Luck or Skill? Allnodes’ CEO Spills the Beans About Eth 2.0 Staking

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington chat with the CEO and founder of Allnodes, Konstantin Boyko-Romanovsky. Allnodes is a blockchain node hosting, monitoring and staking service supporting over 25 cryptocurrency networks.

This episode is sponsored by PumaPay.io.

Among the networks for which Allnodes provides hosting services, Boyko-Romanovsky said, the set up for validator nodes on Ethereum 2.0 was by far “the most stressful.”

“Ethereum 2.0 is like playing Diablo in nightmare mode. I didn’t sleep well for two months when Ethereum [2.0] was launched because there is a risk of slashing,” said Boyko-Romanovsky.

The risk of slashing, or getting penalized, on Eth 2.0 is greater for staking-as-a-service platforms like Allnodes than for individual users. According to Edgington, this is by design in order to encourage network decentralization.

“The Ethereum [2.0] protocol was not designed with staking services in mind. It was very much designed for individual stakers,” he said. “It is deliberately not supposed to be easy for [staking] services.”

Even so, Edgington noted that among staking services Allnodes consistently operates the best-performing Eth 2.0 validator nodes in terms of rewards earned.

While Boyko-Romanovsky attributed most of that success to “luck,” he also noted that using a single Eth 2.0 software client, Teku, and investing time into understanding Teku enabled him and his team to make “improvements” to their validator set-up based on their knowledge.

The trio also discussed the downfall of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Iron Finance and Mark Cuban’s call for action from U.S regulators in light of the fiasco. To listen to the full discussion, check out this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.”

Links mentioned in this podcast:

• CoinDesk article about Iron Finance token price crash (/markets/2021/06/17/in-token-crash-postmortem-iron-finance-says-it-suffered-cryptos-first-large-scale-bank-run/)
• Iron Finance blog post (https://ironfinance.medium.com/iron-finance-post-mortem-17-june-2021-6a4e9ccf23f5)
• Mark Cuban’s statement in Bloomberg (https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1405536487630798859/photo/1)