The Bia Testnet & Obol Ambassador Program

On our journey towards the adoption of distributed validators, it is critical to get our community involved. In order to do that, today, we are launching two important initiatives: The Bia Testnet and the Obol Ambassador Program.

Both of these initiatives allow members of our community to get hands-on in helping us test Obol and spread the word about the importance of Distributed Validator Technology to the broader ecosystem.

Let’s get to the details. 👀

Bia Testnet (Full Details)

Bia is the second official testnet for Obol. In our first testnet, Athena, our community created 200+ distributed validator clusters running across 3+ continents using diverse at-home and cloud-based setups. In an effort to push the limits of the technology and to seed an important community with early DVT access for Athena, we targeted at-home and small validators, Ethereum's core node-running community. The performance we saw from those validators was comparable in most cases with larger institutional operators (overall at-home validators in Athena averaged 93% uptime compared to 87% uptime in operators of a top LSP during the same timeframe). An amazing thing to see considering the majority were clusters run by people who had just met in a Discord community! This was the main purpose of Athena, to verify that DVT could enable better validator resiliency (and performance) while also improving operator decentralization, and we believe we achieved that with flying colors.

With Bia we want to build on our learnings from Athena and test DVT at an even larger scale, with a more diverse variety of client combinations, cluster sizes, and deployment environments. To achieve this, we want to activate more DV clusters globally and see how self-sufficient people can be throughout the entire process. In early December, we officially launched the public beta of our Distributed Validator Launchpad to make it easier to set up new clusters. During this testnet, we will be putting the DV Launchpad to the test by enabling the community to configure clusters through a web-based user flow!!

We will also be stress-testing Charon, our DV middleware, to try to simulate as many different conditions as possible, to gather data on how DVs perform in optimal and suboptimal situations. In order to do so, we will be encouraging groups to test with different node configurations in their DV clusters. These variables include different clients, different geographies, and different hosting environments (i.e. at-home, cloud, etc.). We want to encourage as much diversity as possible in configurations as this contributes to the impact DV middleware can have on anti-correlation, resiliency, and decentralization.

The Bia Testnet is officially live today (we’re already at >40k registrants!!) and will run until the end of March. For full details, please visit our Bia Testnet Handbook.

(Disclaimer: the Bia Testnet is an unincentivized testnet.)

Obol Ambassador Program (Program Structure & Details)

As a core team, we know that we can’t achieve the mission of securing, scaling, and decentralizing proof-of-stake blockchains alone. To do this, we need to better scale the meaningful contributions from our 25k+ strong community. A community is only as strong as its ability to coordinate efficiently.

The purpose of the Obol Ambassador Program is to help scale the project and further its mission by increasing collaboration and work relationships with our community.

The goals of the Obol Ambassador Program are as follows:

• Drive the adoption of DVT by encouraging and providing the necessary resources and network for at-home validators to run distributed validators.
• Drive awareness and education of DVT to all stakers to build broad momentum in the adoption of DVT throughout all types of validators.

The Obol Ambassador Program will help to achieve these goals by encouraging the following activities:

• Testnet participation & technology evangelism
• Community education, moderation, and growth
• Localization and regional engagement

For those that participate in this program, we will be offering special access to the Obol team and initiatives, opportunities to improve their knowledge, and the ability to build their own personal brand in Web3. There will, of course, be sweet POAPs and low-mint swag for ambassadors.

Additionally, we will be leveraging the ambassador program in the future as a way to decentralize the project, with influence and certain decision-making ability given to those that achieve Senior Ambassador status.

As of last week, the Obol Ambassador Program is also officially live! For full details, please visit our Obol Ambassador Program page.