Rated Labs Raises $2.5M To Solve Validator Reputation Dilemma

Rated Labs, a Web3 infrastructure project, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from 1confirmation, Semantic, Placeholder and other prominent investors.

Founded in April 2022, by Elias Simos and Aris Koliopoulos, Rated offers data on validators and node operators at a granular level, which makes it easier for users to compare and contrast their performance.

Rating Validators And Node Operators

As the crypto ecosystem continues to grow, validators and node operators secure hundreds of billions of dollars and accrue tens of billions in the form of fees and inflationary rewards.

However, there is presently no way to gauge validators’ historical performance. This poses an issue for tokenholders who wish to delegate their coins with node operators in order to earn staking rewards.

Choosing a poorly performing operator or worse, a malicious one, could result in the delegator’s stake being slashed. This is what Rated aims to fix by providing an increased level of transparency and accountability at the node operator level.

Currently, Rated v0 offers a network explorer for Ethereum Beacon Chain validators. Meanwhile, Rated’s experimental API can be found here.

“At the moment, we are hyper-focused on building a rich feature set for our Ethereum product–especially ahead of the upcoming Merge,” Rated Labs’ co-founder and CEO Elias Simos said.

“As validators become more commoditized in Ethereum and other chains, users will require increasingly more information about these nodes that needs to come from an independent source,” said Richard Chen, GP at 1confirmation.

Ethereum Validator Ratings. Source: Rated

Nexus Mutual, a DeFi insurance protocol, is already using data from Rated for its new slashing and downtime protection product for ETH stakers.