I’d like to bring the community’s attention to a recently published post on the Lido blog summarizing the results of the first pilot testnet trial that was conducted with the DVT infrastructure provider SafeStake.
This trial was similar to the pre-Simple DVT pilot testnets conducted with Obol and SSV, to generally assess SafeStake’s ability to be used by Node Operators using the Lido protocol.
Five clusters operated validators on Holesky via the Lido Simple DVT Module, during this time, attestation performance was generally found to be performant, but the majority of clusters faced issues being unable to propose blocks (the SafeStake team-run cluster had a 69.23% Block Proposal Success Rate). Additionally there was a slashing incident which occurred as a result of a faulty SafeStake software upgrade towards the end of the testnet.
At this time there are further improvements needed to be made by the SafeStake team including improvements to reaching consensus for block proposals, distributed key generation, and the ability to set a custom fee recipient address on a per-validator key basis.
Given the current status of the above-mentioned pending improvements, and the requirements for DVT usage through the Lido protocol (DKG, fee recipient customization, and better performance with respect to block proposals), as well as the slashing incident, NOM contributors suggest to await further significant improvements to the SafeStake protocol and consider further testnets before considering plans to onboard SafeStake directly e.g. using the Simple DVT module, or via other modules.