Smoothly is a tool for home stakers which enable us to pool together tips and MEV from block proposals. If you want to support the health of the network by staking from home, but also want the benefits of reward smoothing (historically only been offered by staking service providers), you can now have the best of both worlds. By pooling together execution layer rewards, validators have access to the mean reward and enjoy distributions at fixed intervals. To join, validators change the fee recipient address in their validator client to our pool contract, connect their wallet, and claim their share of the rewards every two weeks.

Note that this project is designed as an open source (Apache License 2.0) pubic good, and the only fees that are being charged are split between trusted operators of the oracle network. This amount (1.5% on Goerli) is only meant to cover hard costs and is not meant to enrich the operators. The Smoothly team takes no fee and our oracle is treated the same as all other operators.

The problem it solves

Since the beacon chain launched, capital incentives have increasingly shifted toward centralized staking providers, which offer higher yields through reward smoothing, native token distributions, and liquid staking tokens. This trend inspired me to give back to the home staking community by creating Smoothly, a tool that provides them with access to the mean MEV reward and helps combat centralization.

Funding plans

All funding will be allocated toward one of two things.

| Security |

Our contracts have reached and are currently being audited. In addition to the smart contract audit, we'd like to run a code4rena contest and an audit of our oracle software for further assurances.

| Continue Development & Research into PBS |

Running in parallel with the audit and continuing for at least 12 weeks, we will scale the Goerli implementation to a main net replica. These iterative changes are as follows:

Today we’re reaching consensus with 4 node operators. Every 2 weeks we will be adding an additional Smoothly node operator until 6 operators are running together and reaching consensus on the state. During this time we will be experimenting with peer to peer connectivity which will allow an operator to query the root hash and the state of other node operators. Four additional weeks are allocated to troubleshoot and implement fixes during operator scaling. Currently, node operators are voting and updating the state of the contract daily. This is great for testing features and logic but does not reflect the design of our mainnet implementation, which is 2 weeks between state updates. Each week for 6 weeks, we will increase the duration between state updates by two days until the 2 week duration is reached. Four additional weeks are allocated to troubleshoot and implement fixes during the duration increase. We’re currently monitoring 3 out of 7 public relays on Goerli. Each week for 4 weeks we’ll add an additional relay until all 7 Goerli relays are being monitored for fee recipient changes. An option for mainnet may be to forego the relay enforcement and instead monitor it on the backend until sufficient time has passed to feel confident in all data from relays.

Team: Kody Sale (Founder)

My background is in Mechanical Engineering and am a technologist at heart. I rabbit holed my way into crypto in 2014 when I volunteered my GPU to the distributed computing project Folding@Home. Folding@Home is a project that aims to develop therapeutics for Alzheimer’s through protein folding simulations. The distributed nature of the project led me to the Bitcoin whitepaper, which hit home as I graduated college in 2009 in the midst of the bank bailouts.

My journey into Ethereum began in 2017 when I discovered a network that allowed for more than just sending and receiving BTC. After exploring various parts of the ecosystem, I found my home in staking. Staking resonated with me due to the high priority of inclusion; anyone with an internet connection and consumer hardware could participate in the consensus of a global settlement layer. The welcoming and supportive community at ETH staker played a significant role in my decision to become a home staker.

The project started as a simple idea, and the codebase has grown beyond my initial expectations. I feel a strong sense of purpose in building something that aligns with the core ethos of the staking community. My goal is for Smoothly to be sustainable and to provide tangible value to the community at near zero cost. I have self-funded the project and have no plans to raise money publicly or through tokenization. I see Smoothly as a tool to give home validators access to a pooling mechanism currently reserved for centralized entities. I’m also aware of the plans to include PBS and MEV Smoothing (or burn) in a future Ethereum hard fork and would love to contribute to that research by collaborating with existing infrastructure providers in the MEV-Boost ecosystem.