Obol Airdrops Ethereum Solo Stakers & Community to Build Largest Decentralized Operator Ecosystem

[PRESS RELEASE – Lisbon, Portugal, January 21st, 2025]

Today, the Obol Collective announced its Decentralized Operator Ecosystem (DOE) and airdropped the new OBOL Token to thousands of Ethereum solo stakers, Rocketpool node operators, Obol Techne Credential holders, and other core community members.

The DOE, consisting of over 600 credentialed mainnet distributed validator (DV) operators and 3000+ testnet DV operators, aims to scale and decentralize infrastructure networks as it has done for major Ethereum protocols. In addition, the launch of the OBOL Token seeks to decentralize ownership and initiate governance within the Obol Collective. With these moves, Obol is supporting the Ethereum node operator community with additional opportunities while scaling decentralized infrastructure networks.

Obol distributed validators (DVs) have significantly reduced Ethereum’s centralization risks, with over 600 mainnet operators running more than 1,000 nodes, collectively securing over $700 million of Ethereum stake. DVs reduce barriers and create opportunities for home operators, and enabled leading liquid staking protocols such as Lido & EtherFi to expand the size of their operator sets by tenfold. Notably, home operators running DVs outperform professional operators using traditional validators. At DevCon 2024, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged the pivotal role of Obol’s Squad Staking for democratizing access for at-home operators.

With the Decentralized Operator Ecosystem (DOE) now a proven model for scaling operator networks and empowering home operators, Obol is expanding to Gnosis Chain, and actively exploring additional use cases on Monad and Ethereum L2s.

The OBOL Token will serve as the backbone of the Collective’s governance, operations, and incentive mechanisms. To decentralize ownership and governance of the Obol Collective, a snapshot of stakers and operators was taken on January 13, 2024. This is followed by an airdrop of locked OBOL Tokens on January 21, 2024. The tokens will unlock after the successful completion of the first retroactive funding (RAF) round, carried out via governance.

About The Obol Collective

The Obol Collective is a collection of teams and individuals working together to strengthen the security, resiliency, and decentralization of Web3 infrastructure networks, through the development and deployment of distributed validators.

Users can learn more at obol.org, and blog.obol.org/airdrop