Node Operator Admission: Stakefish as stVault Professional Operator

Node Operators stVaults Identification
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1. Identification

Stakefish is a leading independent non-custodial staking provider founded in 2018 by Ethereum and Bitcoin veterans. We provide institutional-grade infrastructure for 20+ PoS networks, supporting custodians, wallets, exchanges, and retail stakers globally. We currently secure over $3B in assets, including more than 750,000 ETH staked. Our platform combines robust, globally distributed validator infrastructure with intuitive dashboards and transparent reporting. We are SOC 2 Type II certified, ensuring the highest standards of security and operational integrity for our stakers.

Stakefish is a proud Ethereum node operator for Lido since January 2021.

2. Business Case

As a long-standing Ethereum validator operator since genesis, stakefish brings proven reliability, secure infrastructure, and mature operational practices to the stVault framework.

Ethereum Operations Excellence

We maintain globally distributed, professionally managed Ethereum infrastructure with strong performance, security, and audit-ready processes, ensuring stable and scalable validator operations for stVaults.

Institutional Support

With an established base of ETH-focused institutional clients, stakefish will help drive stVault adoption through existing onboarding channels and may transition suitable clients into stVaults to enhance transparency and operational consistency.

Alignment with Lido Priorities

Stakefish’s independent ownership, geographically diverse Ethereum setup, and long-term commitment to Ethereum PoS directly support Lido DAO’s decentralisation and resilience goals.

3. Ops & Decentralisation

Avoiding slashing is our top priority. Since stakefish’s inception, we have maintained a perfect record of zero slashing incidents.

Client & Infrastructure Model

Stakefish places high importance on validator server availability and performance.

  • All changes are tested in a staging environment before being deployed to production.
  • To ensure service availability, stakefish utilize a multi-cloud provider, multi-region deployment strategy; and employ different consensus layer (Lighthouse, Teku) + execution layer (geth, Nethermind) combinations.
  • Stakefish extensively use physical machines to run our consensus and execution layers, providing validators with excellent performance.
  • Stakefish use Prometheus + Grafana for real-time system monitoring and PagerDuty to receive alerts.

Stakefish places high importance on asset security.

  • Stakefish use Dirk as our remote signer tool, avoiding the storage of keys on validator servers. Dirk is deployed in an isolated environment, denies public internet access, and strictly controls internal staff access to Dirk servers.
  • All inter-service communication is encrypted.
  • Non-custodial setup — clients retain control of their assets.

MEV & Neutrality Policy

  • Stakefish only use vetted, open, and transparent relays (e.g., Flashbots, UltraSound, …).
  • Fallback local block-building is enabled to ensure proposer availability during relay outages.

4. Governance & Compliance

  • SOC 2 Type II certified

  • Non-custodial architecture

5. Links

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Hi!

Happy to see that you are moving forward with your onboarding as a Node Operator for stVaults.

As a member of the stVaults Committee, I can confirm that the Committee has started the assessment process. We’ll keep you posted on the progress.

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As a delegate of the stVaults Committee, I am posting to confirm that the relevant ET motions establishing Stakefish’s status as an stVaults Identified Node Operator have now been enacted.

Following the committee’s assessment of Stakefish’s application, Stakefish’s has been assigned to the Basic Identified Operator Category under the stVaults framework, in line with the scope of its application.