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eth-pokhar

Eth-pokhar is a go tool that helps in the process of identifying the pool/entity that operates each validator in the Ethereum beacon chain.

Identifying staking entities is tricky since this isn’t on-chain data in most cases. In the case of pools like Lido and Rocketpool, since they use smart contracts for creating their validators, the data is on-chain and can be easily identified.

For the rest of the entities, other methods can be used like observing patterns in the depositor addresses like the ones found in this repository: eth-deposits, and other off-chain data from contacts/data sources. When creating validators an address must deposit 32 ETH on the beaconchain contract. In most cases, entities share the same deposit address throughout multiple validators. By knowing a few of these cases, one can extrapolate the information and identify all of the validators that were generated by those addresses and thus identify the entities.

This tool is used for tagging validators in ethseer.io.

Pre-requisites

To use the tool, the following requirements must be met:

  • An alchemy API key (the free tier is enough). See here
  • Access to a Ethereum EL node (you can also use alchemy for this)

Expect this tool to make the following amount of requests to the Ethereum EL node on the first run:

And the following amount of requests to the alchemy API on each run:

The size of the fully synced database is around 3GB.

Available commands

beacon_depositors_transactions

Fetches the transactions of the depositors of the beaconchain contract.

Available options (configurable in the .env file):

OPTIONS:
   --el-endpoint value  Execution node endpoint (default: http://localhost:8545) [$EL_ENDPOINT]
   --db-url value       Database where to store transactions (default: postgres://user:password@localhost:5432/dbName) [$DB_URL]
   --log-level value    Log level: debug, warn, info, error (default: info) [$LOG_LEVEL]
   --workers-num value  Number of workers to process API requests (default: 10) [$WORKER_NUM]
   --alchemy-url value  Alchemy url (default: https://eth-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/KEY) [$ALCHEMY_URL]
   --only-deposits      Only fetch deposits. If not set, it will fetch all new depositor transactions which can take up to 20 hours (default: false)
   --help, -h           show help

identify

Identify the pool in which validators are participating or the entity who operates the validators.

Available options (configurable in the .env file):

OPTIONS:
   --el-endpoint value      Execution node endpoint (default: http://localhost:8545) [$EL_ENDPOINT]
   --db-url value           Database where to store transactions (default: postgres://user:password@localhost:5432/dbName) [$DB_URL]
   --log-level value        Log level: debug, warn, info, error (default: info) [$LOG_LEVEL]
   --alchemy-url value      Alchemy url (default: https://eth-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/KEY) [$ALCHEMY_URL]
   --workers-num value      Number of workers to process API requests (default: 10) [$WORKER_NUM]
   --whale-threshold value  Minimum number of validators to be considered a whale (default: 100) [$WHALE_THRESHOLD]
   --recreate-table         Recreate the t_identified_validators table, meant to be used when one of the methodologies of identification changes (default: false)
   --help, -h               show help

Running with docker-compose (recommended)

To run the tool with docker, you can use the following commands:

First, create a .env file on the root folder. You can use the .env.example file as a template.

Then, run the following command to build the tool:

docker-compose build

Finally, run the tool with the following command:

docker-compose up -d

In case that you don't want to update de depositor transactions (which can take up to 20 hours), you can set ONLY_DEPOSITS=true in the .env file and run the tool normally or use the following command:

ONLY_DEPOSITS=true docker-compose up -d

This will set the --only-deposits flag to true.

Output

The tool will create a database with the following tables:

t_beacon_deposits

This table stores the deposits made to the beaconchain contract. It has the following columns:

  • f_block_num: The block number in which the deposit was made.
  • f_depositor: The address of the depositor.
  • f_tx_hash: The transaction hash of the deposit.
  • f_validator_pubkey: The public key of the validator.

t_beacon_depositors_transactions

This table stores the incoming/outgoing transactions of the depositors of the beaconchain contract. It has the following columns:

  • f_block_num: The block number in which the transaction was made.
  • f_value: The value of the transaction.
  • f_from: The address from which the transaction was made.
  • f_to: The address to which the transaction was made.
  • f_tx_hash: The transaction hash of the transaction.
  • f_depositor: The address of the depositor to which the transaction is related.

t_depositors_insert

This table stores the depositors that are used to identify the pool in which the validators are participating See Utilizing custom off-chain data for more information. It has the following columns:

  • f_depositor: The address of the depositor.
  • f_pool_name: The name of the pool in which the validators are participating.

t_validators_insert

This table stores the validators that are used to identify the pool in which the validators are participating. See Utilizing custom off-chain data for more information. It has the following columns:

  • f_validator_pubkey: The public key of the validator.
  • f_pool_name: The name of the pool in which the validators are participating.

t_lido

This table stores the validators that are participating in the Lido pool. See Lido operators for more information. It has the following columns:

  • f_validator_pubkey: The public key of the validator.
  • f_operator: The name of the operator of the validator.
  • f_operator_index: The index of the operator in the Lido pool.

t_rocketpool

This table stores the validators that are participating in the Rocketpool pool. It has the following columns:

  • f_validator_pubkey: The public key of the validator.

t_identified_validators (End result)

This table stores the validators with the pool/entity that operates them. Unidentified validators, non-whales (see Whale tagging) will have a f_pool_name value of solo_stakers. It has the following columns:

  • f_validator_pubkey: The public key of the validator.
  • f_pool_name: The name of the pool in which the validators are participating.

Utilizing custom off-chain data

As mentioned before, the tool can be used to identify validators by using off-chain data. For this purpose, two tables are created in the database on the first run: t_depositors_insert and t_validators_insert.

Important note: addresses must be all lowercase and without the 0x prefix.

t_depositors_insert

This table has the columns f_depositor and f_pool_name. The identify command will use this table to identify the pool in which the validators are participating. The f_depositor column is the address of the depositor and the f_pool_name is the name of the pool in which the validators are participating. All validators that have the same depositor address will be tagged with the f_pool_name value.

t_validators_insert

This table has the columns f_validator_pubkey and f_pool_name. The identify command will use this table to identify the pool in which the validators are participating. The f_validator_pubkey column is the address of the validator and the f_pool_name is the name of the pool in which the validators are participating. These values will be used to tag the validators and will override any other tag that the validator might have been given.

Whale tagging

We use the following definition of a whale: unidentified depositor responsible for at least WHALE_THRESHOLD validators. The tool will tag the whale with the whale_0x.... tag (first 4 characters of the depositor address).

Identification priority

Since the end table t_identified_validators is the result of the identification process, validators' pool/entity will be tagged in the following order (if the validator is already tagged, the next step will override the previous tag, resulting in the last tag being the one that is stored):

table_priorities

Database migrations

In case you encounter any issue with the database, you can force the database version using the golang-migrate command line. Please refer here for more information. More specifically, one could clean the migrations by forcing the version with
migrate -path / -database "postgresql://username:secretkey@localhost:5432/database_name?sslmode=disable" force <current_version>
If specific upgrades or downgrades need to be done manually, one could do this with
migrate -path database/migration/ -database "postgresql://username:secretkey@localhost:5432/database_name?sslmode=disable" -verbose up

Benchmarks

Utilizing Alchemy as EL node and API, with a local database, these are the benchmarks for the tool:

  • beacon_depositors_transactions:
    • Fetching deposits on the first run: 1h 16m
    • Fetching depositors transactions: 15h 22m
    • Total time: 16h 38m
  • identify:
    • Fetching Rocketpool validators on the first run: 38m
    • Fetching Lido validators on the first run: 4h 13m
    • Total time: 4h 51m
  • Total time for the first run: 21h 29m

If running the tool on a weekly basis, expect the tool to take around 16h to run considering that the process of fetching depositors transactions will be done on every run unless the --only-deposits flag is set, in which case the tool will take around 10m to run.

The size of the fully synced database is around 3GB.

Maintainers

@santi1234567