Ethereum staking infrastructure SSV.Network unveiled its roadmap outlining the upcoming developments for the project. Over the course of the next year, SSV Labs aims to progressively decrease hardware demands by 75-90% through a series of phases, employing cryptography, consensus, and network optimization.
SSV.Network initiated cryptography optimizations earlier this year, with plans for consensus adjustments slated for the third quarter, necessitating a fork in the process. The overarching objective of the project is to enable the network to accommodate over 200,000 validators, all while maintaining hardware prerequisites at 4-core CPUs.
SSV.Network builds a permissionless zero-coordination Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) network, permitting individuals to run an operator and register a validator without requiring any off-chain coordination. During the latter half of the year, the project has identified crucial bottlenecks and potential ways of improvement, facilitating the expansion of the network’s overall scale while adhering to the 4-core per operator entry threshold. These enhancements include reducing the time (CPU cycles) required to process a message, minimizing the number of messages each new validator contributes, and reducing the amount of non-committee messages received by operators.
Reducing message processing time was critical due to the necessity for node operators to verify all received messages. A recent implementation of transitioning to RSA signatures resulted in a 98% reduction in message signature verification time. Further enhancement in cryptography entails transitioning from RSA to a more concise signature scheme, which remains significantly faster than BLS12–381. Options such as EDSA + ECIES are being evaluated for potential adoption.
Moreover, the optimization, referred to as committee-based consensus, has been a focal point for the SSV Labs team. It is expected to be integrated into the mainnet by Q3 of 2024, necessitating a fork. Upon implementation, the project foresees a reduction in the total number of messages exchanged within the network to just 13% of the current volume.
While efforts are being made to reduce the number of messages added by each new validator, the focus also remains on how many operators need to process each message. This number can potentially be decreased. The SSV Labs team is actively researching network topology, with one solution being to group validators by cluster. This approach would ensure that all validators within a specific cluster belong to the same topic, maintaining the same upper-bound topic count. Such a change in network topology could reduce message processing by approximately 98%, as operators would need to process significantly fewer non-committee messages.
Over the next 12 months, SSV.Network aims to surpass 50,000 validators. The solutions implemented are expected to support this growth without raising the entry barrier by requiring expensive hardware.
SSV.Network Achieves Major Milestones With 21,000 Validators And $2.7B TVL
SSV.Network is a fully decentralized, open-source Ethereum staking network utilizing Secret Shared Validator (SSV) technology, also referred to as DVT. This technology facilitates an open and straightforward infrastructure for dividing and distributing a validator key into multiple KeyShares, allowing an Ethereum validator to operate across several non-trusting nodes.
Recently, SSV.Network shared some milestones, highlighting the network’s growth over the past few months. Notably, the network now boasts nearly 500 operators and over 21,000 validators. Additionally, the project has recorded a total of 678,000 staked ETH, translating to over $2.7 billion in total value locked (TVL).
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