A quick update on governance & what’s next

General Discussions
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We wanted to share a quick update on where things stand on the governance front. Until this summer, most of our energy has gone into improving the internal processes of the Obol Collective. The result is that the foundations are now much stronger and ready to support what comes next.

With that foundation in place, our focus is shifting toward value creation and alignment:

  • The Obol Grants Program is live and already supporting new projects that strengthen the Collective.

  • Defi integrations are coming soon, starting with Pendle.

  • We’ve also started higher-level explorations on how the OBOL token can become more natively tied to protocol growth.

On the business side, Obol’s ecosystem continues to grow rapidly. This past quarter, Obol crossed $3.2 billion in total value staked (TVS) — a 128% increase since Q2 — with more than 700,000 ETH secured by Distributed Validators, now representing nearly 2% of all staked ETH. Major partners such as Lido, Liquid Collective, and Blockdaemon expanded their use of our technology, and the OBOL token was added to the Blockworks’ Token Transparency Framework with a nearly perfect score. These milestones highlight the growing conviction around Distributed Validators as the backbone of Ethereum’s infinite economy.

At the same time, the regulatory landscape has evolved significantly, especially in the U.S. Following the progress of the Clarity Act and related frameworks, we want to ensure Obol’s governance remains transparent, trustworthy, and compliant, while preserving the agility to execute.

This is also why the Association hasn’t pushed forward with new proposals in recent weeks. We want to take the time to make sure the next steps are clean, aligned, and meaningful. We don’t want to vote on everything for the sake of voting, but we do want to ensure there’s transparency and a clear voice for the community when it truly matters.

One of the potential directions we’re evaluating is an optimistic governance model. One that enables fast execution while keeping major decisions subject to community oversight.

We’ve also heard increasing discussions across the ecosystem about how much decentralization is truly needed for applications and protocols. Many teams are choosing to remain more operationally centralized to preserve flexibility and the ability to ship. From our perspective, blockchains must be decentralized to function properly, but projects built on them don’t necessarily need to mirror that same level of decentralization. By building on Ethereum, we benefit from its security and decentralization while contributing to it. Our goal is to reinforce Ethereum, not to add complexity for its own sake.

We also believe the coming months will bring a more balanced environment where everyone gets what they want:

  • Regulators get compliance, oversight, and consumer protection.

  • Obol get clarity, trust, and reputation.

  • The community and partners get transparency, ownership, and confidence in the system.

Finally, we really appreciated the recent suggestion for the Association to provide in-depth quarterly reports to the Collective. We’ll make that happen and believe it’s a great step toward continuous transparency and accountability. If you haven’t yet, we encourage you to join that discussion to help shape the format and priorities of those reports.

We know it’s been quiet lately, and that’s precisely why we wanted to share this. We’re entering an important moment of reflection that will contribute to building the Staking End Game, and your feedback matters.

We see this phase as a bullish one: taking a breath to align before scaling further. If you have thoughts, now’s a great time to share them below.

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Preamble

My thoughts put into writing on this opening post will be mostly critical to make it easier and faster to read, please take no offense if I sound too direct and/or trimmed down.

Thoughts

On 17th July:

The project also received the full grant amount already.

I would love to read more about it, not just an announcement of an announcement.

I don’t see any information to evaluate around this.

What’s holding you back on more transparency? Maybe the community can help.

I’m looking forward to better information flow towards the community and delegates. However, I didn’t catch the reason why you’d like to go with quarterly reports instead of monthly reports. The format of announcements is lacking meaningful content like timelines/milestones, KPIs (or success criteria?), when community/builders can try it?

Could you provide clear dates and deliverables for the items already announced? For example, the defi integration, the proposed governance approach (scope, decision date), and the start of reports (starting date, metrics)? That would turn this from meta-communication into actionable information worthy of discussion.

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Hey Obol Team and Community,

Really appreciate the update — great to see the foundation getting stronger while the focus shifts toward governance and DeFi growth.

I went through the docs on the OBOL token, staking, and the upcoming Pendle integration — super interesting direction.

Just wondering:

– Will the OBOL token (and its versions like stOBOL / wstOBOL) play a central role in the DeFi layer — not just for staking and governance, but also for liquidity and yield opportunities?

– And beyond Pendle, are there plans to connect OBOL with other DeFi protocols (like Morpho, Eigenlayer, or Symbiotic)? How do you see the balance between its utility side in DeFi and its governance role in the Token House?

Feels like a really strong step toward a more sustainable and interconnected token economy. Thanks for keeping things transparent and thoughtful — excited to see how this all develops

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This lacks the specifics we need to see.

Honestly, you’ve made this integration into quite the spectacle. A research grant? Months of waiting? You could’ve just paid for it and been done with it ages ago. I’m dreading how long we’ll be stuck waiting for other integrations.

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Thanks everyone for taking the time to share feedback, I appreciate the honesty and engagement here. These points are valid and it’s the kind of constructive input we want.

On transparency first. This post was really a first step to explain why things have been quiet and to make sure people see where we’re heading. We agree that more visibility is best, which is why we’re committing to regular public reports. We initially proposed quarterly because of timing: we’re entering a very busy stretch with Devcon and then the end of year. By that time, we expect clearer visibility on a few key fronts, particularly the regulatory side (Clarity Act progress), and also the first DeFi integration going live (Pendle). So a report in that window should be more meaningful than monthly check-ins that risk being repetitive. That said, we’ll keep adjusting the cadence based on community feedback once the first report is out and we will provide ad-hoc updates before then.

On the OBOL token. That’s one of the ongoing design tracks right now. There are several viable directions, but as always we want to make sure anything we present the Collective with is both technically sound and legally compliant. We’ll share more as soon as we can. In the meantime, any ideas or references from the community are always welcome.

On the optimistic governance model. We’re exploring how to evolve governance so it remains credible and with some level of community oversight but doesn’t slow down execution. While we like the optimistic governance model, we’d be happy to hear other suggestions. It’s early days, but the intent is clear: fast decisions with community oversight where it truly matters.

For the DeFi integration (Pendle), totally fair point on the delay. The main reason was that we discovered late in the process that Pendle wasn’t compatible with stOBOL’s architecture. Fixing that meant building an entirely new wrapper contract to preserve the governance and staking properties. That took multiple rounds of design, audits, and back-and-forth with partners including ScopeLift, DAMM Finance, and the Pendle team. They kept contributing well beyond the original grant. It took time, but it was the right call to do it properly. The integration is now in final testing and should go live very soon. The wrapper specs are already public in the docs for anyone curious about the technical details.

More broadly on DeFi. Pendle made sense as a first step because it focuses on yield trading, which directly connects with stOBOL. We’ve done research and outreach with several other teams, but we want to see how Pendle performs first before expanding.

Overall, we’re entering a really interesting phase. This discussion is exactly what helps shape that direction, so thanks again to everyone who contributed.

@stefa2k @AlexIT @pumper

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Thanks for the information.

We need to determine the deadlines for submitting the quarterly report. Let these be comfortable conditions, but not too long.

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Thanks everyone for the feedback here.

On the reporting cadence, the goal is to find the right balance between commitment to transparency and flexibility to execute. That’s why, out of the two options proposed, we went for the quarterly format: it gives us a fixed, recurring milestone while allowing enough time for meaningful progress between reports. It doesn’t mean we’ll go silent in between though. You’ve already seen interim updates through proposals like this new one, and we’ll keep doing that whenever there’s concrete progress to share.

That said, the structure of the quarterly report is absolutely open for input. We’d love to see the community propose topics, metrics, or sections that should be included. In our view, the first one could come at the end of the year, as a natural wrap-up and forward look, but we’re open to community suggestions on what it should cover.

This is a collective effort not something the Association wants to define unilaterally, so feel free to drop ideas.

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