DanGoron: Week 5 dev-update

ETHCC meeting with permissionless staking pool representative

Got in contact with a permissionless staking framework provider, and met at ETHCC.

Discussion points:

• Analyze how the separation of the Validator role between Operator and Delegator will influence staking pools and staking overall.
• Analyze how the two-tiers staking split will influence staking pools and staking overall.
• Forking the staking-deposit-cli to accommodate ETH Delegators

Key takeaway after the meeting:

• Solo staking needs better incentivization, in order to remain marginally capital efficient comparing to large players
• Enshrining delegation could have a positive effect on solo staking, as delegators would have a way to participate that doesn't necessarily involve LST
• An idea would be to have an in-protocol rating system for validators. That could be useful for opinionated delegators weighting more consensus issuance towards solo stakers, and maybe naturally curving staked ETH percentage, as an equilibrium could be met with more solo stakers and less pooling.

User configurable scoring

I got inspired by @Potuz's challenge for EPF for the R&D of a builders rating system on the CL client side, in the context of ePBS. I briefed with two of the EPF fellows that would be interested in working on a PoC for this, I think this would be a good step forward in CR in general and a very interesting topic in ePBS development and implementation

In the scope of my project, I will add the research for a multi-criteria, in-protocol rating system for validators, in the second part of the project, leveraging the work that will be done for the PoC I mentioned above. Having this R&D'd would be a huge improvement,imo, especially in the context of eODS, as oppinionated Delegators can choose between Validators (i.e. Node Operators) based on certain criteria, like:

• did it use the services of a censurable builder, or
• did it play timing games, or
• did it withhold data as a Node Operator

The above can bring positive externalities for censorship resistance in general but also for protocol resilience (Block production, Timing Games, PeerDAS).

Week 6 planning

• Add the user configurable builder scoring in my project's roadmap.
• Add the in-protocol rating system as a research point for the research part of the Project
• Add final details as per the above and submit the Project Proposal
• Moving into the project implementation phase. I will start with the specification notes for the beacon chain deposit-contract.md(Phase 0) and validator.md changes to accommodate delegations.