🎙️ Ethereum is "Terrifyingly" Centralized but there's a way out, ether.fi founder says

Mike Silagadze is the founder and CEO of ether.fi, which is a new player in ethereum staking space, which allows stakers to control their keys while delegating their stake. A reminder that Ethereum now runs on Proof of Stake, which requires users to deposit, or stake, their ETH. Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade introduced the ability for early stakers to withdraw their ETH, which made Ethereum staking and the projects around it one of the hottest themes of crypto this year. Tokens that function as a receipt of staked ETH, called Liquid Staking Tokens, grew in popularity, as did concerns about centralization. We will begin our conversation with an introduction to ether.fi, followed by their differentiation in the already competitive liquid staking sphere.

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7 Key Takeaways

1. EtherFi is a new player in Ethereum staking solutions, but with EtherFi you hold the keys. If the protocol gets hacked or if node operators get in trouble with the SEC or whatever happens, stakers always get their Eth back as they hold the keys.
2. Eth holders can delegate their Eth to node operators who run the servers validating and securing Ethereum. In exchange, holders get a receipt token that is the liquid staked eth. It's liquid in the sense that you can borrow against it, re-stake it to earn additional fees, and take leverage, you can do many things with it.
3. The goal of re-staking can be seen as broadening the reach of Ethereum's trust security mechanism to things beyond just Ethereum.
4. As more Eth gets staked, rewards decrease. To ensure Ethereum stays secure, there will be a need for other revenue streams for stakers. EtherFi focuses on it with a new layer on top of EtherFi called EtherFan which is an NFT layer that gamifies and creates a loyalty rewards program on top of Ethereum staking
5. EtherFan encourages people to think long-term because the longer you stake eth, the more valuable your membership becomes. And it also encourages them to maintain their eth staked because it's associated with an NFT character that they've built up and potentially grown attached to.
6. EtherFi’s operation Solo Staker pair up people that are willing to run nodes. Ethereum supporters with people that have Eth combined with DVT technology which allows them to safely delegate to individual node operators by splitting up the validator keys. This encourages optimized node distribution.
7. DAOs tend to fall into a governance theater making everything difficult and slow when you wanna be fast and nimble. The standard governance model of DAO structures that is popular has a lot of difficulties and seems related to corporate structures with a twist. Alternative governance models are needed.