🪙 OBOL token drops

No one’s mad at Lido anymore

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Remember a time when people were mad at Lido for being too successful? Thanks to distributed validator technology by Obol, the resilience of individual Ethereum validators is harder than ever, and anger at huge liquid staking protocols like Lido have dissipated. Today, the OBOL token dropped.

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Flows — Arbitrum attracts, Berachain bleeds:

7-day net flows by chain | Source: DefiLlama

In terms of capital moving around onchain, Arbitrum was the clear winner this week. It pulled in $368m in bridge volume — more than 4x the next closest chain did, per DefiLlama. On the other end of the spectrum, Berachain saw a brutal $257m in net outflows, by far the largest among tracked chains.

This sharp reversal comes ahead of Berachain’s Boyco unlock on May 6, when $2.7b in pre-launch deposits and 10m BERA tokens (2% of supply) will be released. Boyco initially solved Berachain’s “cold start” problem by front-loading ecosystem liquidity — but with incentives set to expire, that liquidity is now rushing for the exits. BERA is down 60% since April.

Smaller ecosystems like Noble and Avalanche also saw notable outflows, while Base, Ethereum and Sei posted modest gains.

Berachain co-founder Smokey offered a long-term view: No new tokens will hit the market for nine months. But with liquidity flooding out, traders seem more focused on the short term.

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OBOL token is here

Obol launches its native OBOL token today.

Token holders will be able to stake OBOL for a liquid staking token, which can be used for governance in the Obol Collective, as DeFi collateral or voting in retroactive funding rounds (RAF).

"After years of building reliable, distributed validator technology that eliminates single points of failure, we're now putting governance in the hands of the community," said Obol Association CEO Thomas Heremans.

"The OBOL Token represents more than just governance — it's the coordination mechanism for an entire ecosystem of operators who are revolutionizing how Ethereum secures its infrastructure."

What is Obol?

Obol is a middleware tech provider for Ethereum network staking. The company enables “distributed validators” (DV), which allows multiple independent nodes to collectively operate one validator by sharing its duties and private keys.

This solves a longstanding problem faced by all proof-of-stake networks.

Ethereum validators stake about a collective ~34m ETH ($64.7b) today. Especially large institutions may control hundreds of millions of dollars as one operator entity. These operators may be hosting validators across the same hardware servers or in concentrated geographic jurisdictions, exposing them to technological disruption or regulatory risks.

Thanks to distributed validator technology enabled by companies like Obol and SSV, multiple nodes (two of three, four of seven, seven of 10) globally can now collectively run one Ethereum validator. 

Therefore, one going down causes no disruption to the validator, reducing its exposure to these concentrated risks.

This helps validators avoid slashing and reduces risks of single points of failure, thereby improving validator uptime and overall network resilience.

Today, 800+ unique node operators, from major staking services to solo home stakers, run Obol-powered validators. $975m worth of ETH from Lido, EtherFi, StakeWise, Swell, Bitcoin Suisse and more are secured by Obol’s distributed validator clusters across Ethereum today.

Thanks to Obol, Lido has increased its operators from 36 to over 200, according to its press release.

EtherFi, the largest restaking protocol with $5.4b TVL, was able to expand its operators from ~10 to nearly 100 operators today. About 258,784 ETH ($499m) from EtherFi is staked on Obol DVs today. An additional 40 on testnet is set to move to mainnet soon.

According to DV Labs, the 30-day average RAVER score in January 2025 for Obol DVT was 98.23%, outperforming SSV SDVT and a curated Lido set. The RAVER score is a metric used to measure validator effectiveness across proposal and attestation success in Ethereum staking.

The Pectra network upgrade, which went live yesterday, included EIP-7251. It increased the maximum validator stake to 2048 ETH from its previous cap of 32 ETH. That favors institutions, who can consolidate thousands of validators.

“EIP-7251 represents a long-awaited leap forward in validator efficiency,” Heremans told Blockworks.

“By enabling validator consolidations, it addresses one of the biggest operational burdens faced by large stakers and institutions,” Heremans said. He forecasts “up to 80% reductions in operational and infrastructure costs.”

— Donovan Choy

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Venice vs. Kava AI — Who’s the real privacy Chad?

It seems like every week there’s a new AI aggregator whose pitch is providing access to multiple models for the price of one.

But one concern when using any of the major commercial models is privacy. More so if you’re dealing with crypto info. It’s not just about productivity, it’s about OPSEC. Those onchain transactions you just popped into ChatGPT to analyze? It’s for training purposes at a minimum.

On the other hand, you’ve got Venice AI, which promises to be “the only AI that keeps your prompts 100% private,” with in-browser inference, GPU sessions on Akash and zero prompt storage — not even temporary logs.

A newer entrant, Kava AI, blends decentralization and onchain edge. Users can link a wallet (e.g., MetaMask), pull real-time token balances across multiple EVM chains, and execute actual ERC-20 transfers or interact with smart contracts — all via natural language.

For Kava CEO Scott Stuart, privacy is an added benefit.

“Users can interact with Kava AI anonymously without any sign-up…Ultimately, the user controls their data and interaction footprint,” Stuart told Blockworks.

Building apps beyond chat, like in the realms of finance and health, “without exposing this information to a centralized entity,” is the goal.

From a purity perspective, Venice is cleaner today, since it has no central LLMs and no saved prompts. But Kava wins on DeFi functionality.

Kava also leans harder into open source, Stuart noted.

“By making our codebase and infrastructure stack publicly available, we're creating a foundation that an ecosystem can be built upon.” The long game? Multi-modal models running locally in your browser — not just text, but vision, audio and more — though that’s still in the research phase.

Of course, these tools need not be competitors. “There’s tremendous opportunity for multiple teams exploring these frontiers, and we hope our open-source contributions will accelerate progress across the entire decentralized AI ecosystem,” Stuart said.

Degen takeaway? 

For all the kids apparently cheating their way through college, at least they can do it with more privacy!

But seriously: Kava launched in 2019 as a cross-chain lending platform built on Cosmos, pivoted to EVM support (one of many!) in 2022, and has since expanded into decentralized AI with the release of Kava AI in February. That’s a lot of pivots!

I’m looking forward to trialing these new onchain productivity boosters, but it still feels a little early to be trusting them for any serious asset management.

— Macauley Peterson