A handful of protocols and exchanges currently dominate the Ethereum staking scene. Diva recently closed a $3.5 million seed round led by A&T Capital to change that, with plans to build out a cooperative decentralizing staking pool.

“Stakers can stake any amount of ETH with no minimum, and don't need to run any nodes. A standard web3 wallet is enough” said Villalba. Those who wish to operate a node on Diva and earn rewards may do so with as little as 1 ETH, and the protocol works with any system that meets the minimum requirements to run a full Ethereum node.

In return for staking ETH on Diva, participants receive a one-to-one ratio of divETH, a freely tradable liquid asset. Any divETH rewards received by stakers accrue in wallets on a daily basis. DivETH can be unstaked and redeemed for ETH, again at a one-to-one ratio, at any time following the March 2023 Capella update, according to Diva.

Nodes on Diva collaborate together by posting a bond of 1 ETH to form groups. Each group of 16 nodes is matched up against 16 ETH from various stakers on the network, together forming a full validation node.

Eduard Antuña, founder of the open source Ethereum validator protocol Dappnode, first proposed the idea of Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) — which was to become the basis for Diva — at the ETHDenver conference, last year.

The high threshold of 32 ETH to set up a validator node on Ethereum is a cost point that excludes many network participants operating nodes of their own. Given that, staking protocols remain largely presided over by organizations such as Lido, where validator keys are in the control of a minority group of whitelisted node operators, and centralized exchanges such as Binance, Kraken and Coinbase that fully control funds and validator keys.

Diva found backing with a $3.5 million seed round led by A&T Capital, with support from other investors including Gnosis, Bankless, OKX Ventures, Metaweb, DCV Capital, Alphemy Capital, Very Early Ventures and Stake.vc. Additional angel investors behind projects such as Metacartel, Aave, Staking Rewards, zkEVM, ZKValidator, EthGlobal, EigenLayer, Aragon, Stakely and many more also joined in.