Thank you to everyone who followed us so far. Special thanks to our testers, and our contributors!
Our last 6 months roadmap was from our point of view a great success. We ran into close to no problems during the development and even managed to include some extra features into the Stereum Ethereum Node Setup.
All in all, we had a fun and educational year, learned together, laughed together.
Our team grew from 2 to 7 people. We organized two Update & Upkeep Challenges for Stakers and got involved in Client Diversity. We released our Stereum Ethereum Node Setup 1.0 version, and worked down our last roadmaps feature list. Stereum went up to version number 1.12 & four weeks ago we released our Stereum Monitor app on Android.
We had a busy year!
Outside of the development we focused on getting to know more builders & their projects in the Ethereum network layer. We closed some partnerships. Found some new funding opportunities. And as you can imagine, in the next year we also want to focus on building up more connections inside the community & gain more testers, more users & get new input of what YOU will need.
To get there, we will have to improve our development communications. We have some things planned for next year that are currently getting prepared, but if this document has already done some magic, and at any point while reading should you be interested in partnering up or to add funding to the project.
Hit us up: stereum@stereum.net
We thank the Ethereum Foundation, the SSV Network DAO & the Moloch DAO for funding our next roadmap and the community for chiming in through our Gitcoin Grant.
We hope you keep on supporting us!
More funding means more hands, frees up more time and minds.
And we are developing after the unwritten rule of modern IT – the right group of the right people can do a multiple of the magnitude of their peers work!
So from all of us, with the promise at heart that we will keep building:
We thank you very much!
Having worked the whole year, we now know where we are, and where we will be going from here…..
CONSIDER DONATING
With your donation you can help us build new features and keep our servers for testnet running. Thank you for every contribution!
The Vision of Stereum
So… here we are – December 2021 – but where are we going?
To maintain long term development, we are currently looking through some blockchain native options for the long term of Stereum, but this is till in the future. Our focus is our product and our passion for the technology
So lets get it out of the way first: Open Source stays Open Source – indefinitely.
And we hope we can give back to this wonderful Ethereum Community.
Our efforts in the upcoming year will be plenty & our team didn’t really have to ask themselves the question, where we want to go. Our goal is to keep pushing Ethereum nodes as a desirable piece of infrastructure for everyone, individuals as well as institutions, & keep on working for our Vision of Stereum:
“Everyone should be able to set up a node to be able to verify for themselves.
Stereum is going to make it feasible, possible & desirable for everyone to run their own Ethereum Node according to their own needs “
To achieve this, we want to focus on the following principles & points:
- Stereum is a Ethereum Node centric software tool.
- Keep Stereum focused around: Privacy, security, transparency & user choice. When forced, make compromises in the interests of Stereum’s users.
- Create a modular setup to reflect Ethereum’s modular architecture. We want you to be able to run multiple different validators – a SSV node, an All-In Node – at the same time. We want you to be able to split your setup onto multiple machines. Want to run all clients? Why not? Scalability & flexibility is a huge topic for us. If you run a really special, one of a kind setup, why not give us feedback what we can do to enable you. We want you to run your brainchild through Stereum comfortably.
- Add another layer of User security to the Ethereum base network environment. A layer where user choice doesn’t inherently endanger the network, where a resync is only an installation away & one, where you can switch components easily if a bug occurs in one of the production clients.
- We want to make staking more widely available. For this we keep pursuing interesting new innovations in the Ethereum network and integrate their service offer into Stereum.
- Make it possible to let the user create, integrate and share their own Stereum plugins.
The Road to Stereum 2.0
🍄 NEW ARCHITECTURE
Through our efforts last year we learned a lot & as much as it sometimes quite nerve wrecking to wake up to a new development, we can’t forget, that Ethereum is still in development & never stops developing. So, we want to use the beginning of our next roadmap to work on a slimmed up backend. The team is already working on a refactored architecture for Stereum. You can follow this development >here<.
But why do we refactor, you might ask yourself?
Our plans & long term vision for Stereum make this necessary. Through the refactoring the setup becomes more modular/less strict in its structure & enable the development of functions on service basis other than a use case basis, which will make things like “Client Switch” or “Network Switch” for Stereum easy. To make running your own nodes more attractive, we will integrate additional external services into Stereum, so you can use Stereum to run/build your custom node setup.
NEW USER INTERFACE
With the architecture change, we also came up with a new user interface we think is fitting for the new 2.0 version of Stereum. Consider: The screenshots only show a DESIGN. We know that it will probably change a lot through the next months.
To give you some insights in how we came up with the design, her is a short list of designing principles we tried. Without sounding too pretentious, we will keep it short, we just would like to show you we obviously had something in mind when we came up with the design:
- CONNECTIVE – we want to give the users the feeling that Stereum is their direct access to the Ethereum blockchain, their way to follow along, a moving network & their node is what they should build onto.
- FUNCTIONALITY & PURPOSE FOCUSED – through make as many of the node functionalities of the UI available to the user as possible & try to keep them transparent.
- DISTINCT – Stereum is not a DeFi Service – it is an Ethereum Node Setup and Monitoring Software first and foremost & meant as a tool for you to follow your own interests in an Ethereum node.
- ALLEVIATE RESPONSIBILITY WITHOUT CREATING APATHY – user friendliness with a learning curve. Purposefully made not too easy so that newcomers aren’t easily able to wreck themselves. Especially STAKING is a responsibility!
- GAMIFIED LIKE INPUT FEEDBACK – For experts with the required hardware we would like to make it easy & comfortable to f*ck around with Stereum.
- COMPATIBLE – Stereum should be compatible with as many systems as possible & in the future maybe even usable with touchscreens
We ask for your feedback. Tell us what you saw. Tell us your thoughts.
We are sure things will change over the course of the next 6 months of development. We are ready for the merge and for what you guys will need, want or just would like to see.
Let us know what you think!
DISCORD
Stereum
NEW FEATURES 🍄
CUSTOM INSTALLATION
Pick your components and confirm your selection to start the installation. Or just add/remove later at any time!
1 CLICK INSTALLER
The new UI will change how installation works inside of Stereum. We enable the user to select the use-case of the node at time of setup, which will be split up in different categories, currently including:
- Staking
- SSV
- L2
After selecting the use-case Stereum Setup selects necessary client services automatically and abbreviate user randomly according to client diversity metrics.
🍄 SLASHING PROTECTION ON KEY IMPORT
It doesn’t have to be said, but getting slashed is painful. It mostly happens by importing two keys. A number of clients got slashing protection, but we would like to add another layer to it. Performing different checks when a user imports a validator key is the idea. If the check should conclude this to be true the user needs to confirm to import with a warning and short explanation he is about to risk getting slashed.
We will also include this function for the SSV network.
🍄 ADDITIONAL EXECUTION CLIENT SUPPORT
Client Diversity is a huge topic for us, one we want to tackle from multiple sides. Stereum 1 only supports Geth. Our plan is to integrate 2 out of 4 of the additional execution clients (OpenEthereum, Nethermind, Erigon, Besu) to ensure more diversity among them.
NETWORK SWITCH
We want it to be even easier for newcomers to try out the benefits of staking on testnet. And when feeling confident enough switch to mainnet with the same settings (Graffiti, linked mobile app, etc.), converting the testnet Stereum Node into a mainnet Stereum Node with a few steps.
CLIENT SWITCH
Seamless & simple way to switch between clients in case of client diversity issues/client network issues/client bugs. Be safe and prepare your backup setup beforehand, and never have to fear a lose of possible lose of funds through chance.
UPDATE MANAGER
Update the clients without updating Stereum itself!
🍄 NAMING & GROUPING VALIDATORS
The ability to name & group validators to share a node and keep things visibly apart, is one the most popular feature request we received so far. We want you to be able to name validators and not only have the public key as an identifier & group them to be able to sort multiple keys in self named folders.
NEW STEREUM MONITOR APP FEATURES
Enhance the features of the Stereum Monitor App. Our plan is to extend its capabilities to include graphs into alerts. Additionally we create a set of pre-configured alerts in Grafana for mobile app you can choose from.
BLOX’s SSV INTEGRATION
Thanks to the SSV network DAO, we received a grant to integrate Blox’s SSV protocol as a selectable option for all supported client setups.
For this we will be adapting our integration to new versions & features of Blox SSV. We also hope to add Grafana dashboards to view metrics of SSV service & an overview of validator keys staking on this operator with various information (depending on availability of API)
In the installation process we will also offer a Blox SSV service focused setup (no validator service of client teams, optional geth) as an option as well.
To complement the Blox’s SSV protocol’s integration into Stereum we will develop advanced ssv key management options, which will include
- Automated generation of operator keys
- Including operator keys in config import/export process
- Migrate operator keys to new node
- Register operator & validators (also including changing name, keys, operator fees)
- Using Stereum app & MetaMask (interacting with smart contract)
- Using official ssv.network website
VIDEO TUTORIALS
We make it more comfortable & cut out the users exploration of external third party resources to use Stereum. For this we include embedded video tutorials into the Stereum Launcher.
🍄 LANGUAGE SUPPORT
After the 2.0 release we want to work on offering additional translations & language support for the software & website in the following languages:
GERMAN
FARSI
FRENCH
ITALIAN
JAPANESE
MANDARIN
PORTUGESE
RUSSIAN
SPANISH
To achieve this we will be making use of bounties, offering 100 xDAI for each translation (separate for website and software), resulting in 18 bounties and a total of xDAI 1800.
If you are interested in helping us out, write an email to us at: stereum@stereum.net or contact ! daGscheid#8703 on Discord.