH) into EigenLayer - making it significantly easier for anyone to participate in ETH restaking and earn additional rewards.
Kick-start your ETH staking journey with Chorus One! Enter the OPUS Pool here.
In this article, we break down the fundamentals of EigenLayer and Restaking, key benefits and risks, Chorus One’s involvement in the ecosystem, and how investors and institutions can restake seamlessly using the OPUS Pool. Dive in!
Restaking in the context of Ethereum, as defined by Vitalik Buterin, is a process that allows stakers to extend their staked assets' utility beyond the Ethereum network. This concept, integral to Ethereum's Proof of Stake (PoS) framework, enables staked ETH to not only support Ethereum's network but also to bolster the security and trust systems of other blockchain platforms.
Through restaking, assets that would otherwise be dormant within Ethereum gain a new functionality, serving multiple networks simultaneously and offering stakers the opportunity to earn additional rewards from various sources. Ethereum's dense network of validators and the spread of staked assets contribute to its robust security, making it an ideal candidate for restaking.
EigenLayer has pioneered this primitive by integrating smart contracts into Ethereum, facilitating restaking and expanding the possibilities for asset utilization.
It creates a market-driven ecosystem where security is pooled and governed by supply and demand. Users can opt-in to EigenLayer smart contracts to restake their $ETH or LST(liquid staking token) and extend cryptoeconomic security to additional applications on the network. Part of EigenLayer’s potential, therefore, lies in its ability to aggregate and extend cryptoeconomic security through restaking and to validate new applications being built on top of Ethereum or beyond.
Actively Validated Services (AVS), essentially new projects or applications building on Ethereum, can tap into this pool, consuming security based on their needs while validators opt-in at their discretion, weighing risks and rewards. This system negates the need for AVSs to establish their own validator networks, instead allowing them to utilize Ethereum’s existing security infrastructure.
EigenLayer not only enhances capital efficiency by enabling staked tokens to be used across multiple protocols but also simplifies the process. Ultimately, it aims to unify cryptoeconomic security within a single ecosystem, reducing the fragmentation of security across protocols and increasing trust through a larger validator network.
There are two key advantages:
Firstly, stakers can earn or stand to earn additional rewards through restaking by taking on more responsibilities.
Secondly, emerging protocols benefit from the robust security provided by Ethereum's established pool of validators. This creates a mutually beneficial relationship between Ethereum's foundational layer and other blockchain protocols, enhancing the overall ecosystem.
Before taking a deeper look into the ecosystem and how users may get involved, let’s take a look at the fundamental ideas introduced by EigenLayer:
By combining these ideas, EigenLayer serves as an open marketplace where AVSs can rent pooled security provided by Ethereum validators.
While Restaking with EigenLayer presents numerous benefits, there are certain challenges and risks.
There are primarily two categories of risks associated with restaking with EigenLayer:
(1) many operators may collude to attack a set of AVSs simultaneously
With only a subset of operators choosing to restake in specific AVSs, this selective participation opens the door to potential collusion among operators, who might conspire to compromise the system for financial gain, particularly if they are restaking across multiple AVSs with substantial total locked values.
(2) the AVSs built on EigenLayer may have unintended slashing vulnerabilities — this is the risk of honest nodes getting slashed.
The risk of unintended slashing is significant, especially in the early stages of AVS deployment before thorough battle-testing. Vulnerabilities, such as programming bugs, could trigger slashing and result in losses for honest participants. To mitigate these risks, EigenLayer proposes rigorous security audits of AVS codebases and a governance layer capable of vetoing unjust slashing decisions.
We’ll cover the potential risks and management strategies in more depth in an upcoming article in this EigenLayer series, stay tuned!
Chorus One has been actively engaged in the EigenLayer ecosystem since its early days, evolving alongside it, and has recently integrated EigenLayer restaking into our latest product, OPUS Pool.
OPUS Pool is our latest addition to the OPUS product suite enabling anyone to stake any amount of ETH with Chorus One. Not only that, users also have the extra benefit of depositing any other accepted liquid staking tokens (including osETH, stETH, cbETH, and rETH) into EigenLayer in one go!
Essentially, we have opened up an avenue for anyone (OPUS and non-OPUS users) to participate in restaking as easily as possible.
For a step-by-step guide on how to get started with restaking with Chorus One, visit our comprehensive guide.
Additionally, we have been greatly involved within the ecosystem in a multitude of ways:
…. And more!
EigenLayer revolutionizes staked asset utilization, enhancing validator rewards and strengthening protocol economies. It catalyzes the creation of innovative protocols and services, enriching the Ethereum ecosystem. This advancement fosters Ethereum's growth, making it more attractive to institutional investors by allowing a single staking mechanism to secure diverse protocols, improving resource use and network efficiency, and broadening the stakeholder base.
Why should you choose Chorus One for Restaking?
To start your ETH staking journey with Chorus One, head to OPUS Pool!
Check out our step-by-step guide for a comprehensive overview of how you can get started.
For any questions, information, or suggestions, please reach out to us at staking@chorus.one, and we’ll be in touch!
A step-by-step guide to the OPUS Pool for ETH Staking
MEV Max - Introducing Chorus One’s vault on StakeWise V3
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Today, our research team published a study on ethresear.ch, delving into the impact of latency (time) on MEV extraction. More specifically, we demonstrate the costs associated with introducing artificial latency within a PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) framework. Additionally, we present findings from Adagio, an empirical study that explores the implications of latency optimization aimed at maximizing MEV capture.
In late August 2023, we launched Adagio, a latency-optimized setup on the Ethereum mainnet. The primary objective was to collect actionable data ethically, with minimal disruptions to the network. Until this point, Adagio has not been a client-facing product, but an internal research initiative running on approximately 100 self-funded validators. We initially shared ongoing results of the Adagio pilot in our Q3 Quarterly Insights report in October.
In alignment with our commitment to operational honesty and rational competition, this study discloses the full results of Adagio, alongside an extensive discussion of node operator incentives and potential adverse knock-on effects on the Ethereum network. As pioneers in MEV research, our primary objective is to address and mitigate existing competitive dynamics by offering a detailed analysis backed by proprietary data from our study, which will be explored further in the subsequent sections of this article.
This article offers a top-level summary of our study, contextualizing it within the ongoing Ethereum community dialogue on ethically optimizing MEV performance. We dive into the key findings of the study, highlighting significant observations and results. Central to our discussion is the exploration of the outcomes tied to the implementation of the Adagio setup, which demonstrates an overarching boost in MEV capture.
Ultimately, we recognise that node operators are compelled and incentivised to employ latency optimization as a matter of strategic necessity. As more operators take advantage of this inefficiency, they set a higher standard for returns, making it easier for investors to choose setups that use latency optimization.
This creates a cycle where the use of latency optimization becomes a standard practice, putting pressure on operators who are hesitant to join in. In the end, the competitive advantage of a node operator is determined by their willingness to exploit this systematic inefficiency in the system.
Additionally, we demonstrate that the parameters set by our Adagio setup corresponds to an Annual Percentage Rate (APR) that is 1.58% higher than the vanilla (standard) case, with a range from 1.30% to 3.09%. Insights into these parameters are provided below, with additional clarity available in the original post.
Let’s preface this section with the phrase - Right Place at the Right Time.
Delightfully analogous to the quote above, we’re adding further insights to the overarching discourse on the implication of latency optimization (i.e, a strategy where block proposers intentionally delay the publication of their block for as long as possible to maximize MEV capture) when it has become a burning topic within the Ethereum community, drawing increased attention from various stakeholders concerned about its network implications.
Yet, despite its growing significance, there has been a noticeable lack of empirical research on this subject. As pioneers in MEV research, we've been investigating this concept for over a year, incorporating latency optimization as one of our MEV strategies from the outset. Now, we're proud to contribute to the ongoing discussions and scrutinize the most significant claims with robust, evidence-based research.
In a previous article about Chorus One’s approach to MEV, we emphasized the importance of exploring the dynamics between builders, relays, and validators with the dimension of time.
Our focus on how latency optimization can profoundly influence MEV performance remains unchanged. However, we've identified a crucial gap in empirical data supporting this concept. Compounding this issue, various actors have advocated for methods to increase MEV extraction without rigorous analysis, resulting in inflated values based on biased assumptions. Recognizing the serious consequences this scenario poses in terms of centralization pressure, we now find it imperative to conduct a deep dive into this complex scenario.
Our strategy involves implementing a setup tailored to collect actionable data through self-funded validators in an ethical manner, ensuring minimal disruptions to the network. This initiative is geared toward addressing the existing gap in empirical research and offering a more nuanced understanding of the implications of latency optimization in the MEV domain.
The key objectives of this research is three-fold, including:
In the following section, we will present a comprehensive overview of the three most pivotal and relevant observations from the study, and as promised earlier, we will also delve into the results of Adagio.
Context: First, we delve into PBS inefficiencies and MEV returns.
Here, we explore the inefficiencies in the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) framework, showing how timing in auctions can be strategically exploited to generate consistent, excess MEV returns.
Additionally, we demonstrate how all client-facing node operators are incentivized to compete for latency-optimized MEV capture, irrespective of their voting power.
Key Finding: Latency optimization is beneficial for all client-facing node operators, irrespective of their size or voting power.
Using an empirical framework to estimate the potential yearly excess returns for validators who optimize for latency considering factors like the frequency of MEV opportunities, network conditions, and different latency strategies, our results indicate that node operators with different voting powers have varying levels of predictability in their MEV increases.
The above figure demonstrates that higher voting power tends to result in more predictable returns, while lower voting power introduces more variance. The median weekly MEV reward increase is around 5.47% for a node operator with 13% voting power and 5.11% for a node operator with 1% voting power.
The implication here is that big and small node operators cater to different utilities of their clients (delegators) because they operate at different levels of risk and reward. As a result, optimizing for latency is beneficial for both small and large node operators. In simpler terms, regardless of their size, node operators could consider optimizing latency to better serve their clients and enhance their overall performance.
As we look at a longer timeframe, the variability in rewards for any voting power profile is expected to decrease due to statistical principles. This means that rewards are likely to cluster around the 5% mark, regardless of the size of the node operator.
In practical terms, if execution layer rewards make up 30% of the total rewards, adopting a latency-aware strategy can boost the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) from 4.2% to 4.27%. This represents a noteworthy 1.67% increase in overall APR. Therefore, this presents a significant opportunity, encouraging node operators to adopt strategies that consider and optimize for latency.
Context: Second, we discuss the costs of introducing artificial delays, explaining how it increases MEV rewards but at the expense of subsequent proposers.
Key Finding: MEV tends to benefit node operators with higher voting power, giving them more stable returns. When these operators engage in strategic latency tactics, it can increase centralization risks and potentially raise gas cost and faster burnt ETH for the next proposer..
While sophisticated validators benefit from optimized MEV capture with artificial latency, the broader impact results in increased gas costs and a faster burning of ETH for the next proposers. The Ethereum network aims to maximize decentralization by encouraging hobbyists to run validators, but the outlined risks disproportionately affect solo validators. Below, we demonstrate that these downside risks are significant in scale, and disproportionately impact solo validators.
Figure 2 illustrates that introducing artificial latency increases the percentage of ETH burned, potentially reducing final rewards. Even a small increase in burnt ETH can significantly decrease rewards, especially for smaller node operators who are chosen less frequently to propose blocks. The negative impact is most significant for solo validators, making them less competitive on overall APR and subject to greater income variability. Large node operators playing timing games benefit from comparatively higher APR at lower variance to the detriment of other operators.
MEV tends to benefit node operators with higher voting power, giving them more stable returns. When these operators engage in strategic latency tactics, it can increase centralization risks and potentially raise gas fees for the entire Ethereum network. Moreover, larger node operators, due to their size, have access to more data, giving them an edge in testing strategies and optimizing latency.
In this scenario, node operators find it necessary to optimize for latency to stay competitive. As more operators adopt these strategies, it becomes a standard practice, creating a cycle where those hesitant to participate face increasing pressure. This results in an environment where a node operator's success is tied to its willingness to exploit systematic inefficiencies in the process.
Context: In late August 2023, Chorus One launched a latency-optimized setup — internally dubbed Adagio — on Ethereum mainnet.
Its goal was to gather actionable data in a sane manner, minimizing any potential disruptions to the network. Until this point, Adagio has not been a client-facing product, but an internal research initiative running on approximately 100 self-funded validators. We are committed to both operational honesty and rational competition, and therefore disclose our findings via this study.
In simple terms, this section analyzes the outcomes of our Adagio pilot, focusing on how different relay configurations affect the timing of bid selection and eligibility in the MEV-Boost auction.
Our pilot comprises four distinct setups, each representing a variable (i.e. a relay) in our experiment:The Benchmark Setup, The Aggressive Setup, The Normal Setup, and the Moderate Setup.
Key Findings: The results of this pilot indicate that the timing strategies opted by node operators used within relay operations have a significant impact on how competitive they are.
The aggressive setup, in particular, allows non-optimistic relays to perform similarly to optimistic ones. This means that certain relays can only effectively compete if they introduce an artificial delay.
In extreme cases, a relay might not be competitive on its own, but because it captures exclusive order flow, node operators might intentionally introduce an artificial delay when querying it or might choose not to use it at all. Essentially, these timing strategies play a crucial role in determining how relays can effectively participate and compete in the overall system.
These results offer valuable insights into how strategically introducing latency within the relay infrastructure can impact the overall effectiveness and competition in the MEV-Boost auction. The goal is to level the playing field among different relays by customizing their latency parameters.
The above graph displays the eligibility time of winning bids in the Adagio pilot compared to the broader network distribution. As expected, Adagio selects bids that become eligible later with respect to the network distribution. Notably, our setup always selects bids eligible before 1s, reducing the risks of missed slots and increased number of forks for the network.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that our results indicate that certain setups are more favorable to winning bids. This opens up the possibility for relays adopting latency optimization to impact their submission rate.
Bringing together the data on latency optimization payoff and the results of our Adagio pilot allows us to quantify the expected annual increase of validator-side MEV returns.
The simulation results presented in Fig. 4 show that, on average, there is a 4.75% increase in MEV extracted per block, with a range from 3.92% to 9.27%. This corresponds to an Annual Percentage Rate (APR) that is 1.58% higher than the vanilla (standard) case, with a range from 1.30% to 3.09%.
The increased variability in the range is mainly due to the limited voting power in the pilot, but some of it is also caused by fluctuations in bid eligibility times. The observed median value is 5% lower than the theoretically projected value. To address this difference, the approach will be updated to minimize variance in bid selections and keep eligibility times below the 950ms threshold.
Let’s take a moment to consolidate the key takeaways derived from our study and the Adagio setup.
Since inception, Chorus One has recognised the importance of MEV and spearheaded the exploration of the concept within the industry. From establishing robust MEV policies and strategies, receiving a grant from dYdX for investigating MEV in the context of the dYdX Chain to conducting empirical studies that investigate the practical implications of factors influencing MEV returns, we've consistently taken a pioneering role. Our dedication revolves around enhancing the general understanding of MEV through rational, honest, and practical methods.
For comprehensive details about our MEV policies, work, and achievements, please visit our MEV page.
If you’d like to learn more, have questions, or would like to get in touch with our research team, please reach out to us at research@chorus.one.
If you want to learn more about our staking services, or would like to get started, please reach out at staking@chorus.one
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 45+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
People like to say that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. However, sometimes forgetting the past is a deliberate choice: an invitation to build on completely new grounds, a bet that enables a different future.
All bets have consequences. Specifically in crypto, many of t hese consequences are so material t hat t hey become hard to comprehend: hundred-million dollar exploit after exploit, billions vanishing in thin air... In its relatively short history, Ethereum has made many bets when deciding what the optimal protocol looks like. One such gamble was the decision to not enshrine native delegation into their Proof-of-Stake protocol layer.
Before the Merge, the standard PoS implementation was some sort of DPoS (Delegated Proof-of-Stake). The likes of Solana and Cosmos had already cemented some of the ground work, with features like voting and delegation mechanisms becoming the norm. Ethereum departed from this by opting for a purePoS design philosophy.
The thought-process here had to do with simplicity but even above this, the goal was to force individual staking for a more resilient network: resilient to capture and resilient to third-party influence, whether in the form of companies or nation states.
How successful have these ideas been? We could write ad infinitum about the value of decentralization, creating strong social layers and any other such platitudes, but we believe there’s more weight in real arguments. In this analysis we want to expand on the concepts and current state of the liquid staking market and what it actually means for the future of Ethereum. Also, we talk about the role of Lido and other LST protocols such as Stakewise in this market.
If t ere’s some hing that history has shown us is that derivatives can strengthen markets. This is true of traditional commodities where the underlying asset is difficult or impossible to trade, like oil, or even mature financial instruments, like a single stock becoming a complicated index. In fact, the growth in the use of derivatives has led to exponential growth in the total volume of contracts in our economy.
It is common as well that in most markets, the volume of derivatives greatly surpasses the spot, providing significant opportunities across a large design space. It might sound familiar (and we will get to crypto in a moment), but this open-design space has posed major challenges for risk-management practices in the already mature traditional finance, in areas such as regulation and supervision of the mechanisms, and monetary policy.
Liquid tokens are one of the first derivative primitives developed solely for the crypto markets, and have greatly inherited from their predecessors. When designing these products in the context of our industry, one has to account not only for the protocol-specific interactions, but also the terms of regulation (from the internal governance mechanisms and also in the legal sense), fluctuating market dynamics and increasingly sophisticated trading stakeholders.
Let ’s review some of Ethereum’s design choices, and how they fit into t his idea. Ethereum has enforced some pretty intense protocol restrictions on staked assets, famously their 32ETH requirement per validator and lack of native delegation. Game theory has a notoriously difficult reputation in distributed systems design. Mechanisms for incentivizing or disincentivizing any behavior will typically almost always have negative externalities.
Also, on-chain restrictions tend to be quite futile. In our last edition, we discussed some effects that can be observed in assets that resemble “money ”, like the token markets of LSTs, including network effects and power law distributions. But now we want to go deeper and consider, why is Liquid Staking so big in Ethereum and not other chains?
We observe a clear relationship between the existence of a native delegation mechanism and the slower adoption of Liquid Staking protocols. In that sense, other chains have enshrined DPoS, which makes it significantly less likely to result in high-adoption or a similar dynamic, whilst Ethereum has found it self increasingly growing in that direction.
We observe the results of the restrictions imposed at the protocol level. The network *allows* stake to be managed by individual actors, but there is no way to prevent aggregation or pooling. No matter how many incentives you create for the behavior on-chain to be as observable and maximally auditable as possible, the reality is that as it stands, the effect is never auditable.
At the time of writing this analysis, Lido has managed to concentrate 31.76% of the market share for staking in Ethereum under its signature token stETH. This is an out standing figure, not only in absolute terms but also relative to its position in the Liquid Staking market, where it controls an extraordinary ~80%, with close to 167,000 unique depositors on their public smart contracts. It is, by a margin, the largest protocol in crypto by Total Value Locked.
A big issue with TVL is that it is heavily dependent on crypto prices. In the case of Lido, we actually observe that the inflow charts show a constant growing trend from protocol launch to the present day. This is independent from the decreased crypto prices, minimal transaction output on-chain and t e consequent inferior returns on the asset, with an APR that moves in between 3.2 and 3.6% on the average day. This is of course, below the network average for vanilla nodes considering the protocol takes a 10% cut from staking rewards, divided between the DAO and its 38 permissioned Node Operators.
Recently, there’s been heated debate related to the position and surface of Lido inside Ethereum, as it relates to decentralization concerns and a specific number that constantly pops up. What is this 33.3% we keep hearing about ?
There are two important thresholds related to PoS, the first one being t his 33.3 percent number; which in practical terms means that if an attacker could take control of that surface of the network they would be able to prevent it from finalizing... at least during a period of time. This is a progressive issue with more questions than answers: what if a protocol controls 51% of all stake? How about 100%?
Before diving into some arguments, it is interesting to contextualize liquid ETH derivatives as they compare to native ETH. In the derivatives market, the instrument allows the unbundling of various risks affecting the value of an underlying asset. LSTs such as stETH combine pooling and some pseudo-delegation, and although this delegation is probably the main catalyst of high adoption, it is the pooling effect that has a huge effect on decentralization. As slashing risk is socialized, it turns operator selection into a highly opinionated activity.
Another common use of derivatives is leveraged position-taking, in a way the opposite of the previous one that is more focused on hedging risk. This makes an interesting case for the growth of stETH, as in a way its liquidity and yielding capabilities are augmenting native ETH’s utility. There is no reason you cannot, for example, take leveraged positions in a liquid token and enjoy both sources of revenue. At least, this is true of the likes of stETH which have found almost complete DeFi integration. As long as they are two distinct assets, one could see more value accrual going to derivatives, which is consistent with traditional markets.
This growth spurt is an interesting subject of study by itself, but we think it would be also possible to identify growth catalysts, and also apply them across the industry, to discover where some other undervalued protocols might exist if any. For this, you would want to identify when the protocol had growth spurts, find out which events led to that and search for these catalysts in other protocols.
One such example comes when protocols become liquid enough to be accessible to bigger players.
What would happen if we addressed so-called centralization vectors, and revisited the in-protocol delegation. Or more realistically, if we had the chance to reduce the pooling effect and allowed the market to decide the distributions of stake, for example, by having one LST per node operator.
Alternatives like Stakewise have been building in that design space to create a completely new staking experience, one that takes into account the past.
In particular, Stakewise V3 has a modular designt hat mimics network modularity, against more monolithic LST protocols. For instance, it allows stakers the freedom to selectt heir own validator, rather than enforcing socialized pooling. The protocol also helps mitigate some slashing risk, as losses can be easily confined to a single “vault”. Each staker receives a proportional amount of Vault Liquid Tokens (VLT) in return for depositing in a specific vault, which they can then mint into osETH, the traded liquid staking derivative.
Although not without its complexities, it offers an alternative to the opinionated nature of permissioned protocols like Lido, in an industry where only a better product can go face to face with the incumbent.
If you design a system where the people with the most stake enforce the rules and there is an incentive for that stake to consolidate, there’s something to be said about those rules. However, can we really make the claim that t here’s some inherent flaw in the design?
One of the points that get brought up is in the selection of the protocol participants. However, a more decentralized mechanism for choosing node operators can actually have the unintended result of greater centralization of stake. We need only to look at simple DPoS, which counts into its severe shortcomings a generally poor delegate selection with very top heavy stake delegation and capital inefficiency.
Another issue has to do with enforcing limits on Liquid Staking protocols, or asking them to self limit in the name of some reported values. This paternalistic attitude punishes successful products in the crypto ecosystem, while simultaneously asserting the largest group of stake in a PoS system is not representative of the system. Users have shown with their actions that even with LST or even DPoS downsides (all kinds of risk, superlinear penalty scaling) this is still prefered to the alternative of taking on technical complexity.
An underlying problem exists in the beliefs that control a lot of Ethereum’s design decisions, meaning that all value should accrue to just ETH and no other token can be generating value on the base layer. This taxation is something that we should be wary of, as it is very pervasive in the technocracies and other systems we stand separate to. Applications on Ethereum have to be allowed to also generate revenue.
Ultimately, the debate about Lido controlling high levels of stake does seem to be an optics issue, and not an immediate threat to Ethereum. Moreover, it is the symptom of a thriving economy, which we have observed when compared to the traditional derivatives market.
Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, recently wrote an article out lining some changes that could be applied to protocol and staking pools to improve decentralization. There he outlines the ways in which the delegator role can be made more meaningful, especially in regards to pool selection. This would allow immediate effects in the voting tools within pools, more competition between pools and also some level of enshrined delegation, whilst maintaining the philosophy of high-level minimum viable enshrinement in the network and the value of the decentralized blockspace that is Ethereum’s prime product. At least, this looks like a way forward. Let ’s see if it succeeds in creating an alternative, or if we will continue to replicate the same faulty systems of our recent financial history.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 45+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
We’re proud to launch our liquid staking pool on Stakewise v3, enabling individuals to stake any amount of ETH and benefit from Chorus One’s enterprise-grade staking infrastructure and industry-leading MEV yields! Additionally, staking on Chorus One’s pool enables users to un-stake at any time, or utilize their staked ETH capital throughout DeFi. You can start staking with on Chorus One’s pool here .
We're also introducing exclusive Private Vaults tailored for our institutional clients and investors who desire a dedicated liquid staking solution. These personalized Vaults come with individual agreements, ensuring user assets remain distinct and aren't mixed with other Vaults.
Additionally, in the upcoming months, we plan to deepen our collaboration by seamlessly integrating our public Vault into our Staking Dashboard. This integration will make it incredibly easy for OPUS customers to access liquid staking and mint osETH, enabling them to participate in the DeFi space effortlessly. Stay tuned for more updates!
Below, we dive into some of the key details about Stakewise and how you can start staking ETH on Chorus One’s Vaults.
Stakewise v3 represents the latest version of the Stakewise protocol, announced by the Stakewise DAO in 2022.
V3 was conceived to tackle the issue of stake centralization, a significant challenge impacting the security and well-being of Ethereum. Setting up Ethereum validators has traditionally been complex for node operators, with factors like the 32ETH minimum requirement, technical and hardware demands, and the risk of financial penalties for validator mistakes. Consequently, there has been a decline in solo stakers engaging in individual ETH staking. Many have opted to outsource validator operations to commercial node operators, who possess the expertise, hardware, and security measures required to establish validator nodes for individuals and organizations with 32 ETH.
Stakewise v3 tackles this challenge by elevating its existing liquid staking solution, introducing mini staking pools referred to as "Vaults." These Vaults empower individuals, node operators, or organizations to effortlessly launch their own nodes, mint staked ETH (osETH) tokens against those nodes, accept delegations, or delegate any amount of ETH across multiple nodes to mitigate network concentration.
Importantly, each Vault or mini Pool is entirely agnostic to the configurations set up by its operator. This means that the operator can fully customize its vault according to its own design, allowing users to select a vault based on features that best suit the depositor. Whatever client solutions, KYC features, MEV relays the entity wishes to run are under their control, resulting in a diverse marketplace of staking solutions for users to explore and choose from.
Moreover, users can establish private pools, allowing deposits only from addresses whitelisted by the Vault Operator. This ring-fences the Vault, ensuring that staked assets are not co-mingled with funds from other Vaults.
We've covered everything you need to know about how Stakewise v3 works and its use cases for solo stakers, institutions, DeFi users, and commercial node operators in this guide. Check it out!
For investors
Previously, staking ETH was restricted to investors and institutions with a minimum of 32 ETH. They could delegate validator maintenance responsibilities to an experienced node operator like Chorus One, known for its enterprise-grade staking infrastructure.
By staking on Chorus One’s Pool on Stakewise v3, anyone with any amount of ETH can now access the same infrastructure and benefits as our institutional customers. This opens doors for a significantly larger number of individuals to safely and seamlessly stake and unstake their ETH without any minimum requirements.
Chorus One has garnered widespread recognition for our dedication to research and the implementation of strategies aimed at enhancing our MEV performance. We consistently optimize our infrastructure to maximize MEV rewards.
The following graph illustrates our performance over a 60-day period. Over this time period, Chorus One nodes have captured close to 14% more MEV rewards per validator (ETH) when compared to the weighted industry average, observed on Lido.
*Please note that this is a snapshot, and that MEV rewards fluctuate as a function of variance and market conditions. Please visit Rated Network to view the latest figures.
To learn more about the work we’ve done in in spearheading MEV research in the industry, please visit our dedicated MEV page.
We are one of the very few node operators to hold the ISO 27001:2022 certification, representing the industry standard for implementing top-tier security practices. Safeguarding customer assets and data is our utmost priority, ensuring users that their funds are in experienced hands.
Our in-house team of researchers and experts consistently scrutinizes the crypto ecosystem and the Ethereum network with a keen eye. We regularly publish reports and analyses addressing current industry issues, providing fresh insights based on our expertise. We are dedicated to ongoing improvement, constantly exploring opportunities to enhance our performance and deepen our understanding of the network in ambition to improve the overall experience and rewards for our customers.
For institutions
Our institutional clients have the option to establish their own secure vault, operated exclusively by Chorus One. This choice allows them to implement additional measures to safeguard their funds, ensuring that staked assets remain isolated from other vaults. Opting for Chorus One as the operator of their private vaults provides institutions with the assurance that their assets are in capable hands, coupled with the added benefits of our infrastructure, including the highest MEV yields, enhanced security, and streamlined operational processes.
In the upcoming months, OPUS customers can seamlessly stake on our liquid staking pool and earn staked ETH (osETH) directly from our Staking Dashboard. This empowers users to effortlessly access the liquid staking ecosystem with just a few clicks on our platform, allowing you to conveniently track your rewards in one place! Stay tuned for more details – coming soon! 😉
To stake ETH on Chorus One’s Vault, visit here.
If you're interested in launching a private Vault operated by Chorus One, please reach out to us at staking@chorus.one.
To delve deeper into Stakewise v3, check out our explainer guide here. For a step-by-step guide on how you can start staking on Chorus One’s Vault MEV-Max, please refer to this article.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 45+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Stake centralisation has been the talk of Ethereum’s town in 2023. Recognizing its detrimental effect and the risk it poses for Ethereum’s security and vitality, the Stakewise DAO announced its V3 in September 2022 - a permissionless and decentralized liquid staking protocol with a novel design and a liquid staked ETH token called osETH. The primary goals of v3 were stated to reduce the degree of stake centralization on Ethereum by i) making solo staking more appealing, ii) putting the choice of node operator(s) into the user’s hands, and iii) offering a new, less risky staked ETH token standard as an alternative to prevailing models.
Chorus One is proud to partner with Stakewise to support these goals by launching our liquid staking pool on Stakewise v3, enabling individuals to stake any amount of ETH and benefit from Chorus One’s enterprise-grade staking infrastructure and highest MEV yields. Additionally, staking on Chorus One’s pool enables users to un-stake at any time, or utilize their staked ETH capital throughout DeFi.
As 2023 approaches its final weeks, over a year since Stakewise announced their V3, we take a closer look at the protocol's current state - diving into its architecture, distinctions from existing liquid staking protocols, and its potential to broaden the landscape for ETH staking amongst solo stakers and institutions.
Jordan Sutcliffe, Head of Business Development at Stakewise, aptly coined Stakewise V3 as the ‘Swiss army knife’ for ETH staking, sparking a flurry of interest from ETH enthusiasts. During the unveiling, the team revealed that the new version opens the doors for anyone capable of running Ethereum validators to engage in liquid staking and receive delegations in a permissionless manner - an approach that aims to welcome a broader range of participants, fostering control and driving decentralization within the ETH staking ecosystem.
StakeWise V3 achieves this by introducing the concept of layered staking, allowing users i) to delegate ETH to a vault of the node operator(s) of their liking (1st layer), and ii) giving them the option to mint osETH to represent their stake (2nd layer). This design enables anyone to join as a solo staker who can mint osETH tokens against their node, or delegate ETH across multiple nodes to counteract network concentration. Notably, V3 introduces a slashing-resistant staked ETH token, osETH, ensuring scalability without introducing systemic risk to the broader ecosystem.
Ethereum was conceived with the mission of building a permissionless, censorship-resistant and financially robust network for value exchange.
The transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) through the Merge aimed to democratize participation, shedding the hardware and compute costs of Proof of Work (PoW). A year on from the Merge, however, centralization remains one of Ethereum’s biggest challenges - ironically, drifting towards the paradox of its own mission statement.
Currently, staking on Ethereum mandates validators to lock up 32 ETH with the network. While this investment yields interest, any misstep or dishonest conduct by a validator can lead to the revocation of funds. Setting up a validator node to stake on the network can also be a complicated task, meaning financial penalties can result if things are set up improperly.
To address this, liquid staking protocols emerged as intermediaries, enabling solo stakers and institutions to pool their ETH, collectively forming the 32 ETH required for a node. This innovation democratized ETH staking, allowing nearly anyone to participate. Intermediaries assumed the operational responsibilities, handling the pooling, staking, and technical requirements, while taking a share of the rewards for their efforts.
So, why Stakewise V3?
The drawback of the pre-existing version of Stakewise and its counterparts is simple but crucial. The absence of technical or capital requirements, the ability to temporarily exit from staking, and the increased efficiency of staked capital presented by liquid staking protocols resonate with depositors to an extent that it leads to a decrease in solo stakers (for example, individuals setting up ETH validators at home). Over time, this decline can significantly impact Ethereum’s security and decentralization.
To address this, the Stakewise DAO introduced Stakewise V3, its latest version that allows anyone—from solo stakers to established node operators to financial institutions—to participate. As a solo staker, one can seamlessly launch their own nodes, mint staked ETH (osETH) tokens against their nodes, or delegate any amount of ETH across multiple nodes to counteract network concentration.
Layer 1: Vaults
At the heart of Stakewise V3 are ‘Vaults’ - a network of permissionless, non-custodial staking mini pools that anyone can launch on the Stakewise platform and receive ETH delegations on their nodes. It offers users the freedom to stake with whichever vault they want, choosing between vaults run by solo stakers, node operator companies, and groups of solo/commercial operators.
For every 32 ETH of deposits accumulated in a Vault, the Vault operator(s) registers an Ethereum validator in the Beacon Chain and starts staking. The staking rewards belong to the depositors, net of the staking fee charged by the Vault.
Importantly, each of these Vaults is completely unique to the configurations set up by its operator, meaning that the operator can fully customize its vault as per its own design, allowing users to pick a vault based on the features that best suit the depositor. Essentially, Vaults are completely agnostic to the staking solutions that an operator wants to run - whatever client solutions, KYC features, MEV relays or DVT middleware that the entity wants to run are under their control. This leads to a very diverse marketplace of staking solutions that users can shop around and choose from.
Moreover, Vault Operators can set their Vault to a private setting, allowing deposits only from addresses whitelisted by the Vault Operator. This enables use cases like solo stakers depositing ETH into their own Vault and not accepting deposits from others. For instance, compliance-sensitive organizations can create a Vault to enable staking for only a limited number of KYC'd participants.
Layer 2: The osETH Token
The osETH Token is a new type of overcollateralised ETH token introduced by V3, which is a liquid ERC-20 representation of staked assets that uses Vault Token(s) as collateral. It can be minted by anyone who has staked ETH into a Vault(s), or can be bought/sold on decentralized exchanges.
Importantly, osETH represents a new type of liquid-staked ETH token that has its value pegged to staked ETH 1:1, but that does not directly pass on the slashing losses to holders, ensuring that all the staking rewards and penalties remain isolated to the individual Vault. To ensure this, V3 requires >1 ETH for every osETH that stakers in Vault want to mint. In the scenario where slashing does occur, there is always a reserve of ETH that absorbs the slashing losses before osETH holders are affected. This protects osETH holders from losing their principal, making osETH a safer option for staking.
Note that the stakers who mint osETH are still exposed to the slashing risk of the Vaults in which they staked ETH, and excess collateralization makes sure that the other osETH holders are not affected.
For solo stakers -
StakeWise V3 empowers solo stakers by allowing them to mint osETH tokens against their nodes, providing access to DeFi opportunities while maintaining a non-custodial setup. Solo stakers can set up private vaults, mint osETH, and even earn additional revenue by hosting validators for other stakers. Alternatively, public vaults enable solo stakers to accept delegations, maximize their score, and mint osETH based on received vault tokens.
For DeFi users -
StakeWise V3 caters to users seeking yields by providing osETH tokens, tradable in decentralized exchanges or minted within vaults. osETH integrates slashing protection, and ensures that staked capital are not co-mingled across funds, thereby offering a less-risky, diverse marketplace for users to mint osETH and use it in DeFi.
For institutions and exchanges -
Financial institutions typically prefer direct engagement with trusted staking service providers to ensure due diligence and favorable terms. StakeWise V3 caters to this preference by enabling institutions and exchanges to create private vaults, allowing exclusive collaboration with chosen operators and staking clients. Vault tokens from staking represent staked ETH, offering institutions the flexibility to enable liquidity and utility within their ecosystem. Additionally, for broader access to DeFi markets, institutions can mint or permit customers to mint osETH tokens.
For commercial node operators -
In StakeWise V3, operators, whether independent or collaborating with other entities, can establish vaults to accept delegations, allowing depositors to tokenize their staked ETH into osETH. Operators can choose to keep vaults private or public, showcase strong performance, and enhance their vault Score by taking risk-reducing measures.
As experienced node operators, we have established both our public pool (Chorus One - MEV Max) in StakeWise V3, providing individuals access to liquid staking while benefiting from our network expertise and proven MEV strategies. Our institutional clients also have the option of launching private, ring-fenced pools operated by Chorus One. For more details, refer to the final section of this article.
Chorus One is expanding the possibilities of V3’s Vaults by extending our MEV optimization strategies beyond a select group of customers to encompass ALL ETH stakers. We hold decentralization as a core value, and through our partnership with Stakewise, take immense pride in making our enterprise staking infrastructure to everyone - all without any minimum requirements to stake ETH.
Below, we provide a brief breakdown of the various methods available for staking ETH and minting osETH with Chorus One. For a comprehensive understanding of the benefits associated with staking your ETH on Chorus One's liquid staking pools, we've covered all the details here. Check it out!
Chorus One's public vault invites users to stake any amount of ETH and mint osETH, enjoying the benefits of our enterprise-grade staking infrastructure, proven MEV strategies, world-class security measures, and network expertise. Access Chorus One’s Public Vault here.
We will also have private, tailor-made vaults for clients seeking individual, personalized agreements for their staked capital. With these private pools, user assets stay separate and are not commingled with other Vaults, thus offering the perks of liquid staking with enhanced security and all the other benefits Chorus One has to offer—higher MEV yields, top-notch security, network expertise, and more. To launch Private Vault with Chorus One, please reach out to us at staking@chorus.one.
In addition, we're making liquid staking more accessible to both our existing and new OPUS customers.
Soon, our public pool will be seamlessly integrated into our Staking Dashboard, allowing OPUS users to dive into liquid staking, mint osETH, and leverage it in DeFi or hold it—all with just a few clicks! Stay tuned for more updates coming your way soon!
You can also get a glimpse of how it will work, and more insights into Stakewise v3 from Jordan Sutcliffe’s speech at the staking summit, here.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 45+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
Chorus One has launched our liquid staking pool on Stakewise v3, enabling individuals to stake any amount of ETH and benefit from Chorus One’s enterprise-grade staking infrastructure and highest MEV yields! This article provides a step-by-step guide on how you can stake any amount of ETH on Chorus One’s vault, known as MEV Max.
To start staking on MEV Max, visit here.
Stakewise v3, introduced by the Stakewise DAO in 2022, addresses the challenge of stake centralization on Ethereum. The traditional complexity of setting up validators, including a 32ETH minimum requirement, technical demands, and the risk of financial penalties, has led to a decline in individual ETH staking. Stakewise v3 combats this by enhancing its liquid staking solution with mini staking pools called "Vaults." These Vaults make it possible for anyone to set up and run ETH nodes, mint osETH, accept delegations, or delegate ETH across multiple nodes in ambition to promote decentralization and mitigate network concentration. Vaults are completely customized by their operators, according to the configurations of their choice, fostering a diverse marketplace of ETH staking solutions.
Chorus One is expanding the possibilities of V3’s Vaults by extending our MEV optimization strategies beyond a select group of customers to encompass ALL ETH stakers. We hold decentralization as a core value, and through our partnership with Stakewise, take immense pride in making our enterprise staking infrastructure to everyone - all without any minimum requirements to stake ETH.
Below, we provide a brief breakdown of the various methods available for staking ETH and minting osETH with Chorus One. For a comprehensive understanding of the benefits associated with staking your ETH on Chorus One's liquid staking pools, we've covered all the details here. Check it out!
Chorus One's public vault invites users to stake any amount of ETH and mint osETH, enjoying the benefits of our enterprise-grade staking infrastructure, proven MEV strategies, world-class security measures, and network expertise. Access Chorus One’s Public Vault here.
We will also have private, tailor-made vaults for clients seeking individual, personalized agreements for their staked capital. With these private pools, user assets stay separate and are not commingled with other Vaults, thus offering the perks of liquid staking with enhanced security and all the other benefits Chorus One has to offer—higher MEV yields, top-notch security, network expertise, and more. To launch Private Vault with Chorus One, please reach out to us at staking@chorus.one.
In addition, we're making liquid staking more accessible to both our existing and new OPUS customers. Soon, our public pool will be seamlessly integrated into our Staking Dashboard, allowing OPUS users to dive into liquid staking, mint osETH, and leverage it in DeFi or hold it—all with just a few clicks! Stay tuned for more updates coming your way soon!
Now, moving on the staking guide.
6. After a few minutes, your transaction will be completed.
To learn more about our partnership with Stakewise, set up a private vault with Chorus One, or for any other queries, please reach out to us at staking@chorus.one
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 45+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
The staking economy is a thriving industry, offering over $12 billion in rewards, with $600 million attributed to Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). At Chorus One, we deeply recognize the significance of MEV for both validators and investors, which has fueled our commitment to continuously optimize our infrastructure to ideally integrate with the Ethereum MEV pipeline.
MEV serves as a gateway for validators to maximize the value extracted from transactions within a block. As early as 2019, the research paper "Flash Boys 2.0," authored by Ari Juels and Lorenz Breidenbach, shed light on its real-world impact, particularly in decentralized exchanges and user experiences. The cumulative value of MEV extracted on Ethereum alone surpassed $78 million in early 2021 and has skyrocketed to an astonishing $600 million in 2023.
MEV has become a cornerstone of Chorus One's research efforts. As one of the earliest and most influential contributors to MEV research, we conduct in-house studies and experiments to optimize MEV yield. Notably, we were commissioned by dYdX to produce an in-depth report on MEV within dYdX v4, and released the first public tracker of (pre-protorev) MEV on Osmosis (@chorusonemev). Furthermore, we have developed a customized version of the Solana client to capture MEV opportunities on the Solana network.
To achieve the highest possible MEV yield, employing effective infrastructure strategies is paramount. At Chorus One, we conduct a series of experiments to identify the most efficient combination of strategies, aiming to optimize our MEV performance. Below, we delve into the fundamentals of MEV extraction, exploring the solutions we implement to improve our performance.
In general, MEV empowers block producers to rearrange, include, or exclude transactions, providing advantages that can impact users. However, there is a subtle distinction in how MEV operates on Ethereum compared to other blockchain networks.
On Ethereum, the process involves a 'block builder' constructing the block, which is then passed on to a 'relay' before being proposed by a validator. This Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) introduces a separation between the block producer and the proposer. As an Ethereum validator, Chorus One focuses on optimizing MEV rewards by fine-tuning our interaction with relays.
Conversely, on most other chains, validators themselves build the block and have the freedom to prioritize transaction sorting to maximize MEV rewards.
We continuously optimize our infrastructure to capture the highest possible MEV rewards.
The following graph illustrates our performance over a 60-day period. Over this time period, Chorus One nodes have captured close to 14% more MEV rewards per validator (ETH) when compared to the weighted industry average, observed on Lido.
*Please note that this is a snapshot, and that MEV rewards fluctuate as a function of variance and market conditions. Please visit Rated Network to view the latest figures.
This process of continuous infrastructure optimization highlights the significance of employing a combination of well-established best practices to achieve higher MEV rewards. By utilizing specific methods in tandem, validators can effectively maximize their MEV yield. More on this below.
Before diving into Chorus One's approach, we briefly explore the process of extracting MEV. It involves key players with distinct roles:
Block Producers: They create blocks of transactions on the blockchain, deciding which transactions to include and their order.
Relays: A relayer is an entity responsible for checking blocks before passing them to the block producers. The relay confirms the builder blocks for validity and estimate the MEV-related value of each block. By tweaking how block producers/validators interface with relays, they can add value by optimizing MEV rewards.
Searchers: These individuals or automated bots constantly monitor the blockchain, searching for profitable opportunities to manipulate transaction order and earn additional profits through MEV.
DApps and Protocol Developers: Decentralized applications (DApps) and the developers who create rules for block producers support MEV extraction. DApps create opportunities for MEV extraction through their design, while protocol developers establish rules that enable block producers to capture MEV.
In simpler terms, block producers create blocks,relays check the blocks, searchers seek ways to profit by manipulating transaction order, and DApps and protocol developers provide the framework and incentives for MEV extraction.
Validators often employ similar solutions to increase rewards and actively seek optimization opportunities. For instance, MEV-Boost, an implementation of proposer-builder separation (PBS) developed by Flashbots for Ethereum, enables validators to maximize staking rewards by selling block space to builders in an open market.
MEV-Boost is free, open-source, and neutral software designed to democratize MEV while minimizing associated negative implications, such as consensus-layer security risks, centralization, or the risk of searchers going rogue. For more information on MEV-Boost software, visit https://boost.flashbots.net.
MEV plays a significant role in yield generation on networks like Ethereum, and as a result, our nodes are MEV-boost enabled by default.
With a team of in-house experts, we continuously adjust our infrastructure to optimally integrate with the Ethereum MEV pipeline.
1. Relay Selection
Relays are crucial intermediaries in the MEV extraction process, acting as trusted connectors between block builders and validators. Their primary role is to facilitate seamless data exchange and ensure the selection of the most lucrative bids for validators. We continuously conduct experiments to identify the optimal combination of relays (as shown in the relay market dashboard below) , aiming to establish efficient communication and achieve the highest valid bid submission to validators.
Our approach: By carefully selecting the best relays, we enable our validators to receive winning bids from all connected relays.
2. Latency Games
Exploring the dynamics between builders, relays, and validators is even more interesting with a new dimension: time.
Latency, the delay in data transmission, has gained significant importance for relays and the entire MEV supply chain, leading to notable consequences. It acts as a centralizing force within the MEV supply chain, with relays having shorter latency likely to be more successful in auctions. This preference encourages builders to prioritize sending their blocks to those relays.
Our approach: We optimize our connection to relays when requesting blocks by prioritizing payoff and minimizing the probability of a missed slot.
3. Infrastructure Optimization
On the infrastructure and hardware front, we prioritize optimizing the performance of our validators. Through the strategic selection of hardware, geographical distribution, and client implementation, we ensure that our infrastructure operates at its peak efficiency. This optimization enhances the rewards generated for our customers.
Our approach: We are actively investing in and expanding our infrastructure to further elevate performance and rewards.
TL;DR: More rewards, more revenue.
Through our unique solutions and ongoing research, we continuously push the boundaries to enhance the rewards obtained through MEV. Today, our MEV-boost enabled nodes capture significantly higher APR on staked ETH, surpassing the yield of the average validator.
To learn more about our approach to MEV, visit: https://chorus.one/mev-maximum-extractable-value
To stake with Chorus One, reach out to staking@chorus.one and we'll get back to you.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 45+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
The Shapella Upgrade was completed in April, marking a significant event for both Ethereum and the entire crypto industry. This upgrade combined changes to both the Execution Layer (Shanghai upgrade) and Consensus Layer (Capella upgrade), allowing for the withdrawal of staked ETH and any accumulated staking rewards.
Shapella was a major stride towards greater flexibility and accessibility in staking on the Ethereum network. With the ability to withdraw staked ETH and rewards, the pivotal event galvanized institutional interest in the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value.
In this article, we’ll explore how the Shapella upgrade has sparked increasing interest in ETH staking among institutional investors, and why this trend is expected to continue.
A look back…
Let’s start by examining how we arrived at the current situation and why withdrawals were not enabled during the Ethereum transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
The Ethereum network transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism in two stages, starting with the launch of the Beacon Chain, followed by the Merge. During this time, staking withdrawals were not enabled to ensure network security and reduce the risk of failure. Validators were able to exit, but customers could not unstake their staked ETH.
Despite knowing they would be unable to withdraw their ETH for some time, the initial network participants contributed millions of ETH to secure the Ethereum PoS network.
To ensure the upgrade went smoothly, it was implemented without any downtime. And the focus was solely on making this transition as seamlessly as possible. As a result, no other features or changes were added at that time. The goal was to minimize the chances of anything going wrong and to keep the Ethereum network running smoothly for all its users. ETH withdrawals were not enabled, until Shapella.
Why Institutions hesitated to stake ETH before Shapella
Prior to Shapella, staking ETH involved significant risks due to uncertainty surrounding withdrawals. This made institutions hesitant to stake their assets, as they needed quick access to them if necessary.
In fact, despite ranking second in market cap, only 15% of the total ETH supply was staked, a remarkably lower percentage than other tokens such as Solana, which has over 70% of its total supply staked.
Another reason for the lack of institutional participation in ETH staking was the general unclear regulatory stance regarding digital assets globally.
For instance, in late 2021, the SEC sent Kraken, one of the largest US exchanges, a Wells notice regarding its staking services. According to the SEC, Kraken's staking service constituted a security offering and required registration with the Commission. Kraken disagreed with the SEC's position and argued that staking fell outside its jurisdiction and was not a security offering. Despite its stance, Kraken suspended its staking services for US customers due to concerns over the regulatory environment and uncertainty surrounding the SEC's position on staking.
As a result, institutions feared that what happened to Kraken would apply to all staking providers, although Kraken's situation was a one-off and would not affect someone who staked their assets through a trusted non-custodial staking provider like Chorus One.
Here's why a situation like this is unlikely to happen to a non- custodial staking provider or validator like Chorus One:
The Silver Lining: Why ETH staking is more appealing to Institutions post-Upgrade
Since Shapella, the level of staking is on an upwards trajectory, despite shaky grounds.
The amount of ETH being staked has been steadily increasing, with large amounts of capital being locked up to earn 4 to 5% yields in ETH.
Source: Dune Analytics
Approximately 655k ETH ($1.2M) has been deposited since the upgrade, with the ‘largest weekly token inflow in ether staking’s nearly two-and-a-half-year history’ seen just two weeks following Shapella. The surge was largely driven by enterprise-grade staking providers and institutional investors seeking to reinvest their rewards following withdrawal.
At the time of writing, there are approximately 19M staked ETH, and deposits continue to surpass withdrawals.
The growing amount of staked ETH is a promising indicator for the adoption and security of Ethereum. Now that yields are available, institutional investors are likely to be even more interested in staking ETH. In fact, there has already been a strong influx of institutional interest in ETH futures following the upgrade, indicating positive staking momentum among larger investors who are looking to increase their revenue.
Additionally, the first week of May 2023 saw a surge in staked ETH deposits as investors raced to stake their tokens with validators. According to Nansen, over 200,000 ETH was deposited into the network, marking the first time since Shapella that deposits outpaced withdrawals. This recent surge has resulted in over 19 million ETH being locked for staking, which accounts for about 15% of the total circulating supply of ether.
Shapella benefits institutions by providing them with the opportunity to get liquidity on their staked ETH and earn a yield of 4% or more while participating in securing the network. It essentially derisks staking, which increases the intrinsic value of the asset and makes Ethereum even more attractive to institutions. This reduction in perceived risks associated with staking makes it more likely for risk-averse holders to consider staking, which could bring more institutional investors to Ethereum staking.
In conclusion, the Shapella upgrade sparked significant positive changes to the Ethereum network - particularly in terms of staking - and paved a secure way for institutions to get involved in supporting the growth of the network.
As a leading staking provider, Chorus One is dedicated to making the staking process easier, secure, and compliant for our customers. Our multi-chain staking solution, OPUS, is safe, secure, and compliant, making it easy for institutions to start staking with a few simple clicks. Learn more about OPUS here and contact us at staking@chorus.one to learn more about how we can help you get started.
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 40+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
Withdrawals are imminent. This March, Ethereum will be undergoing its first hard fork of the year, bringing much anticipated withdrawals to the mainnet. As developers move into the final pre-launch sequence, by upgrading the public testnets (first Sepolia, then Goerli), we wanted to get you up to speed on this coming Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade.
If you look at Ethereum’s Beacon Chain today, the way to participate as a validator means you must send at least 32 ETH to the Deposit Contract, or “stake” your ETH. The Beacon Chain follows the contract, querying for changes so that it can process any new deposits. The entire validator lifecycle consists of different states that determine what you can or can’t do as part of the network.
Ethereum only allows a small number of validators to start or stop validating at a time to maintain the stability of the validator set. Once you are part of the “Active” set, you start accruing rewards by voting (”attesting”) every six minutes with the occasional proposal. The majority of these rewards are added to the balance of the validator.
At any point, you might want to stop validating and take out your ETH, in which case you would want to join the voluntary exit queue. On the other hand, you might have been a validator for some time and want to utilize the excess ETH, considering the average validator balance is ~34 ETH.
Withdrawals close the validator cycle and mark the end of the PoS transition that started with the Merge in September 2022. Before then, the two chains were unaware of each other. Specifically, the Execution Layer didn’t communicate at all with the Beacon Chain until they merged. Withdrawals stand opposite to the deposit process, crediting your ETH from the Beacon Chain on the Execution Layer to finally close the cycle.
There are 2 requirements for withdrawals to be processed:
For every block, the network scans the validator set for the first 16 validators that satisfy those two requirements. Then, those withdrawals get processed as part of the block in a gasless transaction.
According to the most recent estimate, ~300,000 validators are on the old credentials, meaning the majority of validators will need to change them (it involves digging for those mnemonics created over 2 years ago). This change can only be done once.
Chorus One developed a tool called “eth-staking-smith” that enables the user to generate those signed messages and easily update their withdrawal address.
The process after that is fully automatic. Meaning, you don’t have to do anything else to start spending those rewards, they will be credited to the withdrawal address without your intervention. If all of those validators properly change their credentials, a complete run through the active validator set would take about 4 and a half days. Meaning, you can expect to receive your rewards to the withdrawal address in that cadence.
Please check the official ETH Withdrawals FAQ to learn more about withdrawal mechanics and enabling withdrawals for your validator.
We have previously elaborated on why staking is the most attractive risk-adjusted source of yield in crypto. We believe in its force to provide value at the base level to stakers, deliver competitive results and guarantee that networks such as Ethereum continue to operate as the backbone of a decentralized financial system.
However, the inability to withdraw staked assets on Ethereum has been a risk consideration that stakers had to make before committing to the task for the past years. Not anymore. This massive unlocking of liquidity is sure to make big waves in the coming months and impact the staking panorama of Ethereum. Staking has also made the news with the recent news of regulations in the United States. As a non-custodial staking provider, we continue to believe in this thesis.
With an increasing number of ETH being staked post-Merge, along with growing adoption of the Ethereum network and a rising ETH price, we believe that 2023 will be an even stronger year for Ethereum staking post-Shanghai. However, we must get ready for some changes.
We made our bet on the Ethereum staking ecosystem last year, when we finally unveiled OPUS: our API and Portal solution to significantly speed up institutional staking operations.
Since then, we have been working on many exciting features, including enabling MEV rewards, with more in the pipeline to be rolled out in the coming months. We plan to support withdrawals in our infrastructure as soon as it's safe after the upgrade, and we are working to create the simplest staking and unstaking process in the market for all kinds of institutional clients.
We have been testing this process and will continue to do so on the available testnets for increased security. We also provide a suite of options including the mentioned update of validator withdrawals addresses and a full Portal to consult all rewards accumulated.
Reach out to sales@chorus.one to know more about how OPUS can help you start staking or offer staking to your customers with minimal setup.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 35+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
For more information, please visit chorus.one
Authors: Jennifer Parak, Maksym Kulish
One of the most important events of 2022 in the crypto community was The Merge upgrade of the Ethereum protocol, which switched Ethereum from a Proof-of-Work legacy chain implementation to a Proof-of-Stake Beacon chain. It has proved that principal innovation is possible for the oldest and largest decentralized systems, without any disruption to the protocol users.
At Chorus One, we worked on securing next-generation Ethereum since the Beacon Chain took off in 2020, and we operate multiple thousands of validators on the mainnet today. Our new product OPUS — an Ethereum Validation-as-a-Service API — is designed to enable any organization and individual to run staking validator clients on Ethereum Beacon Chain, with a non-custodial, permission-less approach where we require customers to specify their own withdrawal and fee recipient addresses, so they remain in possession of both their stake funds and rewards. This post focuses on the technology implementation of validator keys provision and storage approach within our Validation-as-a-Service API product and shows off some challenges we faced and solutions we created in the process.
The Merge has introduced two new types of keys involved in securing the Ethereum chain, in addition to legacy chain wallet keys that are remaining unchanged within Beacon Chain [1]. These keys are composed of the Signing (Validator) key pair and the Withdrawal key pair. In addition to new key functionality, the Signing key is also using a new cryptographic signature scheme, called BLS, which stands for Boneh–Lynn–Shacham. This means older key generation tools will not work for creating Signing keys. BLS signatures, specifically those over the BLS12–381 curve are used in Beacon chain block signatures and attestations. This makes it possible to aggregate multiple signatures and verify them in a single operation, which is an outstanding improvement in scalability [2].
Like most other Proof-Of-Stake blockchains, next-generation Ethereum depends on the functioning of validators for securing the transaction flow. Validators are members of the network who lock a portion of their Ethereum coins (with a minimum amount of 32 ETH) to become responsible for proposing new signed blocks of transactions, and verifying such signatures of other validators, which is called attesting. Normally, every Ethereum validator should attest signatures for a slot once per Ethereum epoch (around 6.4 minutes); and for every slot, in every epoch, one validator is pseudo-randomly chosen to produce a block of transactions to be attested by others. Validators are being rewarded for both block proposals and block attestations. The mechanism of signing the blocks and verifying the signatures of others relies on the Signing key pair. The verification mechanism works because every public part of a Signing key (Public Signing Key) is published on-chain, so every signature done with the private part of the Signing key (Private Signing Key) can be verified by every other validator. Despite having the power for creating blockchain content, the Signing keys can not be used to move any funds including staking funds, and they only listen for and sign the transaction content provided by the peering network of Ethereum nodes.
The Withdrawal key pair is neither used for blocks nor for attestations, but it has control over staked funds. After the Shanghai fork, withdrawals will be activated, which will enable the funds to be moved to an owner-controlled withdrawal address specified in the deposit contract. With EIP-4895 withdrawals will be enabled in a push-based fashion [3], such that funds that were previously locked on the consensus layer on depositing are automatically pushed to the execution layer as a system-level operation. This means users won’t have to pay any gas for a withdrawal transaction. For users who have specified a BLS withdrawal address in their deposit contract, they would need to broadcast a BLS_TO_EXECUTION_CHANGE message to the beacon chain to update their withdrawal address to an execution address.
Finally, when the validator successfully proposes a block, a special Fee Recipient address receives the accumulated gas fees from the block. Since the Fee Recipient is not directly involved in staking, we will largely omit it in this post.
More information about different types of keys involved in Ethereum staking can be found in the following resources: [4], [5]
As part of the OPUS Validation-as-a-Service API, we require customers to retain ownership of Withdrawal keys, so that staked funds can never be controlled or accessed by Chorus One. A Signing key, however, is different: since Chorus One is a responsible party for hosting and maintaining the Ethereum validator, the inner workings of the Validation-as-a-Service API require us to generate, load, and store Signing keys. Thus, a robust solution for key management is an essential part of our Validation-as-a-Service API.
Early into the project lifecycle, we used the staking deposit command line interface (CLI) provided by the Ethereum Foundation (https://github.com/ethereum/staking-deposit-cli). While the staking CLI is a great tool for solo/home stakers, we realized that it was not designed for our use case. First of all, staking-deposit-cli by default stores the newly generated keystore into a filesystem, posing a potential security threat from leaking key material. While it is possible to use infrastructure-specific workarounds like ramdisks to mitigate the threat, such workarounds would add complexity and failure points to the platform. The open-source nature of staking-deposit-cli allowed us to fork the source code and modify it to cater to our needs, but the lack of thoroughly automated test suites meant we had a hard time syncing our changes with upstream updates. Finally, all of our codebase is Rust, and having to support Python CLI within the infrastructure, including keeping a good security track record by timely patching all the Python dependencies, puts an additional burden on the development team. In the end, we decided to pursue an alternative approach to generating keys, which we describe in the next paragraph.
Having endured even more difficulties with staking-cli when generating Ethereum keys on a large scale, our Ethereum Team decided to tackle the problem during our company-wide engineering hackathon where we built an MVP for an Ethereum key generation tool written in Rust. This was the birth of the Eth-staking-smith project.
Eth-staking-smith can be used as a CLI tool or as a Rust library to generate Signing keys and deposit data derived from a new mnemonic or to regenerate deposit data from an existing mnemonic. These use cases were implemented, in order to provide the same functionality as the staking-deposit-cli whilst avoiding all problems mentioned above.
Example command to generate keys from a newly generated mnemonic:
Example command to generate keys from an existing mnemonic:
Private Signing keys
As mentioned above, the Private Signing key is the key used to provide a signature to any action taken by the validator. The Eth-staking-smith Signing key output is done without encryption because in our use case, we use remote API to store the key material immediately upon the generation. Remote API implements encryption for both data transfer and data at rest. We decided to make keystore use optional, but Eth-staking-smith can still generate encrypted keystores for the users who need that.
Example:
Keystores
The keystore is an encrypted version of the private Signing key in the specified format [6]. When generating keys with eth-staking smith, a keystore password can be specified and in that case, the keystore data will be output. Using a key derivation function (e.g. <code-text>scrypt<code-text>, or <code-text>pbkdf2<code-text>), a decryption-key is derived using the given passphrase and a set of strong built-in derivation arguments. The example below highlights the field <code-text>function<code-text> that shows the key derivation function used. The keystore is a useful alternative that is less vulnerable to an attacker than storing the private Signing keys in a plaintext file, since they would need the keystore file, as well as the passphrase to decrypt the file.
Example:
Mnemonic
The mnemonic, passed in by the user or the one generated, is returned as part of the output so that the user can store it safely. Further information on mnemonics can be found under the reference [7].
Example:
Deposit data
Finally, the deposit data is returned, which is used to make the deposit of 32ETH using the Ethereum deposit contract to activate the validator. One of the most important fields in the deposit data is the withdrawal credentials.
By default, withdrawal credentials are BLS addresses derived from the mnemonic, however, there exists a use case where a user might want to overwrite the derived withdrawal credentials with already existing ones.
The BLS address format is called <code-text>0x00<code-text> credentials, and is actually set to be deprecated sometime after withdrawals will be enabled. Another alternative way to provide withdrawal credentials is to use a legacy Ethereum wallet address, prefixed by <code-text>0x01<code-text>. Ethereum will be pivoting from using <code-text>0x00<code-text> (formerly eth2) to <code-text>0x01<code-text> execution (formerly eth1) addresses. To learn more about this, we recommend watching the panel from Devcon 2022 [8] and looking into the Ethereum specification [4]. Eth-staking-smith, therefore, allows the user to pass in a <code-text>0x00<code-text>, <code-text>0x01<code-text> execution withdrawal credentials, as well as an execution address to overwrite the withdrawal credentials.
Example deposit data with BLS credentials (<code-text>--withdrawal_credentials 0x0045b91b2f60b88e7392d49ae1364b55e713d06f30e563f9f99e10994b26221d<code-text>)
Below we present a full-fledged example output of the key material generated by Eth-staking-smith:
Command:
Output:
Since writing key material on disk was a major security vulnerability for us, Eth-staking-smith removes this issue entirely by not writing any files on disk.
To avoid heavy-lifting and re-creating crypto primitives from scratch, we’re re-using functionalities from the lighthouse client implementation [9] for key generation, which builds on top of blst — a BLS12–381 signature library [10], which is currently undergoing formal verification.
For entropy collection, one customization was made: Eth-staking-smith defers entropy collection to the operating system by using <code-text>getrandom()<code-text> on Linux and thereby making use of Linux’s state-of-the-art randomness approach.
Finally, since key generation at scale was notoriously slow for us with staking-deposit-cli, we took initiative to add additional arguments for our users to tweak performance <> security parameters depending on their specific use case.
As per our use case, our API does not require the keystore file, but only the private key in raw format. We, therefore, enable the user to opt-out of keystore generation in order to improve performance. This can be done by omitting the <code-text>--keystore_password<code-text> argument as follows:
We measured that omitting keystore speeds up the key generation process by 99%. The key generation performance we experience with Eth-staking-smith is consistently sub-second, with slight variability depending on hardware and platform.
In case the user requires the keystore file for redundancy, there’s another option to speed up the keystore generation process by choosing a different key-derivation function. By default, Eth-staking-smith will use <code-text>pbkdf2<code-text> to derive the decryption key to achieve better performance. There’s also the option to use <code-text>scrypt<code-text> which offers better security, however, consequently, worse performance. This can be done by choosing the key-derivation function using the <code-text>--kdf<code-text> argument as follows:
As mentioned above, users who had previously specified a BLS (0x00) withdrawal address, will need to make a request to the beacon chain to update their validators’ withdrawal address to point to an execution address. To perform this operation, the user will need to have the BLS withdrawal key mnemonic phrase. Once done, withdrawals will be automatically funded on the execution address.
Eth-staking-smith enables the user to generate a signed <code-text>BLS_TO_EXECUTION_CHANGE<code-text> message which they can send to the beacon chain to update their withdrawal address.
Users can use the response to make the request to the beacon node as follows:
Throughout this post, we explained the basics of Ethereum Beacon Chain block validation, the key material involved in the process, and walked through an automation tool we created at Chorus One for Proof-of-Stake key management.
We hope the tool can be useful to some of our readers, especially those who use Rust for their blockchain automation work. It is also open-source, and we will welcome bug reports and pull requests on Github.
If the reader is interested in using OPUS Validation-as-a-Service API which builds upon that automation, you are welcome to join the wait-list for private beta, contact via sales@chorus.one.
[1] https://kb.beaconcha.in/ethereum-2-keys
[2] https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/building_blocks/signatures#aggregation
[3] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4895
[4] https://notes.ethereum.org/@GW1ZUbNKR5iRjjKYx6_dJQ/Skxf3tNcg_
[5] https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/blob/dev/specs/capella/beacon-chain.md
[6] https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-2335.md
[7] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf7HJT_DMFw&feature=youtu.be
Will Ethereum become a deflationary cryptocurrency, now that The Merge has happened? The answer to this question, in short, can be given in two words: “it depends!” Its long form, however, would offer you a better understanding of whether Ethereum will indeed remain inflationary (albeit only slightly as miners have packed their bags) or become a deflationary asset as time goes on.
At 6:42 AM UTC (2:42 AM EDT / 8:42 AM CEST) on Thursday, September 15, 2022, Ethereum’s long-awaited transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, dubbed “The Merge”, was finally completed. As Chorus One and the rest of the ecosystem could confirm, the operation — after years of blood, sweat, and delays — was successful.
Having started out as a network relying on Proof-of-Work, thus fast shaping into the “hub” of miners as Bitcoin’s biggest competitor, Ethereum soon encountered scalability issues with its Execution Layer. Too much energy consumption between competing miners to process transactions and not enough security for the network, after all.
The Beacon Chain was, therefore, introduced in December 2020 as the network’s Consensus Layer. This innovation could be seen as Ethereum’s spine, master coordinator, or watchful lighthouse tower, with its key functions set to store data, and manage the network’s validators. Functionalities also included scanning the network, validating transactions, collecting votes, distributing rewards to performing validators, deducting rewards of offline validators, and slashing the ETH of malicious actors.
This Proof-of-Stake blockchain ran alongside the PoW network with the objective to — one day — merge and transform Ethereum into a Proof-of-Stake only network. A win for decentralization and the environment!
That day happened on September 15th, 2022. But before that, Ethereum was inflating at roughly 3.67% — with a ~ 4.62% issuance inflation rate. We will break down the calculations behind this inflation rate, shortly. But first, let’s go back to the drawing board to remind ourselves about the definition of inflation and deflation, in the first place.
Inflation happens when more bills are printed (FIAT money) or more tokens are minted (cryptocurrency) for circulation in the system. The value of the currency then decreases. In FIAT, this means that more bills would be needed to afford things. In certain cryptocurrencies, this means that the price of the currency goes down.
Deflation, on the other hand, happens when tokens are removed or destroyed from the system through “burning”. By logic, the value of the currency is supposed to increase. There are, however, much more complicated dynamics to this. Those won’t be our point of focus, today.
Before The Merge, Ethereum rewarded the capital-intensive mining activity with up to 2.08 ETH approximately every ~ 13.3 seconds. This rounded up to roughly ~ 4,930,000 ETH/year in miners rewards. The network also had around ~ 119.3M ETH in total supply. (Source: Ethereum.org)
We can find the inflation rate by summing up the Executive Layer and Consensus Layer inflation rates.
Then, we move to the Consensus Layer issuance, based on the amount of ETH staked. We’ll round up that number to 13,000,000 of staked ETH presently.
That’s almost Net Zero!
Summing both figures, we had an issuance inflation rate of ~ 4.62%, pre-Merge. In other words, miners made approximately ~ 89.4% of issued ETH whilst stakers got ~ 10.6% of the pie as ETH’s issuance inflated at ~ 4.62%.
Goodbye miners. Stay on, stakers!
We’ll get to understand how not addressing high gas fees could actually be a plus for “Deflationary Assets” or “Ultra Sound Money” advocates.
As we go back to the drawing board for the second time in our walk-through, let’s revisit the difference between inflationary, deflationary, and disinflationary crypto assets.
Some cryptocurrencies’ tokenomics are set-up to increase token supply over time. From the start, they are “programmed” to be inflationary. Other cryptocurrency projects, which propose unlimited coin supply, are inflationary as well — as unlimited supply is bound to outweigh demand, decreasing the currency’s value over time. An example of a coin with unlimited supply is DOGECOIN.
With its halving mechanism until the last 21 millionth Bitcoin is minted, Bitcoin is a disinflationary cryptocurrency. It is set up for a chronological decrease in its issuance. A disinflationary cryptocurrency can, in other words, be described as “an inflationary cryptocurrency with disinflationary measures” in the sense that the demand may, over time, become greater than the diminishing issuance of new tokens.
A good example of a deflationary cryptocurrency is the Binance Coin. BNB’s initial supply saw 200,000,000 tokens in circulation. At the end of Q3, nearly 40 million BNBs had been burned as part of the plan to halve the initial supply from 200 million to 100 million.
Look at tokens in circulation as a balloon and issuance as air: BNB’s mechanism is to deflate the balloon till 50% of air in it remains whilst Bitcoin’s mechanism is to keep inflating its balloon with a set maximum air supply, but doing so with a little less air at every pump.
So what about Ethereum, now that The Merge has basically rendered a close to Net Zero inflation rate? Why is it touted as a potential deflationary coin?
Enter EIP-1559, the mechanism that burns a portion of ETH gas fees during transactions on the network. With the inflation rate already dropping to 0.49% as explained above, EIP-1559 has the potential to decrease ETH supply — but only on the condition that the gas prices are above 15 Gwei.
Consequently, it is no surprise that ultra sound money advocates would plead users to set their ETH transaction fees to a minimum 15.1 gwei.
Ultrasound.money tracks Ethereum’s supply in real time. A negative figure reflects how many ETHs have been burned since The Merge. In other words, a negative figure showcases deflation, whilst a positive figure showcases inflation.
32 hours into The Merge era, Ethereum had issued over 376 more ETH. Inflationary.
A month on and the figures keep rising…
Or maybe not… a wider perspective shows us that there has actually been a decrease since October 8th, when the issuance peaked at over 13,000 ETH.
Ethereum — Deflationary or not?
Ultrasound.Money projects gas fees to be above 70 Gwei, registering a -3.40% supply decrease across the next two years.
As we’ve witnessed now, four weeks since The Merge, we’re bound to see periods of a deflationary ETH and periods with a low but healthy inflation — both of which would be vital for an economic equilibrium.
At Chorus One, we pride ourselves in being a full-stack partner to the protocols we choose to operate and support. This goes beyond the highly available infrastructure we provide to secure and maintain networks. It includes assisting in ecosystem-building via our ventures and business development teams, as well as participating in network governance and — most notably — deep research. Since our inception, we have been at the forefront contributing to core topics of interest in Proof-of-Stake such as liquid staking.
In recent months, we have shifted a big part of our research focus onto a complex topic that underpins the core fabric of any crypto protocol: MEV (Maximal Extractable Value). This emerging field deals with the value that can be extracted through reordering transactions in the block production process. (A collection of resources on MEV can be found here).
MEV has become an ubiquitous topic for many ecosystem participants. Primarily being a validator, our position in the network places us at a spot within the MEV supply chain that comes with great power, thus also great responsibility. Generally speaking, our mission is to maximize freedom for crypto users and to contribute to the creation of long-term sustainable, user-owned decentralized network infrastructure. Since MEV is a crucial domain that — if not adequately dealt with — might threaten the mission we are set towards; we recognized that we should leverage our expertise and resources to contribute to the MEV space in a way that ultimately benefits networks and their users.
The goals we want to contribute towards in the MEV space are two-fold. On one hand, we aim to make visible and help minimize extraction of value from users through e.g. front-running, sandwiching, and other exploitative practices. On the other hand, we strive to redistribute revenues from non-exploitative MEV that comes into existence from market inefficiency to our delegators that contribute security to the underlying network.
The rest of this article lays out the core pillars of our approach to MEV providing examples of our existing and planned engagements in the area.
What is MEV and how does it impact networks and their users?
Before deciding how we should engage with MEV, we seek to understand what we are dealing with. We are proponents of the open-source crypto ethos and don’t want to keep the information we are gathering to ourselves, but rather share it with the wider ecosystem. Thus, the first pillar of our MEV policy is Transparency. We are actively researching, building dashboards, and publishing other materials to create a shared understanding and to help lighten up the “dark forest” that is MEV.
Our exemplary work in the MEV Transparency domain: Dune Analytics Ethereum MEV dashboard, MEV Extraction Twitter bot, various MEV-related articles (e.g. our series on MEV on Solana).
How can we help to minimize negative externalities of MEV?
As a result of our research effort, we deeply understand MEV in the context of the ecosystems we are a part of. We recognize that MEV can pose negative externalities to users and ultimately the protocols they are trying to utilize. We are actively engaging to help minimize negative externalities in various ways, depending on how deep our engagement in the respective ecosystem is. This can include creating awareness and participating in the dialogue around MEV, research on related problems, as well as supporting and building solutions seeking to minimize exploitative MEV and to decentralize MEV extraction.
Our work in the Network Sustainability domain: operating and participating in public discourse and communities of block building solutions such as Flashbots, investments in projects seeking to minimize front-running (including e.g. Anoma and Osmosis). We have additional projects in this domain in the pipeline and are looking into operating infrastructure to help decentralize block building and relayer infrastructure.
How can we optimize and distribute MEV rewards to our delegators?
It would be hypocritical to say we are in this for the good of it only. There are clear incentives associated with engaging in MEV. Practically speaking, we are looking to optimize the return we can achieve through MEV and pass it through to our delegators creating a differentiated service while helping to improve network usability, security, and ultimately sustainability via the first two of our MEV pillars (see also Phil Daian’s early post “MEV wat do?” on this topic).
For institutional clients that want to offer staking to their users, we are happy to assist in navigating the space and finding the optimal solutions as part of our white label staking services.
If you are building in the MEV space, are trying to understand how MEV will affect your protocol, or are interested to work with us on research topics, feel free to reach out to us through the appropriate channels:
Research: research@chorus.one
Ventures: ventures@chorus.one
Sales: sales@chorus.one
The Ethereum Merge is one of the most anticipated events in crypto history.
The transition, meant to take Ethereum from its current Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake model, has been in the works since Ethereum’s inception. However, it took its first step in December 2020, when the Beacon Chain was successfully launched. And now, with the consensus mechanism running unimpeded for a year and a half and over 13 million staked ETH, developers feel confident enough to move to the second step. This requires joining the consensus layer of the Beacon Chain with the execution state of the main Ethereum chain, the process known as “the Merge”.
This new era to the Ethereum protocol brings better security, greater energy efficiency, and sets the stage for future scaling efforts meant to take Ethereum to the moon.
Chorus One has been closely following the development efforts to bring Proof-of-Stake Ethereum to reality. As a trusted staking provider in the ecosystem, we are participating in testing the Merge at this critical point with our Prater/Goerli nodes ready for transition. We are particularly aware of the risks associated with such a significant change of operations in a blockchain that has captured a major part of the economic activity in the crypto ecosystem. For that reason, our goal remains to support decentralised networks to promote the security and availability of our services, and to increase the rewards of our clients under such a standard.
As we think of the future for both our operations in the Ethereum ecosystem and the existential threats that can compromise the integrity and stability of the network, we have devoted a lot of effort into understanding MEV and clarifying our position towards it.
On our path to support a more decentralised, democratic and fair distribution of MEV rewards for our stakers, we would like to announce our support for MEV-Boost.
Although MEV continues to be a controversial and cutting-edge space for research, we believe that this can be an interim solution as we wait for more sophisticated in-protocol upgrades. On a high level, MEV-Boost is an implementation of proposer-builder separation (PBS) built by the Flashbots team for Proof-of-Stake Ethereum. As a free, open-source and neutral software, we believe it embraces the values of the Ethereum community and can be a valuable asset for all validators, big or small.
By participating in the fair extraction of MEV, we believe we are unlocking the real value of the networks we support, as well as increasing the value of staking to promote higher rates of participation, and an increase in the security of the PoS protocol.
As staking providers, running MEV-Boost allows us to maximize the staking rewards of our clients while protecting Ethereum decentralization, with an estimated increase of 60% in the rewards we can share.
Unlike previous Flashbots’ offerings, this software is compatible with all client implementations of the Ethereum protocol, making it a big step towards further client diversity, a topic that has been the subject of research at Chorus One in the past year.
Finally, we are committed to evaluate and continue to monitor different approaches to our MEV implementations, and to the risks of single-relay and single-block producers, working with different teams to find the most balanced system. Fair MEV extraction continues to be something we iterate on going forward.
In the coming days we will be getting ready to test MEV-Boost on our Goerli infrastructure to best prepare in time for the mainnet Merge. We have been working closely with Flashbots and collaborating with other node operators to ensure that the product is ready and tested by the time it goes live.
MEV is an inevitable part of participating, not only on blockchains, but in all ordered economic systems. Our intent is to be responsible participants of Ethereum and beyond, with MEV research spanning Solana and Cosmos, there is more to come. For the time being, follow our node readiness for MEV-Boost here.
Chorus One is one of the largest staking providers globally. We provide node infrastructure and closely work with over 30 Proof-of-Stake networks.
Website: https://chorus.one
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