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, 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.

We recently announced our 12 week countdown to mainnet and released the names of our oracle operators.

▪ Anthony Sassano, Founder of The Daily Gwei ▪ EthStaker ▪ Cryptomanufaktur ▪ Aestus Relay ▪ Kody Sale (Founder of Smoothly) ▪ Noah Figueras (Co-founder of Smoothly)

Funding plans

All funds raised from this round will be donated directly to the Smoothly pool contract upon launch! These rewards will go straight to stakers registered to our contract. This is all part of our larger initiative called SLIDE, Social Layer Incentives for DEcentralization. Our goal is to incentivize people to stake from home. The recent social push is great, but a real financial incentive would reverse the tide. By pooling together donated funds with block proposals, home stakers who register with Smoothly will get outsized rewards, incentivizing solo staking!

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.

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.