Roles & Staking Infrastructure

The roles in Liquid Collective's Ethereum implementation, and staking infrastructure overview.

Key roles in Liquid Collective

The teams building and operating Liquid Collective work together to ensure the smooth functioning of the protocol and provide a seamless and secure Ethereum staking experience. You can learn more about Liquid Collective's approach to working with these roles in our post.

Platforms

Platforms provide a seamless on-ramp and access for users to interact with the Liquid Collective protocol. There are two types of Liquid Collective Platforms. Platforms either enable minting and redemption of LsETH, or enable secondary interactions.

In the Liquid Collective protocol's Ethereum architecture Platforms are also referred to as Allowlisters, as Platforms that enable minting and redemption curently function as the agents responsible for adding users to the Allowlist.

You can learn more about Liquid Collective Platforms in the Platform Operations documentation.

Wallet and Custody Providers

Wallet Providers and Custody Providers offer LsETH token storage and signing infrastructure. Wallet and Custody Providers enable Platforms to easily access and distribute LsETH to their users through custody and/or embedded minting services. In some cases, these Providers and Platforms are the same entities.

Service Providers

Service Providers provide development, consulting, attestation, legal, or technological services to the Liquid Collective. Liquid Collective seeks to collaborate with existing web3 teams in the development of the protocol’s liquid staking offering.

Examples of Liquid Collective Service Providers include Alluvial, Exiger, Rated, and Hypernative.

Node Operators

Node Operators run the Ethereum validator infrastructure on Liquid Collective, registering validator keys with the protocol, performing validation duties, and earning network rewards for doing so. Liquid Collective does not run validator infrastructure, but instead delegates that critical task to proven Node Operators that meet high performance standards.

You can learn more about Liquid Collective Node Operators in the Node Operations documentation.

Oracle Operators

Infrastructure providers, operating a daemon app to report Ethereum consensus layer data to the Liquid Collective protocol. This data is necessary so the Liquid Collective protocol can account for the network rewards earned by validators.

Oracles report to Liquid Collective's core contract on the balance of underlying staked tokens plus accrued staking rewards, minus any slashing penalties. This information informs LsETH's Conversion Rate for deposit and withdrawal (when supported, after withdrawals are enabled on Ethereum), alongside supporting DeFi reporting.

Liquid Collective's Ethereum staking infrastructure

Liquid Collective is designed to provide a secure and enterprise-grade liquid staking solution which necessitates sanctions checks on the protocol’s active validator set. Liquid Collective Node Operators must meet certain protocol performance and compliance requirements, and have the capacity to scale to a large number of validator nodes.

Liquid Collective works only with security-focused Node Operators that institute best practices to generate network rewards, including:

• operating multi-region, multi-client infrastructure

• offering technical support teams

• maintaining security posturing (including double-sign protection)

To reduce the risk impact of validator operations, and to increase decentralization, Liquid Collective delegates tokens to multiple independent validator Node Operators. The staked tokens are distributed across Node Operators in a round-robin manner so that the Liquid Collective protocol is supported by a broad and dispersed active validator set. As a result, the risk is distributed, which should minimize staked ETH exposure to any one operator.

Node Operators in Liquid Collective's active set also support the protocol's Slashing Coverage Program by providing coverage for deductibles, up to a cap, against slashing incidents and missed rewards incurred due to the fault of their infrastructure.

You can find in-depth technical documentation on Liquid Collective's Ethereum validator infrastructure in Node Operations Validator Infrastructure.