Obol Collective to airdrop OBOL tokens to thousands of solo stakers and node operators
2025-01-21
Category: None

The Obol Collective, an industry group formed last year to advance distributed validator technology, plans to introduce and airdrop its new OBOL token to thousands of network participants, according to an announcement on Tuesday. 
Recipients, including thousands of Ethereum solo stakers, Rocketpool node operators and Obol Techne Credential holders, will join Obol’s decentralized operator ecosystem. A snapshot was taken on Jan. 13, and an initial distribution is planned for Tuesday. 
The token will function as the governance mechanism for the collective, which at its start included more than 50 staking protocols, client teams, software tools, as well as professional node operators and home stakers, including major players EigenLayer, Figment and Lido, which was Obol’s launch partner. 
Obol's distributed validator technology, or DVT, is designed to enhance the security of Ethereum's proof-of-stake consensus system by enabling more people to validate the chain's state. 
Before Obol, validators — the companies, pools, and individuals who operate hardware to run Ethereum — were largely centralized operators of specialized infrastructure. Obol’s distributed validator tech enables a group of people anywhere in the world to collectively operate an Ethereum validator, helping to decentralize the security of the Ethereum network.
“Without DVT, it's hard to really decentralize stake to a certain degree, because these machines can only be run by single people or single entities,” Obol co-founder Collin Myers told The Blockl in an interview. “Staking has just reached that maturity of scalability where we're talking validators being run by groups of people.”
“It's taken two and a half years for that industry to develop and reach a certain level of maturity,” Myers said, referring to the launch of the Beacon Chain that enabled something like Obol to come online. “It requires decentralization.”
Thomas Heremans of the Obol Association said the airdrop would occur in three phases, similar to Morpho or Eigenlayer. The first phase, on Tuesday, will announce the airdrop and include a checker where people can see if they’re eligible. Then, on Friday, people can claim their locked tokens. 
This will then proceed to a governance vote. “The community will have the chance in a month or two to pass a governance resolution if they want to unlock the tokens,” Heremans said. “We will try to list on exchanges then.”
The airdrop will account for 7.5% of the total OBOL supply. There are “three main buckets” of recipients. 
The first big bucket is anyone who participated in the network’s “1% For Decentralisation” funding model, which was announced last year. This model contributed 1% of accrued staking rewards “toward projects that add value and impact at the Ethereum consensus layer, including technology partners, researchers, community educators, node operators, and others.”
Another 30% of the airdrop will go to operators “that have been with Obol for a very long time,” Heremans said, including those that were on the mainnet and testnets. 
“We've been working with professional and amateur node operators and solo stakers for a very long time,” he said. “These people have acquired certain degrees of skills and expertise in running nodes, and especially running Obol DVT nodes,” explaining the bronze and silver badges and Techne Credentials the protocol gave out to operators “depending on the level of achievement.”
The last big bucket is home stakers and solo stakers, “which we think are still critically important to the future of Ethereum for it to remain credibly neutral.”
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