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This repo aims to have in one place all the research around decentralized staking pools for eth 2.0.

ETH 2.0 Decentralized Staking Pools - Summary

The backbone of decentralized staking pools is in distributing the control of the keys that control the validator and its withdrawal key. You can think of it as a giant multi-signature setup with some M-of-N threshold for signing attestations, block proposals and withdrawal transactions.
A good starting point could be this presentation.

Adding a consensus protocol that rewards and punishes pool participants, controls withdrawal and on-boarding then we have a full protocol for an open decentralized staking pools network.
The key word here is open as in autonomous and open to join by anyone.

Overview

Conceptually a pools network can be thought of as a 3 layer stack.

Layer 1 - Every pool is a collection of 32 ETH validators represented by a public BLS key.
Layer 2 - Every pool's public key has a corresponding distributed private key controlled via an SSV group of operators.
Layer 3 - All pools (and their SSV groups) coordinate via a consensus layer which also deals with rewards, penalties, slashing, creation/ liquidation of pools and more.\

The network has 2 actors: block producers (BP) and staker.
A BP is a bonded actor (staked) which has the responsibility of executing top consensus (attest to blocks, propose blocks and more) and local SSV group assignments (mostly eth2 network duties).

A block producer is economically incentivized to run a pool node, participate in the network and more. The block producer's collateral is also staked.
For more information regarding network economics click here.

A staker that deposited ETH into a smart contact to stake in a pool will, in return, mint a fungible ERC-20 token representing his stake + future rewards. At deposit time the amount minted of that token will be 1:1 to the deposit amount, as time goes on and the network as a whole gains reward the user's ERC-20 token balance (and so for every other user) will grow relatively.
The ERC-20 token creates instant transferability, detached from a specific pool liquidation.

Pool liquidation is an event that is triggered by an ERC-20 token holders specifically requesting to convert back to ETH. This is also dependent on phase 1.5 of eth2 to complete, see discord discussion

Research

• Pools mini paper + CDT2.0 for in-depth details
• DKG theory
• DKG + key rotation POC
• SSV nodes
  • python ibft implementation
  • python SSV node
  • SSV compatible valdiator
• BLS keys + bi-linear pairings
• Isolated Casper + Ghost consensus as candidate for the pool's network consensus
• Network tokonomics