Introducing Validator Swarm

Lido's Community Staking Module (CSM) is a groundbreaking step toward decentralized staking. However, the manual process of creating validator keys, deploying them, handling exits, and ensuring everything runs smoothly can become a bit tedious, complex and stressful — especially when you're managing a large number of validators. We are excited to introduce the Lido CSM Validator Manager, an open-source tool we've developed to streamline the deployment, monitoring, and management of Lido CSM v...

CSM Testnet: Node Operator Analysis

IntroductionThe CSM Testnet performance evaluation concluded on September 30, 2024, shortly followed by the publication of the CSM Mainnet Early Adoption (EA) list. One pathway to EA list inclusion was through participation as a node operator in the testnet, maintaining both good performance and sufficient participation time.Performance was measured as the percentage of successfully completed duties out of total assigned duties. Good performance was defined as exceeding 86.60%.Sufficient part...

Becoming an Ethereum Node Operator Part 2

Author: Javier Ron Research @firstset We began this series of posts by highlighting the potential dangers associated with node operators becoming excessively large and exacerbating centralization issues within Liquid Staking Protocols (LSPs). As we continue this series, we provide insights and strategies for smaller Node Operators (NOs) to grow and establish themselves in the network. At first glance, this might seem contradictory. However, it's important to understand that by empowering new ...

Becoming an Ethereum Node Operator Part 1

Author: Javier Ron Research @firstset TLDRThe combination of capital and technical barrier of entry has pushed the solo staker category to represent between 1% and 6.5% of the total ETH staked, based on Dune Analytics and Rated estimatesRated reports that almost 50% of all staked ETH is handled through the top 4 staking entities, which either run their own centralized validators, or delegate to a limited set of established Node Operators (NOs).This concentration of both stake and infrastructu...