[Music]
great thanks a lot to everyone who
showed up here um to quickly introduce
myself my name is Tony I do I'm doing
research at the affirm foundation and
today I want to talk about a topic I
perceive as very very important um
namely decentralization and to be more
specific I want to talk about the topic
of correlation
penalties to get into the topic let me
quickly describe the problem that we
have today on this chart you can see the
missed attestation rate um of different
entities going from K EFI Lio the very
professional entities on the on the left
hand side two solo stakers kak and
rockol um on the right hand side to be
fair K is an outlier here so I think
when I did this chart they just had some
strugg but in the end the picture is
quite clear solo stakers are struggling
with um what the network demands from
them and what this chart actually shows
is the Mist attestation rate compared to
the expected missed attestation rate
based on the market share and if your
bar is above zero this means you miss
more attestations than expected and this
is of course problematic because solo
stakers um we might all agree are the
most important entities in the ecosystem
they are super important for various
different properties and we should make
sure that solo stakers remain
competitive compared to all the large
pools one thing that is also very evil
and dangerous are economies of scale so
what's what big pools can do they can
just put many validators for example on
one note and this allows them to lower
their costs solo stakers cannot do that
so if you are a solo Staker you might
just have one validator and therefore
you have one node you use one internet
connection and you have to manage it
yourself on the other hand the pools
they can use economies of scale to make
their operations more and more efficient
right they can use one cloud provider
use one internet connection and so on
and in the end what we might um go
towards to is a very centralized
validator set and this is something that
is very bad for and we should definitely
try everything to avoid
that the cool thing is so now getting
into some positive vibes the cool thing
on the right hand side is you cannot
really leverage economies of scale
without also creating correlations for
example if you put four 4,000 5,000 keys
on one machine there is a correlation
how those validators behave in the end
if your note goes offline then all of
your 5,000 validators will be offline if
your cloud provider has a problem then
all of your keys might be affected and
the same applies to all the other things
that affect economies of scale so what
we see on the right hand side I would
say it's a um correlations and economies
of scale should be um should have a very
linear relation and now how can we
actually leverage this knowledge
leverage the knowledge that economies of
scale might scale also the correlations
um to the good for etherum and this
brings me
to an EAP that is still very young it's
EAP um
7716 called anti-correlation attestation
penalty and as you can see here um it's
very young so the EAP is only a few
months old um the original idea is from
vitalic and deine and me hacked on the
implementation at the eve Berlin hecon
and now we are getting closer to final
um not really finalizing but getting
closer to finding ways how we can best
introduce anti-correlation attestation
penalties the high level idea is the
following if many validators miss their
attestations in the same slot we just
scale the penalties up and vice versa if
they if only a few validators miss an
attestation we can lower the penalties
so basically if you're running um all of
your keys on one machine the machine
goes offline then you might expect
higher penalties and a solo Staker that
goes offline should receive lower
penalties and this is the goal of this
EAP this is just an example how it would
look like you would have many validators
on one machine the machine goes offline
the correlation will be high and so with
the pen penalty be on the other hand
side your resol sta you have one key on
one machine the machine goes offline and
the it should then affect your penalties
by just lowering
them finally let me quickly present some
initi results so this is from empirical
data it's approximately um um 6 months
of data and what we can see is that the
comparison between the pink bar and the
gray bar and you can already see that
only the small siiz clusters and the
unidentified cluster um which both
include many solar stakers they would
profit from the whole thing so we can
see solo stakers would have been
penalized almost half what they were
actually penalized whereas the big
stakers like we saw earlier Lio ke eavi
and so on they would receive higher
penalties and in the end what we want to
do is just create a leveling playing
field for all these entities and allow
solo stakers to finally also econ
economically compete with the big
guys that's all I have for this
lightning talk um thanks a lot if you
have any questions if you want to engage
with the EIP we are still in draft stage
so happy for any input on the EAP itself
and yeah feel free to reach out if you
have any
questions all right it's very unfair to
be a solo Saker right
so uh could a withdrawal address be
considered a correlation so like if a
staking large staking pool used the same
with contract address for a withdrawal
address could that be considered a
correlation
um that's an interesting question so of
course we always have to check what can
the protocol actually see right the
protocol can see um correlations because
of Mis dations and also as you said the
protocol might also be able to see
withdrawal addresses I guess this is
very easy to circumvent right we will
basically create an incentive for the
big guys to use multiple withdrawal
addresses so this is very easy to
circumvent whereas um correlations be
that arise from running everything from
a very centralized setup cannot really
be
circumvented H Tony thank you so much um
can I kind of reduce my correlation by
artificially kind of taking individual
of my 10,000 validators offline
selectively to make a pattern that is
not
correlated yeah you can and that's
actually one of the goals of the EAP so
for example if you're a big staking pool
and you have thousands of keys running
on a few machines what you can can do is
basically split those keys up and put
them on many different machines the cool
thing is you lose economies of scale so
it cost money you have to maybe manage
more machines you have to diversify your
setup and in the end you basically do
exactly what we want you to do you
diversify your whole setup and you um
increase your fall
tolerance okay yeah I mean if I'm um if
I'm a non Staker but I want to put Ethan
to a staking pool you're saying that I
will be slashed disproportionate to my e
so you're not in that case you're not
penalizing you're penalizing people
below solo stakers right people that
don't that can't run the infra and I
that's a that seems like a very large
weakness here of uh possibly this
proposal yeah I see your point um I
would say it's the following so why
would someone stake with a pool because
it's because they offer a high enough um
high enough profits for you right as
soon as we force big pools as as soon as
we lower the profits for big pools
either by increasing the penalties or by
forcing them to diversify the setup
their um rates that they can offer they
would also be reduced right so I would I
would argue that this would create an
incentive for someone who thinks thinks
about maybe staking with a pool to yeah
consider it again and maybe don't stake
with a pool just because the incentives
are not high
enough right if they can't stick then
for example what you could do is look
into uh one of the entities like rockol
that offers you to also stake with less
than one Eve while still having a very
anti-correlated setup okay guys time's
up if you want to continue the the chat
you can you can do it afterwards thank
you very much Tony thank you