BY Attestant ON Nov 25, 2019

Attestant is a company dedicated to the business of staking. It provides an Ethereum 2 managed staking service, giving customers the ability to stake their Ether using Attestant’s infrastructure while always retaining full control of their assets.

Our service

Staking in Ethereum 2 is a highly technical process, but those who wish to participate require more than just technical competence. Attestant is a company that provides a fully managed staking service: in addition to an institutional-grade staking architecture designed specifically for Ethereum 2 it provides real-time monitoring of your validators, daily or weekly summaries of validator progress, and financial reports showing both validator rewards and costs.

It is important to understand that validating is an active process: it requires a server to be actively participating to gain rewards. Equally, if the server is not actively participating it will be penalized and funds will be deducted. So for any given period of time a validator could end up with higher or lower funds than it started with, as can be seen below:

Figure 1: Range of potential reward/punishment at time 5

Ensuring active participation requires more than simply switching on a computer. There are numerous additional requirements of running a successful validator service, including: ensuring the security of the operating system upon which the validator runs; configuring the Ethereum 1 and beacon chain nodes required for the validator to operate; ensuring that the nodes have sufficient network connectivity to be up to date with the chain state; and providing the ability to withstand denial of service attacks.

Focus on Ethereum 2

Ethereum 2 is unique amongst proof of stake networks for a number of reasons:

the underlying asset (Ether) already has value

the underlying asset is already active on a mature network (Ethereum 1)

the complete migration from Ethereum 1 to Ethereum 2 will take a significant amount of time (years), resulting in two chains running simultaneously with the same underlying asset used to secure them

the validator process and ecosystem has many nuances that must be understood to avoid a reduction in staking rewards, or loss of part or all of the stake

These combine to require an advanced validator solution, from bringing new validators online through running them and to reporting of their financial performance.

Current status

Attestant is in the process of building its managed staking service. If you would like to participate in the upcoming closed beta please sign up below.