Winners
Today we announced the 12 winners of Operation Solo Staker, a program we launched that allows individuals to get a free staking machine by committing to run an Ethereum node for 3 years.
The winners are: @punk9527, @AndyGuzmanEth, @ethereumgt, @sunnydece, @janek26, @ro_bbiek, @TMajambere, @NelsonRodMar, @mavroudisv, @dimsomedim, @eridianalpha, @alpgasimov. You can read our Tweet Thread that gives a nice background on each one of them.
The winners come from 5 different continents and 12 different countries! They are from Hong Kong, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Canada, Australia, Spain, Belgium, France, Greece, Thailand, England, and the Netherlands. We are super excited to work with these 12 individuals as the first cohort of the program. It is our goal to extend this to 100s and then 1000s of individuals across the globe!
Background
A quick background on why we did this and why we think it’s important for the Ethereum community. One of ether.fi’s guiding principles is “Decentralization is a primary objective”, it’s right on our website. Ethereum today is not a decentralized system: there are about ~7,500 nodes running Ethereum, and about half are based in the US. Of these, over half are in a single data center in Virginia, 20 minutes away from the White House and the CIA headquarters. This is mind blowing, Ethereum needs Solo Operators!
We had 450+ applicants from over 75 countries to be part of the program. The heat map below gives an overlay of current validators being run (red/yellow) and the applications that we had for people to be solo stakers (blue/green). The visual contrast is pretty stark, the network’s current validators are very concentrated in a few locations. That big yellow dot in the Eastern part of the United States is super scary!
What excites me about that map is how many people want to participate in helping decentralize Ethereum. It’s not an easy task and quite the responsibility to run a validator. Based off the interest, I think it’s fair to deduce that one of the main barriers for stakers is the starting cost of running a node. You need ~$60k USD just to get a node started (32 ETH + $1,000 in hardware) and then have ongoing costs of high quality internet. By removing this barrier we are going to allow the decentralization of Ethereum to go to the next level.
How it Works
The winners of the program are receiving a staking machine from either dAppNode or Avado. They are financing that staking machine over a 36 month period and will receive the 5% validator staking reward in return, which enables them to cover their payment for the machine, the internet bill, and hopefully have a little left over. The Obol technology will be implemented on these machines and by leveraging their technology we allow the solo stakers to rely on other validators to ensure successful validation.
We couldn’t have pulled this off without our great partners at Obol, EthStaker, dAppNode, and Avado. This is one of those partnerships that is truly positive sum for all parties involved. Thanks to those talented and dedicated teams, the collaboration has been awesome and we feel fortunate to work with such great people in the crypto space!
The Future
Today marks the start of our solo staking voyage. It’s our goal to scale this to 100s and then 1000s of machines across the world. If you were not one of the first winners selected, don’t fret, we plan to onboard more in the coming months. Thanks for joining us on our journey to further decentralize Ethereum.
Follow us on Twitter or Discord to get the latest on Operation Solo Staker.
