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Obol

Building infrastructure for public blockchain networks

Obol logo
21-100 employees
  • B2B
  • Cryptocurrency
  • SaaS
  • Blockchain
  • Web 3.0
Civic Center, New York, NY

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Company mission

To evolve DVT by building a crypto economic protocol and diverse community that can enable the primitive to become a sustainable public good, increasing the security and resiliency of public blockchain networks.

Our take

As the finance world embraces blockchain technology, companies work to build the infrastructure that will support new users and combat known on-chain issues. Obol is one such company, working to improve validation in Ethereum by building distributed validators that do not rely on a single operator.

Obol was founded in 2021 to decentralize validation so that it is less prone to failure. Currently, validators – that stake funds to process transactions – answer to a single operator. If the operator fails, then so does the validation process. Obol’s network will enable staking from multiple validator operators, so that if one or even a few go down, Ethereum network transactions will still validate and complete. It uses novel “secret shared validator” technology to do so, which splits validator keys between multiple operators.

Obol has garnered strong support from the DeFi community and received strong investment, the latest of which was led by Pantera Capital and Archetype. This investment will be used to accelerate the deployment of Distributed Validator Technology (a core technology on the Ethereum scaling roadmap). Beyond this, after establishment on Ethereum 2.0, the company has hopes to support additional public blockchains in the future.

Kirsty headshot

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Benefits

  • Twice annual Global Off-sites
  • Opportunity to collaborate with Ethereum core client teams
  • Opportunity to collaborate with industry-leading validators

Company values

  • Technology Values: Open Source, Distributed Development Teams, Security Focused Design, Test Driven Development, Trust Minimised, Interoperability, Client Diversity and Inclusion
  • Core Team Values: Employee Diversity & Inclusion, Remote First, Core Team Health & Wellness, Financial Responsibility & Transparency
  • Community Values: Inclusive & Collaborative, Emphasis on Education, Grants Focused (DV’s, Deployers, and Researchers), Progressive Decentralization

Funding (2 rounds)

Jan 2023

$12.5m

SERIES A

Oct 2021

$6.2m

SEED

Total funding: $18.7m

Leadership

Collin Myers

(Co-founder & CEO)

Worked in DeFi Global Product Strategy for ConsenSys. Former Global Head of Business Development at Token Foundry.

Oisín Kyne

(Co-founder)

Director of Kyne Software. Former Full Stack Developer at ConsenSys.